Dallas Fort Worth Urban Forum

Why We Need To Make Rick Brettell’s Dream of a Museum of Texas Art a Reality

BY PETER SIMEK JULY 27, 2020

...It its race to become a globally significant art institution, the DMA has lost its appetite and capacity for exhibiting and interpreting the rich history of Texas art. Brettell’s solution? Pioneer yet another new cultural institution in Dallas–a Museum of Texas Art. And he had found the perfect location for it: the former home of The Science Place in Fair Park, which was the original home of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts before it moved to the Arts District in the 1980s.

“[Science Place] was built to be an art museum, with beautifully proportioned galleries and spaces,” Brettell wrote about his idea in the Dallas Morning News. “The former DMFA building cries out to be filled with works of art again.”
...
Think of it: a Museum of Texas Art could leverage partnerships with the DMA and its boxed-away holdings of Texas Regionalism, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the African American Museum, Tulsa’s Philbrook and its remarkable Native American art, and other institutions around the state and the country to explore new narratives drawn across multiple artistic mediums and cultural traditions that give new meaning and prominence to the diversity of cultures and histories that forge Texan identity.