Todora Photography LLC “Francesca Mollett: Elsewhere” is at The Warehouse in Dallas through June 28, 2025. Photo: Kevin Todora.
The 17th edition of the Dallas Art Fair opens today (April 10), and alongside it, the entire city’s art ecosystem is activating, with institutions and galleries staging their best shows of the year and private collections throwing open their doors to curious art enthusiasts and professionals in town for Dallas Art Week. Since 2013, Dallas has also had a satellite fair; the Dallas Invitational returns this year for its third edition in a new venue—the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. According to that fair’s founder, James Cope, the change will facilitate better audience engagement by making space for the fair to host not just booths but also events and panels. With two fairs and a whole city of art to see, you need an ironclad itinerary to take in as much as possible. Here are the exhibitions we recommend checking out.
Must-See Art Exhibitions in Dallas
Otobong Nkanga, “Each Seed a Body”
Nasher Sculpture Center
Through August 17, 2025
Operating as both a shaman and an engineer, Otobong Nkanga creates intricate multimedia choreographies that blend materials and sensations, prompting reflection on our connection to the land and the resources we extract from it. Deeply informed by social and ecological concerns, Nkanga’s art is a call for a shift in perspective that recognizes humanity as part of a broader network of relations. As the artist explains, “Humans are only a small, minute part of the ecosystem.”
Linking us to our shared histories—not just through land and geography but through the emotions shaped by events and encounters—Nkanga treats art-making as an act of both care and resistance, challenging the anthropocentric model and advocating for a more symbiotic, interrelational existence.
The recipient of the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate, she’s presenting newly conceived iterations of major ongoing projects, including Carved to Flow (2017–), alongside a new work, all created in response to and in relation to the North Texas region and its unique ecosystem.
“Otobong Nkanga: Each Seed a Body” at Nasher Sculpture Center.
© Otobong Nkanga. Photo by Kevin Todora, courtesy of Nasher Sculpture Center
“Marisol: A Retrospective”
Dallas Museum Of Art
Through July 6, 2025
Subject to a recent rediscovery and surge of interest, Venezuelan-born American sculptor Marisol Escobar (1930–2016) offered a distinctive take on Pop Art and New Realism, blending artisan craft with commercial imagery and deeply personal, human elements. Marked by a unique feminine touch, Marisol’s work embraced traditional sculptural techniques rather than the ready-made appropriation favored by many of her contemporaries. Her art delves into themes of gender, identity and society, examining power dynamics in a consumer-driven world still in its formative stages.
Integrating found objects and fabrics—products of mass circulation—into her assemblages, Marisol crafted life-size, three-dimensional figures from wood, giving them a tactile, almost tangible quality. Often portraying female figures, her humanoid sculptures challenge the submissive, objectified female form seen in male-dominated Pop Art, to present instead a strong, assertive female presence. This retrospective is a much-deserved tribute to the originality and depth of her work.
Marisol, The Generals, 1961-62, wood, mixed media and sound
recording, Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Gift of Seymour H.
Knox, Jr., 1962 (K1962:7).
© Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“Double Vision: The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection”
The Warehouse
Through June 28, 2025
The Warehouse has been a pillar of Dallas’s art ecosystem since 2012 when Cindy and Howard Rachofsky and the late Vernon E. Faulconer began sharing their collections with the public. Then, last year, Howard Rachofsky and Thomas Hartland-Mackie created a new joint non-profit, The Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation (colloquially known as “The Warehouse”), uniting forces and resources to do even more to educate the public by creating opportunities for people to engage with new curatorial voices and artists.
The inaugural exhibition, “Double Vision: The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection,” features eighty works by forty-two artists with works from both the Rachofsky Collection, created over the past 40 years, and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection, developed over the last decade, illuminating unexpected overlaps and resonances.
Also on view as part of the WAREHOUSE:01 project is Francesca Mollett’s “Elsewhere,” featuring nine paintings, six of which were created for the exhibition. Morellet has swiftly captured the attention of curators and collectors alike with her swirling abstractions, which evoke an alchemical, perpetual flow of matter and energy—the very origins of everything. Her canvases create both a sensory and poetic whimsical space, exploring how purely abstract landscapes and narratives can still evoke and provoke subtle sensations, hallucinations and visions tied to our relation with the physical world.
“Double Vision: The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection” at The Warehouse.
Photo: Kevin Todora
“You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry”
Dallas Contemporary
Opening April 11, 2025
Fiber art has experienced revived attention at both the institutional and commercial levels in recent decades, allowing more artists to explore this ancient yet always contemporary medium further due to the infinite possible variations that material language and tactile code allow.
During Dallas Art Week, Dallas Contemporary is opening a large, curated group show organized by Mexico-based curator Su Wu that examines how artists have variously interpreted and used tapestry to weave intricate reflections on the human condition.
Across time and geographies, since the earliest civilizations, tapestry has been used as a language to communicate, translate and question the structure of the surrounding reality, actively exploring our relationship with materials, nature and all the processes in between. Featuring works by twenty-nine artists and designers, the exhibition offers a broad overview of the many dimensions of this medium, between art and craft, the medium and the matter, and devotion and its technological mediation.
Mika Tajima,
Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Yellow, Full Width, Exa), 2023.
© Mika Tajima, courtesy of Pace
“A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now”
The Green Family Art Foundation
Through May 11, 2025
With one of the most comprehensive and active collections of contemporary art, particularly when it comes to rising names and emerging talents, the Green Family Art Foundation is another pillar of Dallas’s art scene. In a space in Dallas’s Design District, the foundation presents three exhibitions per year featuring works by emerging and established artists. On view during this year’s art week is a group show curated by Tom Morton that offers a broad intergenerational overview of artists sharing ties with the U.K., either through birth, residency or artistic education.
The stellar list of participating artists includes some of the most sought-after names that emerged in the past few decades, such as Pam Evelyn, Jadé Fadojutimi, Caroline Walker, Louise Giovanelli, Issy Wood, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Francesca Mollett (among others), alongside British contemporary masters such as Charles Avery, Lisa Brice, Cecily Brown, Tracey Emin and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Inspiring the title was an observation attributed to the seminal eighteenth-century British painter and theorist Sir Joshua Reynolds, that “a room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.” The exhibition aims to highlight the variety and vitality of the British art scene across narratives, mediums and styles.
Installation View: “A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now” at The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas.
Photo: Evan Sheldon. Green Family Art Foundation, courtesy Adam Green Art Advisory
Oto Gillen,
“Eleventh Avenue”
“Eleventh Avenue”
The Power Station
Opening April 11, 2025
Also in Dallas’s Design District, The Power Station is known for its highly curated and experimental exhibitions, and for consistently pushing the boundaries of artistic practices and traditional art spaces. During Dallas Art Week, it will present a solo exhibition by New York-based photographer and artist Oto Gillen. Blurring the lines between photography and sculpture, Gillen’s photographic objects are marked by explicit materiality and contextual sensitivity. His work challenges and questions the perception and creation of images, exploring the intersection of the self with larger societal and cultural constructs and the meaning-making processes that occur in between.
For “Eleventh Avenue,” Gillen will stage a dramatic installation featuring a pair of digital displays mounted on the columns of The Power Station’s ground floor. Divided into two parallel video channels, the displays will feature a linear sequence of photographs from the past decade, flowing in chronological order and advancing to the present day. This marks the artist’s first video-based exhibition in the U.S., showcasing the evolution of Gillen’s work while expanding the possibilities of photography within a new technological framework.
Oto Gillen’s “Eleventh Avenue” opens at The Power Station in Dallas on April 11.
© Oto Gillen / The Power Station
