Mission

Centraltrak creates a network of artistic, cultural, and educational institutions. It is a node through which several vectors meet and pass.

Building on the forward-thinking intellectual resources of the School of Arts & Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas and the rich cultural fabric of Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency bears a twofold mission of promoting unparalleled artistic experimentation and encouraging critical engagement with the local urban context. It is an incubator for cutting-edge international and national artists to cultivate sophisticated intellectual discourse around art and politics in the world and the collections and events of the arts institutions of DFW. Centraltrak is a forum for avant-garde exploration of how one defines “creative form,” be it in words, art, architecture, or urbanism. The aim is to inject artists and writers from the USA and other nations into a community of professional artists in Dallas and, thus, to introduce the Dallas public and U.T. Dallas students to a heady mixture of professional artists working in all media.

Centraltrak supports four artists – one Texas artist and three national and international artists – for varying periods of time, from two weeks to one year. Artists live in the Residency and show work and curate exhibitions in the gallery space located at 800 Exposition Avenue in the historic neighborhood, Deep Ellum, located in downtown Dallas. Visiting artists also engage the greater public of DFW by exhibiting work and giving public lectures in joint institutions, such as the McKinney Avenue Contemporary and the Dallas Museum of Art.

As part of our mission to engage the urban context of DFW, Centraltrak works together with the arts institutions of DFW and the Dallas Public Schools. In particular, there is direct collaboration between UT Dallas, the Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet School and the Dallas Museum of Art through joint programming and our shared support for visiting artists and lecturers.

Why Centraltrak Now?

Centraltrak is a short distance from the Dallas Arts District. In addition to the Dallas Museum of Art, Crow Collection of Asian Art, Meyerson Symphony Hall, and the Nasher Sculpture Center, by 2009 the Dallas Arts District will also be home to the Winspear Opera House, Wyly Dance Theater, and the newly constructed Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School. With invaluable collections of masterworks and Asian, modern, and contemporary art and an array of buildings by world-famous architects, such as Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, and Sir Norman Foster, DFW is poised to become an international cultural and arts Mecca.

What go lacking in this highly sophisticated setting of cultural consumption and art collecting, however, are the discourse, language and making to match. Dallas consumes the art of international artists but creates largely regional art. Dallas collects cutting-edge national and international art on par with the global capitals of the world but does not explain, theorize, or critically analyze it like the writers of global capitals. Centraltrak creates a world-class community of artists and thinkers – parallel to those in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Berlin – that raises the culture of DFW to the level of its greatly refined performances and treasure of objects. Centraltrak produces the language and critical thinking of DFW.