There was a time when Ray considered creating a
museum and sculpture garden at his house, with its
spectacular setting, stretching in evergreen ecstasy in
every direction. But he worried about the neighbors
and the opposition they could bring to bear at City
Hall.
When Ray finally settled on the site of the Nasher,
he also settled on Renzo Piano as the architect
who could make the project sing. It was a brilliant
choice. Enveloped by the calm of good proportion,
the Nasher Sculpture Center, seemingly, was born
perfect. Every decision, however arbitrary at the
time, appears now to have been inevitable.
Anchored in the order of the Greek imagination,
however Genoan its disposition, the Nasher is
suffused with unalloyed joy. Piano is so attuned
to tuning out the cacophony of life in Italy, from
Versace to Berlusconi, that his walls absorb the follies
of those who fail to grasp their inner meanings.
Endowed with the ancient poise of olive trees that
know their indispensability, the Nasher today exudes
a world of youthful beauty, wit, and resonance, a
world where it is always afternoon, as Tennyson once
Inside Bryan Tower in downtown Dallas, the site of Good/Bad Art Collective’s CURTAINS project.
wrote. Take the show of Katharina Grosse, with its
fantastic forms and colors deliriously fresh from
Berlin—geological, anthropological, psychological,
and more fun than a Ferris wheel and rollercoaster
rolled together. Or the sounds of Soundings, new
music at the Nasher, willing to be weird, strangely
affecting, or dangerously serious.
All this can be traced to the masterful direction
of Jeremy Strick, whose breathtakingly original and
strategic intelligence has made the Nasher flourish
as a bastion of the new. “The unique setting and
collection of the Nasher allows us to create resonant
conversations between masterpieces of modern
sculpture and the most advanced expressions of
contemporary artists,” says Strick. “The exceptional
beauty and intimacy of the building, garden, and
collection fosters innovation and experimentation
and helps us to see things in new, fresh ways.”
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this icon of
high spirits unconstrained, Strick has commissioned
10 works of sculpture to enlighten the landscape
of Dallas and show its people something about
themselves they may never have known before. This
