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COURTESY SEVENTEEN HUNDRED SEEDS Cynthia Mulcahy and Robert Hamilton's Seventeen Hundred Seeds, Oak Cliff, Summer 2012 FROM GALLERIST TO AGRARIAN ART INSIDE THE PASTORAL NEST OF CURATOR CYNTHIA MULCAHY AND ARTIST ROBERT HAMILTON Here, the remains of 1,700 sunflowers and fresh beets rub shoulders with Brazilian graffiti artists and Texas' top art provocateurs. And Billecart-Salmon pink champagne is often on ice. Enter the casa of Oak Cliff's most game-changing couple, Cynthia Mulcahy and Robert Hamilton. A little birdy. A toy bird whistle perches on the original 1918-era molding above the front door. It's just another day for Cynthia Mulcahy and Robert Hamilton. More than a hundred pounds of spring onions litter a corner of the kitchen floor in their cozy bungalow, waiting to be weighed, gathered in bags, then dropped off at the Oak Cliff eatery Bolsa or the neighborhood co-op Urban Acres, where Mulcahy often volunteers. Nearby, an earthworm farm — a large wooden trough covered with newspapers that made an appearance last year at a show at the Reading Room — awaits its next home at Mulcahy Farms, 90 miles away. Cutting-edge contemporary art (from the gallerist's Mulcahy Modern stable, including Margaret Meehan and Celia Eberle) cozies up to a collection of odd piñatas, Hamilton's monochromatic photo-emulsion paintings and remnants of last summer's social engagement/art endeavor Seventeen Hundred Seeds, which is still being talked about and was celebrated in the "Food" exhibit at Eastfield College Galleries earlier this year. The home bustles with activity, humming from a charming art- and book-lined office as a new curatorial project takes shapes — one involving the topic of war, which opened this spring at NYC's powerhouse dealers Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. But this dwelling is also a Mecca for entertaining. After our photo shoot, flutes of the house beverage, Billecart-Salmon pink bubbly, were passed. Now enter the live-and-work space of two Oak Cliff creatives you need to know as told to us by Miz Mulcahy herself. Stats. When and where did you start Mulcahy Modern Gallery? State Thomas Historic District in Uptown was the first location, opened March 1994. Moved to Bishop Arts District in March 2000. The road from curator to private dealer and now farmer. Closed the gallery in Summer 2007. I've been a private dealer since then. My father was fighting serious lymphoma cancers at MD Anderson (he did not leave the hospital for six months), and I was in the midst of another P RODUCE D & WRITTEN BY C AT H ER I N E D. AN SP O N. P H OTO G R A PHY J A M E S B L A N D. JULY | PAGE 19 | 2013