Electric energy pulsates through the lounge. You smile and wave at some friends who are coming through the door on the far side of the room. You and your wife are gracefully gliding and slowly spinning on the dance floor. The two of you are spending your evening dancing to the beat of exuberant jazz featuring works by Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti. Tomorrow you will drive with your wife in your brand new automobile to the new suburb five miles from downtown where you will purchase a new home equipped with all of the latest inventions for modern life and one that is suited to the good tastes of families with less than extravagant means. You muse about how the women in these neighborhoods are breaking out of some of their traditional roles and exploring new ways of interacting in the community. You wonder where all of that is going to go, but you think about your wife and decide that as long as she can keep the house clean and do the cooking, it will be okay. You want her to be happy. If you get back home soon enough, the two of you may listen to your new record featuring George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, that is if you can get her away from Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby. When you go into your office on Monday you will see the construction on the latest building you have been daily watching going up at Main and Field. You will think of how amazing it is that technology will take you via elevator up thirty, forty, fifty or more floors into the sky. In some ways it seems a bit inhuman and surreal. That picture you saw on the wall of the community center sticks in your mind of the factory worker wielding his hammer on a conveyor belt. It is juxtaposed with the words the man on the trolley you took the other day told you in such glowing terms concerning the wonderful new life being constructed in the Soviet Union by a man named Lenin. Was it Vladimir? You don’t remember. All you know is you are back to dancing the night away and thinking life can’t get any better than this…
Reality comes to you and you remember it’s not 1923 but 2012, 89 years later. You are spending a Friday evening hearkening back to the days of your great grand parents, mimicking them as you and your friends dress as flappers, wear zoot suits, don boaters and other hats to as closely resemble the 1920’s as you can. You are doing these things as you dance, listen to upbeat jazz, tour art exhibitions, and watch Woody Allen films about life in Paris in the 1920’s. All of these things you are doing at the Dallas Museum of Art which has done a masterful job of taking its facility and turning it into more than just a place to view art but also to experience life. On this particular Friday night in April quite a number of people get into the act including a group of thirty-somethings who show up in a crowd of twenty dressed for the occasion to have fun and celebrate a birthday.
In this particular sense the Dallas Museum of Art is creating a life social experience on three different levels from the art. Let’s consider that birthday party. A group of friends comes down on the Friday night to be visually and audibly enriched by the art. It just so happens that they are also celebrating a birthday. Third, they and others, are becoming part of the art for the evening by dressing up in everything from flappers to gangsters to golfing legend Bobby Jones. They are stepping into character and randomly running into friends and acquaintances who have also come down for the evening’s events.
They spend the evening wandering from the Atrium where they had flatbreads and wine and dance to music from the Singapore Singers, to commiserating in the “speakeasy”, indulging the artistic tastes of their children, listening to lectures, taking art tours, and watching movies in the Horchow auditorium.
Third Friday nights are not the only time though that the DMA caters to the social needs of the community. Its Thursday evening jazz concerts provide a nice way to go with spouse or friends and relax with a glass of wine and an appetizer after a stressful day at work and listen to numerous individuals and groups that one might not have previously known. The concerts are in the Atrium most of the year, but out on their lawn during the Thursday nights in May and June. If you want to walk through the museum before, during, or after the music, the exhibits are open until 9:00 pm. The remainder of the month there are concerts, films, and lectures in the auditorium, and plenty of other high brow entertainment in which you can indulge before or after enjoying a snack or meal in the Atrium or in the museum’s restaurant Seventeen Seventeen.
I wrote about hospitality last month and mentioned the idea of the third place which we have all been exposed to during the past 15 years. The concerts and Friday evening late nights at the DMA have turned it into a venue that fits this definition. One can go to the DMA to drink wine and hear jazz or a Cuban band instead of going to a pub, coffee house, or other venue for the same evening. In that sense, the opportunities the DMA provides are fungible, and a nice change from what many people typically indulge in for entertainment during an evening. You might even bump into someone who you know. My wife and I who have been members of the museum since we got married saw four people that we knew at April’s 1920’s night.
The old adage “one learns by doing” can be applied to art, history and culture. People today like to have experiences. That is how some people learn. Providing an opportunity for your membership and the general public to come out to the museum for a 1920’s night, dressed in period attire, provides an opportunity for people to not only have fun with the experience but also take advantage of the offerings that the museum has where they can learn more about the 1920’s which was an important time in American history. The members and public are dressed as the art, they can choose to take specially-tailored tours discussing Georgia O’Keefe and her life in the 1920’s and beyond. They can hear how she was influenced by her culture and how her paintings and her husband’s photography influenced succeeding generations. They can watch movies showing Paris in the 1920’s featuring Dali, Picasso, Hemingway and others.
My wife and I watched the late movie, Midnight in Paris, and while we will probably not see it again, it left me with an important lesson to remember and apply. There is a certain romance and nostalgia attached with an era previous to our own at times. We think, “if only I could have been there…or lived then…” I remember a conversation with a woman whom I have known for twenty years who has had a variety of experiences including being a missionary for nearly ten years. She had experienced some physical problems along with some pain in her life from what went on around her, but stated “My best days are ahead of me.” I try to live in that realm and appreciate that the best thing to do is to make my life the best work of art through how I live it today, not being hemmed in by other’s limiting thoughts or expectations. My life will be what God allows, and I make it to be including those nights when I step back in time as I pretend to be someone else in a different era, knowing that appreciation of the past helps me to live more fully now.
The Dallas Museum of Art provides the opportunities to experience the past, and we and our friends can enjoy the best of it to enhance our lives for today.
Society Art
Posted: May 1, 2012 by Chuck DeShazo
