Want to Find New Audiences? Keep Trying New Things

A Risk-Taking Arts Administrator Came to Texas, and Soon the Galleries Were Louder, Full of Med Students—and Open All Night

Experiment—constantly and fearlessly, every single day.

That’s the best advice I can offer from my own career working in museums to connect the arts to different people, communities, disciplines, and places. The art of arts engagement flows from this recognition: Because the arts connect to so many things, artists and arts organizations need to always be trying new things.

I’ve tried everything from giving museum tours in the middle of the night to using artworks to help medical students develop their powers of observation. Experimentation naturally produces failures. But experiments are also …

By Bonnie Pitman | June 22, 2017

When I Say “Dallas” … You Think “Cowboys!”

How Football Helped the “City of Hate” Recover From JFK's Assassination

By Christian McPhate | January 24, 2017

Watching my Dallas Cowboys fall to the Green Bay Packers last Sunday on the last play of the game in an instant classic of an NFC Divisional Playoff, I couldn’t …

Professor, Get Your Gun

Dealing With Threatening Students Used to Be Hard. In Today's Era of Gun Rights, It's Frightening

By Jervey Tervalon | October 3, 2016

Now that Texas’ “campus carry” law, that bit of cowboy legislation that empowers everyone over 21 with a concealed handgun license to carry a pistol into a public university classroom …

In the Birthplace of Juneteenth, I Learned the Value of the Holiday

The Annual Commemoration of Slavery’s End Should Be Celebrated Far Beyond Its Texas Island Roots

By Dale M. Taylor | June 17, 2016

When my husband and I moved to Galveston, an island city on the Gulf Coast of Texas, in 1991, I was exhausted by racial hatred and violence, and Juneteenth was …

Element

By José Angel Araguz | March 25, 2016

The wind would be water and fire,
would be earth—sand and gravel,
mud churning, even magma—

as I held my hand out from
the car on drives back to Texas.
The …

Is San Antonio America’s Most Progressive City?

From Immigration to Education, My Hometown Is Paving the Way for the Future. But It Took Me Years to Realize It

By Maria Luisa Cesar | August 19, 2015

When people ask me where I’m from, I say I was born in Caracas, Venezuela, but grew up in San Antonio. I start with Caracas because it’s an instant conversation …

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