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24 By Catherine D. Anspon A rt Hearts Fashion: Our time empowers creatives, while blurring, then erasing boundaries of art, design, craft, and fashion. (Check out our profile of Temi Coker in this issue.) In that vein, take note of Ivy Winfrey — how many fashion brands launch their inaugural collections at an art space, let alone one of Texas' leading galleries. This spring, the Nairobi-born, Dallas-raised Winfrey debuted Two Bags by Ivy at Talley Dunn Gallery, creating an installation with a wall of handbags transformed into vases holding crimson roses. Her brand's first collection, Ariyo, is freighted with meaning. Winfrey says, "Ariyo translates to 'two' in Luo, my mother tongue. And every bag in this debut collection is named after a woman in my matrilineal lineage. Not as decoration. As documentation." With this fashion foray, Winfrey taps into the continuing zeitgeist of handbag as statement and collectible, epitomized by the ongoing Louis Vuitton x Murakami collab. But Two Bags by Ivy has a feminist rallying cry that is both personal and universal, as Nic Nicosia, homemade stories #14 (figure 2), 2023, at Nasher Sculpture Center. Germán Venegas, Megaflash, 2023, at Colector. Two Bags by Ivy, Kyani dual mini. well as a democratic price point. "The gallery experience was built around the idea that a woman is always c a r r y i n g t w o truths at once: joy and grief, home and diaspora, who she c a m e from and who she's b e c o m i n g , " Wi n f r e y s a y s . " T h e installation didn't ask you to resolve those tensions; it asked you to hold them, both, at the same time. That's what Ariyo means beyond the translation." Read our Q&A with Winfrey (a fascinating figure also known for her music chops as the first-ever female DJ for the Dallas Mavericks, "rewriting NBA culture one track at a time") at papercitymag.com. Hometown Hero Heralded: Kudos to Nasher Sculpture Center for placing Dallas talents on an international platform, where they belong. Who can forget David Bates' 2014 solo at the Nasher, concurrently mounted with a painting exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. This spring, photographer/ sculptor/drawer Nic Nicosia gets the Nasher treatment in an ambitious solo, "Everyday Surreal." Some 70 works are presented, comprising the largest take on the artist since his 1999 – 2001 museum survey organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston that focused on the artist's photography and film and traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art in 2000. "Everyday Surreal" surveys the second part of Nicosia's half-century career. His sculpture, drawing, and hand-collaged and re-photographed images are showcased here, highlighting a practice that has shifted from elaborate tableaux involving crews to a solitary methodology that mirrors our age of anxiety. Exhibition curator Jed Morse says, "'Everyday Surreal' … speaks deeply and warmly to the strangeness and ironies that populate our daily lives" (May 16 – August 16). Nicosia — a veteran of two Whitney Biennials, Documenta IX, and the Pompidou Center, is in the esteemed stable of Erin Cluley Gallery, and his late 1980s photography and film was the subject of Cluley's booth at Art Basel Miami Beach last December. He's cited in press materials as "one of the city's most celebrated living artists" — and we concur. Canvassing a Mexican Master: Colector gallery's founder, Mexican architect Jesús Alberto Flores, has organized an important exhibition for the recent canvases by Germán Venegas, a talent who is in international collections from The Met to Museo Tamayo. Amounting to a radical break with artist's previous myth- and symbol-laden figurative painting, the works on view in "Everything Is Becoming" command our attention in a conversation that ultimately becomes about abstraction, reveling in the process of painting. Concurrent with Venegas' embrace of Buddhism, this reinvention represents a distillation to the autonomy of pigment upon canvas (through May 30). © NIC NICOSIA. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ERIN CLULEY GALLERY, DALLAS.