13 Must-See Exhibitions During Dallas Arts Month

Dallas Arts Month prime-time viewing is powered by the blue-chip Dallas Art Fair, the adjunct Dallas Invitational fair, special Arts Month exhibitions presented by collector-driven foundations, and the city’s galleries and triad of museums stepping up with their own powerful programming. Here are the must-sees.

Allegory + Myth: Francisco Moreno at Dallas Contemporary

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Francisco Moreno, A City in a House in a Room, 2024, at Dallas Contemporary (Photo by Kevin Todora)

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Francisco Moreno, Chapel, 2019, at Dallas Contemporary (Photo by Kevin Todora)

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Francisco Moreno, WCD Project, 2012-2015, at Dallas Contemporary (Photo by Kevin Todora)

Allegory + Myth: Francisco Moreno at Dallas Contemporary

April 17 – October 11, dallascontemporary.org.

Mexican-American artist Francisco Moreno — a hometown hero — gets his well-deserved flowers at the Dallas Contemporary with his first museum solo, organized by guest curator Thomas Feulmer of The Warehouse. “Historia Sintética” highlights monumental creations spanning two decades of Moreno’s promising career.

The survey grounds itself in three signature works, beginning with the WCD Project, 2012-2015, a souped-up 1975 Datsun paired with black-and-white camouflage canvas; this performative artwork was originally constructed for the fondly recalled Soluna Festival. WCD demonstrates Moreno’s brilliant, iconoclastic interweaving of history and myth, taking as its point of departure Emanuel Leutze’s grand 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware.

In that direction, the artist’s magnum opus, The Chapel, 2016-2018 (in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art and loaned by the DMA for this exhibition), conflates the architecture of a Spanish Romanesque chapel with a personal archive of imagery including art-historical asides.

“Historia Sintética” wraps with a debut of the artist’s latest, The Mural Cycle, 2024-2026; showcasing Moreno’s particular brand of sci-fi surrealism, the five eye-popping oversized paintings will float over the walls of the Contemporary. Moreno is a self-professed fan of Peter Paul Rubens’ Medici Cycle. Pride in his Mexican heritage has inspired him to add a new direction to mural-making by imagining a world in which the Incas conquered the Europeans.

“I’m not just referring to European masters but also the Mexican masters,” Moreno says of the murals, which examine the cycles of an artist’s life, from an uncertain youth to the triumph of creativity. “I’m fascinated by Mexican symbolism and precolonial art. To me, it’s the same as looking at Rubens and Botticelli.”

— Kendall Morgan with Catherine D. Anspon

Two Fairs Are Better Than One: Dallas Invitational

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Theodora Allen, Struck V, 2025, at 12.26, Dallas Invitational (Photo by Diego Flores)

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Elda Cerrato, Despolarización mutua de dos entes. (ó Comunicaciones del Ser Beta). Etapa preparatoria (Serie: Entes Extraños. Epopeya del Ser Beta), 1970, at Galerie Lelong, Dallas Invitational (© The Estate of Elda Cerrato)

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Rob Davis, Candles, 2025, at Nina Johnson, Dallas Invitational

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Yves Scherer, Sunshine, 2024, at Galería Mascota, Dallas Invitational

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Hartmut Austen, Marrakesh, 2011, at Good Weather, Dallas Invitational

Two Fairs Are Better Than One: Dallas Invitational

Thursday – Saturday, April 16 – 18; tickets $25, dallasinvitational.com

Lured by the Dallas Art Fair each April, collectors, curators, and artists converge for the vibrant spring art season. As a sign of the city’s cultural robustness, the pendant fair Dallas Invitational returns Thursday – Saturday, April 16 – 18, at Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek.

Founded in 2023 by indie-minded Dallas gallerist James Cope, this boutique fair unfolds throughout the hotel’s guest rooms, which are transformed into temporary gallery spaces for an impressive roster of international and hometown exhibitors. Now in its fourth (and largest) edition, the Invitational has established itself as one of the most distinctive events on the Dallas cultural calendar, encouraging intimate conversations and visual dialogues that evoke the atmosphere of a private salon.

This year’s curation includes a record 22 exhibiting galleries. We look forward to presentations by Europa (New York), Galerie Lelong (New York), Good Weather (Chicago, Little Rock), Galería Mascota (Mexico City), Nina Johnson (Miami), and Dallas’ own 12.26 and James Cope Gallery.

Recommended: Europa showcases Sophie Stone’s intricate braided textile work, drawings and sculptures by video artist Aki Goto, and moody paintings of street scenes and film stills by Nick Farhi. Galerie Lelong brings Ficre Ghebreyesus, Jaume Plensa, and Ursula von Rydingsvard, joined by Kate Shepherd and Tariku Shiferaw, demonstrating the gallery’s multigenerational and international program. Good Weather’s strong booth includes emerging artists Raque Ford, Amy Garofano, Ron Ewert, Hartmut Austen, and Nancy Lupo. 

— Peter Augustus Owen

Five Painters + Remarkable Roxy

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Roxy Paine, Chart, 2024, at Talley Dunn Gallery

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Aarionne Hobbs, A Wicked Offering, 2024, at Kirk Hopper Fine Art

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Dagon Blank, The Castigation of Tantalus, 2025 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art

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Alberto Perez, Wings, 2026 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art

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Shaun Roberts, The Hireling Shepherd, 2025 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art

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Alexandria Wooldridge, Willow, 2026 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art

Five Painters + Remarkable Roxy 

April 11 – May 16, kirkhopperfineart.com.

During Dallas Arts Month, galleries step up with their programming. Here are two must-sees.

At Talley Dunn Gallery, “Roxy Paine: Overgrown Neuron” signals the New York-based sculptor’s gallery debut. The internationally exhibited Paine is in nearly every museum collection you can name, from NYC’s MoMA and San Francisco’s SFMOMA to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. What’s unique about this show: It traces Paine’s intensive hand-built process and his mastery over stainless steel, sans digital imagery or foundry, as it follows his commission for the campus of UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. One of the outliers here, the nearly 11-foot-wide Chart, 2024, underscores the artist’s obsession with fungi. Through May 9, talleydunn.com.

At Kirk Hopper Fine Art, noted guest curator Susie Kalil returns to organize “Five Painters: New Myths,” an exhibition sparked by her 2025 turn as a juror for Stephen F. Austin State University School of Art, Nacodoches. Kalil curates associate professor Shaun Roberts and grad students Alexandria Wooldridge and Alberto Perez, joined by art-school alums Dagon Blank and Aarionne Hobbs. The stunning canvases displayed by this quintet — informed by Old Masters, especially the dramatic storytelling of the Renaissance and Baroque periods — embody the terrible beauty of our turbulent times. Kalil says, “Every generation has new myths. These artists are returning to mythologies — retelling them in ways that reflect where we are now.”  

— Catherine D. Anspon

The Art of Portraiture: Thoma Foundation

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Yinka Shonibare, CBE, Refugee Astronaut VIII, at Thoma Foundation (Photo by Stephen White)

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Andy Warhol, cycle1, 1985, at Thoma Foundation

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Kumi Yamashita, Chair, 2015, at Thoma Foundation (© Kumi Yamashita. Photo by Hideto Nagatsuka)

The Art of Portraiture: Thoma Foundation

Through February 2027, thomafoundation.org.

As a city of significant collectors (many, regulars on the Artnews Top 200 list), Dallas is beginning to rival Miami as a place where rarified private treasures are generously shared with the public.

Aligned with Dallas Arts Month, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation unveils “Presence of Absence: Embodied Portraiture.” The 60-plus works on view were plucked from the foundation’s avant-garde holdings — talents including Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the U.S. at the 2024 Venice Biennale; CBE RA Yinka Shonibare, whose Dutch wax-print, fabric-draped sculptures address colonialism; South African video pioneer/critic of Apartheid William Kentridge; set designer/installation master Robert Wilson, represented by a video of Lady Gaga channeling Ingres’ Neoclassical portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Riviere owned by the Louvre; Carrie Mae Weems known for her intimate photographic and video portraits of fierce femmes; and sound artists Cardiff & Miller, whose collaboration often features salvaged materials from the past including antique furniture and vintage rotary and retro phones.  

— Catherine D. Anspon

The Cult of Frida

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Nickolas Muray’s “Frida with Her Pet Eagle, Coyoacán,” 1939, printed 2024, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (© Nickolas Muray Photo Archives)

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Frida Kahlo’s “Diego and I,” 1949, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Collection of Eduardo F. Costantini. © 2026 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museum Trust, Mexico City/Artists Rights Society, New York)

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Yasumasa Morimura’s “An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Hand-Shaped Earring),” 2001, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. © Yasumasa Morimura, courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York)

The Cult of Frida

Through May 17, mfah.org.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s most influential department and arguably America’s top curator of Latin American art, Mari Carmen Ramírez, has taken on Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), presenting the artist in a way she has never been seen before. “Frida: The Making of an Icon” at the MFAH delivers an expansive, years-in-the-making blockbuster that promises to lure both scholars and the art-curious public to Houston. After all, this is the show’s only U.S. stop before it heads to London’s Tate Modern this summer.

Delving deeply into the museum’s own archives as well as those of the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City, Ramírez’s exhibition brings forth a portrait of not only the painter herself (via 35 career-spanning Kahlo works) but also nearly 80 additional artists across five generations whose creations dialogue with or embrace the intimate art and dramatic life of the legendary Kahlo.  

— Catherine D. Anspon

The Art of Noir: The Warehouse

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Danh Vo, In God We Trust, 2025, at The Warehouse (Courtesy The Rachofsky Collection)

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Julie Curtiss, Limule (Horseshoe Crab), 2021 (Courtesy The Rachofsky Collection)

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Woody De Othello, Out of Body, Out of Mind, 2020, at The Warehouse (Courtesy The Rachofsky Collection)

The Art of Noir: The Warehouse

April 11 – July 18, thewarehousedallas.org.

With its cynical attitudes and shadowy, black-and-white visuals, film noir captured the American imagination in the years surrounding World War II. Not just a genre but a definite mood, noir’s misanthropic morality finds artistic expression in The Warehouse’s exhibition “Chase a Crooked Shadow: Film Noir as Contemporary Mirror,” its opening perfectly timed to Dallas Arts Month. Guest curator New Mexico Museum of Art’s Alexandra Terry organizes this sweeping, complex, and intensely topical exhibition.

Shaped by moral instability and the growing realization that the American dream is compromised, noir replaced suggestion with spectacle, making it a fertile worldview that continues to influence contemporary art. Using noir’s themes and archetypes as curatorial concepts — including detectives and antiheroes, landscapes, violence, and psychological states — “Chase a Crooked Shadow” juxtaposes work from the Rachofsky and Hartland & Mackie/Labora collections with loans from other institutions to highlight this film genre’s legacy, illuminating the deviant aspects of modern life we might wish would just remain in the shadows. 

Why you should go: Nearly 80 talents are showcased, with works informed by a brooding sense of unease, arrayed across diverse media — painting, sculpture, photography, installation — traversing generations, aesthetics, and geography. Watch for Texans — both the known, Nic Nicosia, and underknown, Troy Brauntuch and the late Patrick Faulhaber, poignantly represented by a miniature photorealist street scene — alongside national and international notables Janine Antoni, the late Gordon Parks, Ross Bleckner, Alighiero Boetti, Mamma Andersson, Marlene Dumas, and Danh Vo; the latter’s crumbling American flag, In God We Trust, 2025, formed from milled steel and spilling logs, becomes the exhibit’s marquee piece that speaks to our dystopian time.  

— Kendall Morgan with Catherine D. Anspon

High Society: Madrazo at the Meadows

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Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, "The Marquise d’Hervey de Saint-Denys as the Goddess Diana (La marquesa d’Hervey Saint-Denys como la diosa Diana)," 1888, at Meadows Museum (© GrandPalaisRmn [Musée d’Orsay.] Photo by Adrien Didierjean)

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Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, "Aline Masson," late 1870s, at Meadows Museum (© Pablo Linés)

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Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, "Girls at a Window (Muchachas en la ventana)," circa 1875, at Meadows Museum (© 2010 The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Photo by Michael Agee.)

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Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta, "Woman with a Parrot (Dama con un loro)," circa 1872, at Meadows Museum (© 2010 The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Photo by Michael Agee.)

High Society: Madrazo at the Meadows

Through June 21, meadowsmuseumdallas.org.

Nothing is more thrilling than rediscovering an artist lost to the sands of time — especially when that talent was once the toast of three continents for his portraits of the beau monde, with patrons who sought him out at his studios in Belle Époque Paris, then Manhattan and Buenos Aires. So, the curtain rises on Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta (1841 – 1920) when his transatlantic retrospective arrives this spring at the Meadows Museum, SMU, co-organized by the Meadows and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, where it opened last fall to great fanfare.

With Gilded Age society figures such as the Vanderbilts among his sitters and friendships with tony collectors William Hood Stewart and Archer Huntington (founder of The Hispanic Society of America, which bestowed an honorary membership on Madrazo), the artist’s career was ascendant during his lifetime, then fell out of favor as he was neither Impressionist nor avant-garde.

Recent scholarship, capped by this exhibition, returns him to his rightful place among the pantheon of 19th-/early-20th-century Spanish painters that includes his brother-in-law, Mariano Fortuny. Madrazo and Fortuny often took painting trips together; this exhibition underscores the latter’s influence, particularly regarding the preciosista style.

At the Meadows, you’ll see more than 100 works, primarily portraits and genre scenes that span decades, explored thematically and chronologically. Included are several freshly discovered canvases and loans from approximately 60 national and international institutions and esteemed private collections, including Prado, The Met, and Musée d’Orsay.

— Catherine D. Anspon

First Families of Dallas Collecting: Green Family Art Foundation

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Ja’Tovia Gary, Citational Ethics (Saidiya Hartman, 2017), 2020, at Green Family Art Foundation (Collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. © Ja'Tovia Gary. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery. Photo by Steven Probert.)

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Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled, 2020, at Green Family Art Foundation (Courtesy of the Karpidas Family. © Ewa Juszkiewicz. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.)

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Evita Tezeno, Beyond the Path There is a New Birth, 2023, at Green Family Art Foundation (Marlo and Jel Melucci. © Evita Tezeno. Courtesy the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.)

First Families of Dallas Collecting: Green Family Art Foundation

Through August 9, greenfamilyartfoundation.org.

While you may not be able to tour Dallas’ celebrated private art collections — troves of often museum-promised or -exhibited work, owned by discreet Artnews Top 200 types — art seekers can bask in an important selection of these treasures this spring and summer.

It’s all thanks to the Green Family Art Foundation (just a stroll from the Nasher Sculpture Center), which welcomes the public. “Fields of Vision: Dallas Collects,” curated by Sara Hignite of Hignite Projects, is the perfect show to unveil this month when international and national art-goers flock to town, with more than 40 works showcased.

It pulls back the curtain on the holdings of The Rachofsky Collection (Tomoo Gokita), Cindy and Armond Schwartz (Lonnie Holley), Wendy and Jeremy Strick (Piero Golia), Annika and Dennis Cail (Jammie Holmes), Dan Patterson (Katharina Grosse), the Karpidas Family (Ewa Juszkiewicz), Craig and Kathryn Hall (Pedro Reyes), Dallas Art Fair’s John and Marlene Sughrue (Gabriel Rico), Marlo and Jeff Melucci (Dallas-based painter Evita Tezeno), Mark Giambrone (Nasher Prize talent Theaster Gates), Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation (DMA-exhibited, Dallas-born artist/filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary), and finally, Green Family Art Foundation (Nasher-exhibited Hugh Hayden).

— Catherine D. Anspon

Mapping the Body at The Power Station

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled (Woman in Sundress), 2003, at The Power Station

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Robert Gober, Untitled, 2000–2001, at The Power Station (Courtesy the Rachofsky Collection)

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Roman Marble Portrait Head of a Woman, 1st half of the 3rd Century A.D., at The Power Station

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Isa GeIsa Genzken, Untitled, 2006, at The Power Station

Mapping the Body at The Power Station

Both shows, April 15 – June 27, powerstationdallas.com.

Always provocative in its programming, The Power Station has devised a timely exhibition for Art Week 2026 that examines the fragmentation that marks our modern experience. “Body Fragment” proves that self-obsession with distraction and disintegration is hardly a contemporary problem. Featuring artworks spanning from antiquity to the present, the show juxtaposes classical sculptures with modern works from an all-star roster, including Kelly Akashi, Tracey Emin, Sean Landers, Sarah Lucas, and Cindy Sherman.

Concurrently on view in the Station’s annex and third floor is the 16th project from the institution’s offshoot, Picnic Curatorial. The ironically titled “Feel Good Hit of the Summer” pays tribute to the timeless designs of surfboard shaper Renny Yater (employed to dramatic effect in the 1979 Coppola film Apocalypse Now). Integrating Picnic founder Gregory Ruppe’s surf designs with artworks from the Pinnell Collection — amassed by Power Station founders/Artnews Top 200 collectors Janelle and Alden Pinnell — alongside pieces from Germán Benincore, Gabriel Rico, and Tim Kerr, this group show for our fractious times will be set to a soundtrack by NoSocial.

— Kendall Morgan

Rabbits Rule at Laura Rathe Fine Art and Dallas Arboretum

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“Hunt Slonem: Bunnies, Birds & Butterflies” alights at Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden

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Hunt Slonem, Sunflowers & Swallowtails III, 2026, at Laura Rathe Fine Art

Rabbits Rule at Laura Rathe Fine Art and Dallas Arboretum

“Garden Party: Hunt Slonem” at Laura Rathe Fine Art, through May 2

“Hunt Slonem: Bunnies, Birds & Butterflies” at Dallas Arboretum, April 20 – September 30, dallasarboretum.org.

A duo of shows that celebrate the flora and fauna of museum-collected artist, preservationist, and personage Hunt Slonem begin at Laura Rathe Fine Art, where Slonem unfurls his signature neo-expressionist menagerie of birds, bunnies, and butterflies, paired with dreamlike landscapes that reinforce the “Garden Party” theme.

Concurrently, Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden mounts a riotous installation: Slonem’s traveling al fresco show in which mammoth glass bunnies cavort amidst the verdant vignettes of the 66-acre garden along White Rock Lake, joined by totemic toucans and a kaleidoscope of butterflies.

The joyful outdoor exhibition, four years in the making, debuted in May 2024 at San Antonio Botanical Garden — a bicoastal exploration of the art of blown glass undertaken by studio teams in New York and Seattle, in collaboration with international artisans and craftspeople. Slonem’s often monumental sculptures, encrusted with mirrored and colored mosaic surfaces, dramatically hold court in rooms of nature while giving off disco-ball vibes.

— Catherine D. Anspon