Everett Spruce, Barry X Ball

Episode No. 463 features curator Shirley Reece-Hughes and artist Barry X Ball.

Reece-Hughes is the curator of "Texas Made Modern: The Art of Everett Spruce" at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. The exhibition will be on view through November 1. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by Texas A&M University Press. It is available from Amazon and from Indiebound for $35.

The exhibition includes nearly 50 works Spruce made between 1929 and 1977. Spruce was an Arkansas-born painter who lived and worked in Dallas. Across his career, Spruce applied lessons learned from early Renaissance painting and early modernism to the Texas landscape. He exhibited widely was collected by institutions across the United States, including those in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York. As the American art world began to narrowly focus on the coasts in the 1960s and beyond, Spruce's work and career were substantially neglected.

On the second segment, sculptor Barry X Ball discusses his work on the occasion of a career-spanning survey at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. That exhibition, “Barry X Ball: Remaking Sculpture,” has been extended through January 3, 2021. It was curated by Jed Morse.

Ball’s sculptures are typically created out of rare stones with the assistance of 3-D scanning and printing technology and CNC milling machines. His work typically addresses and often updates mostly European major work from sculpture’s history, such as Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta or Medardo Rossos. This is Ball’s first survey exhibition in the United States; previous exhibitions of his work have been at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and the Villa Panza in Varese. The fine exhibition catalogue was published by the Nasher.