Hope you all are doing good today!
My summer break has been really nice, and I’ve enjoyed some time away!
One trip I made recently was to the Dallas Museum of Art in downtown. This is a stellar museum with a magnificent host of historical artifacts — many of which are from all around the world. I’ve always had an interest in history and art, and greatly appreciate the arts in all its forms.
For today, I want to share this trip with you! We’ll take a quick look at the history of this museum, and then jump into my experience!
At the end, I’ll have a short update on the games I’ve been playing lately!
Let’s jump in!
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A full history can be found here on the DMA’s website.
As of writing this, the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is over 123 years old.
It was founded back in 1903 as the Dallas Art Association by fifty citizens that met at the Dallas Public Library. Eventually, it was named the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1933.
One memorable piece of history happened back in 1936, when the The Texas Centennial Exposition was held at Fair Park — a World Fair that ushered in a lot of support for the Museum — possibly helped because of the iconic Art Deco designs that were created in Fair Park for this World Fair. Likewise, this fair helped tremendously with the local economy in Dallas during the tail end of The Great Depression — with it supporting thousands of jobs and providing millions of dollars in local revenue.
As of now, the DMA is one of the ten largest art museums in all of the United States. With free admission to view its collections, this museum has amassed millions of new people that have viewed its art and historical pieces since its opening over a century ago.
I arrived at the Dallas Museum of Art on a late morning during the week.
Schools were still out for the summer, but because of the heat, I’m sure that it was busier than normal with people just wanting to cool off.
Instead of starting at the first main floor where it was busier, I was recommended to start from the top and work my way to the bottom to avoid a lot of crowds.
I’m not planning on writing too many details for each piece I have pictured here, but I’ll try to include anything that stood out or some thoughts I have. Anything I draw from as sources will either be from my own experience or from information gathered on the DMA’s website — where you can find their entire collection. I also linked one other source down below in the Ancient Egyptian section of the museum.
On my way to the elevators in the main concourse, I came across this imposing marble statue of Semiramis (pictured above) — a fictional interpretation of the former queen of Assyria.
The top floor of the museum hosted many works of art from the Americas. A lot of them were incredibly old, whereas only a few were modern.
I love seeing some of the older pieces in the Ancient American section, which covered Latin America and Indigenous American Art. It’s fascinating to me to see pieces I can easily recognize or understand their use case. Like in the above collage of photos, there’s a small mirror made from anthracite that’s over 2,000 or 3,000 years old — or even the small sculpture of the feline on the bottom right.
There were plenty of pieces that held so much texture to them or were so well designed, given their ancient age. While on the fourth floor, there were a variety of unique works place all around.
Plenty of pieces stood tall — like the wall panel art in the photo above. It’s incredible how well that wall panel looked for being close to 1,500 years old!
As I continued on the fourth floor, there were so many paintings that dominated my view. Many of them were several hundred years old, and a good portion were from the renaissance and baroque period — though others were more modern.
I loved the cat painting in the bottom right of the above collage!
The third floor of the museum contained various collections from Africa, Asia, and Oceanic regions.
Some of the most incredible pieces that stood out to me were from the Arts of Ancient Egypt section.
They had at least two ancient coffins on display. The first one, pictured above, is called the Coffin of Horankh and is dated to around 700 BCE/BC. It’s unreal to me that the hieroglyphs were largely intact on the bottom of it.
The second in the above photo is a mummy on loan from Southern Methodist University’s Bridwell Library, and is dated from around 1200 BCE/BC. The designs and hieroglyphs on the coffin are so detailed given its age. According to the Digital Collections at SMU, the remains within likely belonged to a 35-year old woman who was a member of the family of Ramses II.
After this section on ancient Egypt, I kept exploring the third floor.
There was a large room dedicated to Hindu art (pictured in the gallery above), which was fascinating to walk through. I’m pretty ignorant on Hinduism, so it was very interesting to learn more about all these artifacts.
There were a few sculptures of Buddha and other similar works throughout the third floor, as seen in the photo above.
The second floor was my next destination, which hosted a lot of European, Roman, and Greek art and sculptures.
The second floor had so many paintings throughout. They were all fantastic to see, and I honestly couldn’t tell you what my favorite was, as they all contained a unique story that was amazing to learn about.
It was getting really crowded on the second floor, so I wasn’t able to take too many photos of the Roman or Greek collections. They had several other busts and portraits though, and were amazing to see given their old age.
What they did have was impressive, and I wish I could’ve spent more time examining each piece. After I finished up, I walked down to the first floor.
Admittedly, I am not a huge fan of Contemporary Art. The first floor mostly consists of modern or abstract pieces. While I found it all interesting, I decided to walk to the outside and around Klyde Warren Park a bit.
It was such a bright and sunny day out. But, there was still a handful of people out and about, especially at Klyde Warren Park in the shaded sections. All of the food trucks were set up and ready to serve an upcoming lunch crowd.
For those unaware, Klyde Warren Park was built about 15 years ago, and sits on top of the massive Woodall Rodgers Freeway underneath it. From the top though, you can’t even tell a busy freeway is under you with the food trucks, events, seats and benches, and everyday construction going on.
That about wraps up my visit to this art museum in Dallas!
There was a lot more that I didn’t take pictures of. It was well worth the visit, and is a museum I’d quickly recommend visiting if you find yourself in the Dallas area, especially with there being no cost to visit the main collections. If you park in the garage, you will have to pay for parking — though you can stay there while visiting other areas downtown.
I’d highly push for anyone to visit during the week like I did. I’ve heard it can get quite busy over the weekend. Likewise, keep in mind that it is closed on Monday and Tuesday of the week.
It might sound awful, but I’ve honestly not played too many games over the past couple of weeks!
It’s been nice to take my break, and taking a step away from games has been good to refresh my mind. In the meantime, I’ve been working on some other writing projects, and spending time with friends and family during my summer break!
I still need to work on my old PC, and get that all up and going. I’m getting closer to figuring out what caused it to crash a few weeks ago. So, hopefully, I’ll get it back up and can jump into Bastion and finish that up, as well as some other Steam games I’ve been eying.
I think that just about does it! Thanks for checking out this blog! I should be jumping back into my normal content shortly once my summer break comes to an end. I don’t want to give away any specific dates yet, but I hope to be back to my normal schedule by the start of September. I do have at least one more blog planned by next week or the week after!
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to chatting again soon!
See you all next time,
Joe
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