DMA Insight

The following is an excerpt from the 2013 publication The Arts of India, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas at the Dallas Museum of Art. 

The Dallas Museum of Art holds a substantial collection of crosses from Ethiopia. The crosses were carried in processions, used by priests to bestow blessings, or worn around the neck for protection and to assert identity. These objects have been in use since at least the 15th century, reflecting the long history of Christianity in Ethiopia.

In 1959, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (today the Dallas Museum of Art) held a landmark exhibition featuring the works of seventy-two artists from ten South American countries. Organized and curated by Director Jerry Bywaters and Cuban art critic and writer José Gómez Sicre, South American Art Today marked a significant moment in the Museum’s history and a significant shift in the Museum’s acquisition and exhibiting philosophies.

Piled carpets were probably known in ancient Greece and Rome, though none survive. Fifth century Coptic rugs made of a looped pile do, however, exist. In the 7th century, the Arabs swept across North Africa gathering Egyptian and Berber converts to their forces, and in the 8th century, conquered Visigothic Spain brought their rug-making techniques to the West.

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.

DALLAS, Texas – Febraury 4, 2014 – The Dallas Museum of Art announced today that it will receive a long-term loan of one of the world’s largest private holdings of Islamic art, transforming the Museum’s Islamic art collection into the third largest of its kind in North America.

Most of the ritual sculptures in the DMA collections are bronze or gilt bronze images created for veneration in monasteries or shrines. The development of Tantric Buddhism in Tibet led to distinctive ways that holy figures were represented.

In January 2008 the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston announced that Nona and Richard Barrett of Dallas had given more than two hundred works of art form their outstanding private collection of contemporary Texas art to both museums.