Art
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Marriage at Cana, c. 1672, oil on canvas Image courtesy of The Barber Institute of Fine Arts
Murillo: From Heaven to Earth
Kimbell Art Museum
3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, 817-332-8451, kimbellart.org
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s best-known works are renderings of biblical scenes, but this new Kimbell Art Museum exhibit examines more secular subjects, including day-to-day life in 17th-century Seville. The exhibit of 50 paintings, on loan to the museum, was inspired by Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step, part of the Kimbell’s permanent collection. That painting’s unusual cast of characters includes a bare-bottomed boy, thanks to his torn pants. (That detail had twice been painted over, but the painting has since been restored.) Expect to see beggars, street people and other ordinary figures in this collection of the Spanish painter’s work, the biggest in the U.S. in 20 years. Sept. 18-Jan. 29, 2023
Sonnet: Death Valley
The National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame
1720 Gendy St., Fort Worth, 817-336-4475, cowgirl.net
In January 2020, Rima Canaan Lee began photographing Death Valley. The iconic nature of her subject, from its vastness to its deadly heat, spoke to Lee of both the promise and the danger of the American West. It also, she says, served as a symbol of the American Dream. Superimposed on each of the 14 large-scale photographs on exhibit at the Cowgirl as a way of creating a dialogue between word and image are lines from Astrophil and Stella, a book of sonnets written by Philip Sidney in the 1580s. In the sonnet series, Astrophil writes of his love for Stella and the anguish of his unfulfilled desire. Through Oct. 2
Rima Canaan Lee, whose presence absence, 2020, UV print on dibond Photo courtesy of the artist