DMA Insight

African Art at the DMA: A Brief History

GENERAL DESCRIPTION
The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) has long championed the inclusion of African art in the discourse of the world’s art. Before acquiring its first African object in 1969, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (DMFA, as the Museum was known then) hosted and organized a number of exhibitions that introduced the public to this non-Western visual expression.

The Steven G. Alpert Collection of Indonesian Textiles

GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Among those cultural areas of the world where cloth has had special significance apart from its practical use as clothing, Indonesia is unsurpassed in the integration of form and function, color and texture, and pattern and symbol in textiles which are in themselves objects of prestige and wealth, which are often thought to have protective powers, and which can even be considered sacred.

Dallas Art Institute

GENERAL DESCRIPTION
The most influential large scale teaching effort [in Dallas' art community] occurred in 1926 when Olin Travis, recently returned from extensive study at The Art Institute of Chicago, established the Dallas Art Institute on the second floor of a building at 1215 1/2 Main Street.

Hoblitzelle Foundation

GENERAL DESCRIPTION
With the Hoblitzelle Foundation's donation of 550 pieces of 18th-century British silver in 1987, the Dallas Museum of Art became one of the most prominent collections of this material in the United States.