Publications

The Dallas Museum of Art has produced many beautifully designed, lavishly illustrated publications and brochures. Fascinating scholarly essays, arresting color plates, and numerous figural illustrations will delight and inform members, visitors, and scholars alike. Visit the Museum Store for a list of publications with price, availability, and ordering information.   

We invite you to click on the links below to access online versions of featured publications, along with further links to collection records, videos of lectures and discussions, and more. 

different by design the speechless report

speechless: different by design was an experiment—one that in its making involved seven artists-designers, dozens of museum staff members, nine scientists and researchers, many consultants, two museums, and the support of generous donors, foundations, and sponsors. Once it was created, the next step was presenting it to the public. After over five years of work, I am thrilled that thousands of visitors physically experienced the exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, and many more engaged with it virtually through our digital platform for the project.

FRAMEwork: Guide for Welcoming Museum Visitors with Autism Spectrum Disorder

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), and Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille (PBALille) have each developed programs in recent years specifically for people with autism and other neurodiverse conditions. The three institutions, all of which are members of the FRAME (FRench American Museum Exchange) network, have combined their expertise to create a Guide for Welcoming Museum Visitors with Autism Spectrum Disorder, a free digital publication.

Chanel to Reves: La Pausa and Its Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art

Since 1985, the Dallas Museum of Art has been renowned as the home of the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection, which includes masterpieces of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and decorative art.  Less well known is the fact that the villa in southern France where the Reveses assembled their collection was originally owned by Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, and the original furnishings, books, and décor of Chanel inhabited the villa, and traveled to Dallas with the Reves Collection.  

Available in the DMA store.  

The Wittgenstein Vitrine: Modern Opulence in Vienna

A monumental silver and gemstone-encrusted cabinet acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art in 2013, the Wittgenstein Vitrine is one of the most important works—and the largest, most complex commission in silver—produced by the Austrian firm Wiener Werkstätte. The print catalogue weaves together a fascinating portrait of the vitrine, examining the powerful Wittgenstein family and exploring how the vitrine came to symbolize the debate over ornamentation as it shaped the very definition of Viennese modernity in the 20th century.

México 200

The Dallas Museum of Art has exceptional holdings of Mexican art, from early Olmec sculptures to contemporary art installations. The DMA’s Mexican collection, with almost a thousand pieces, covers more than three millennia of Mexican art history. From sculpture to prints, from terracotta to gold, the Museum is able to display an incredible array of objects.

Concentrations 56: Stephen Lapthisophon—coffee, seasonal fruit, root vegetables, and "Selected Poems"

For his current installation at the Dallas Museum of Art, Stephen Lapthisophon's first U.S. solo museum exhibition, Lapthisophon has created a space reminiscent of his studio, in which walls obscure the space and appear layered, similar to his collage technique. While several works are framed, much of the work in the exhibition is intentionally left bare or open to the elements, simply being pinned to the walls. The walls have been left unfinished, with their wooden beams and support structures exposed. In one room, the walls do not extend to the ceiling, allowing for an airiness that extends beyond the exhibition space and is indicative of the artist’s process: art cannot be separated from daily life—it must be left open to influences from within and without.

TWO x TWO x TEN

On October 25, 2008, the Dallas Museum of Art and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, held the tenth annual Two by Two for AIDS and Art auction at The Rachofsky House in Dallas, Texas. Since its inception, this event and its related activities have raised approximately $17 million for the contemporary art acquisition funds at the Dallas Museum of Art and for AIDS research and programs undertaken by amfAR. Two by Two has become the single largest annual source of contemporary art funds for the Dallas Museum of Art, and amfAR’s largest single annual fundraising event in this country.

Passion for Art: 100 Treasures 100 Years

Great works of art, literature, and music are often expressions of our most profound attempts to understand the nature of the world and our place within it. Inspired by these achievements, Passion for Art: 100 Treasures 100 Years presents one hundred of the Dallas Museum of Art's greatest treasures in a carefully choreographed sequence of universal themes: landscape, symmetry, masks, body, machine, luxury, home, music and dance, mortality, transcendence, and cosmos.

Concentrations 51: Mark Handforth

For a specific site in the Dallas Museum of Art’s Sculpture Garden, Mark Handforth has created an enormous, lively, and surreal sculpture standing over fifteen feet tall. Made by “braiding” or “interlocking” basically three industrial found objects—an I-beam found at a demolition site, a working red-lighted lamppost, and huge anchor chains (each a foot long)—the work is perceived as a giant cobra snake, uncoiling and dancing, its red head reaching above the garden walls. In his proposal to the Museum, the artist stated, “The chain snake is an oversized readymade, an aggrandized piece of folk art—the kind of thing you might put your mailbox on, but of catastrophic proportion.”

A Painting in the Palm of Your Hand: 18th-Century Painted Fans from the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection

In 1985 the Dallas Museum of Art received a one-of-a-kind gift of more than 1,400 works from philanthropist Wendy Reves in honor of her late husband, Emery, establishing the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection. In addition to a world-renowned assemblage of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, her donation of European decorative arts, the area of her particular personal interest, founded the institution’s collection in that field.

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