As a working artist myself, I always find the annual Dallas Art Fair informative and inspirational. This year, after surveying the vivid and varied works at the stall of Meliksetian | Briggs gallery, owned by Preston Hollow residents Anna Meliksetian and Michael Briggs, I popped over to Houston gallery Seven Sisters’ space to view the work of artist and SMU Assistant Professor of Art Daniel Rios Rodriguez and have a chat. The Killeen native and longtime San Antonio resident recently made the move to Dallas to teach at SMU.
“I’m in the first year of my contract,” said the tenure-track painting and drawing teacher, “brand-new to Dallas, brand-new to SMU. I moved here in August and jumped right into teaching. In the fall, I had a show at Ruby City in San Antonio, so that also kept me busy.”
“I love it,” he said, smiling, of his SMU experience. “The students are all really smart kids, all really engaged. They want homework, which is a shock to me. They’re always asking for more work, which is great.“It’s super supportive,” he noted of SMU. “There’s a lot of freedom with what it is that I teach and how I teach. I appreciate that, being the kind of painter that I am.”
Rodriguez received his BFA from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2005 and his MFA in Painting from Yale in 2007, and he has enjoyed solo exhibitions in New York, Toronto, Dublin, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Mexico City and group shows in Beijing, London, and Paris, among others. He was a 2018 Artist in Residence at the Chinati Foundation, a 2017 printmaking resident at the Wingate Studio in New Hampshire, and a 2013 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award recipient.
“Now that I live in Dallas, it’s a little easier, I think, to integrate myself,” he said of the Fair. “I’m right up the street. They’re probably tired of seeing me at this point.”
This year, his work was featured at both the Seven Sisters and Kerlin Gallery (Dublin) booths.
“My work sold at Kerlin, which is great,” he mentioned of a new artistic direction. “I’m starting a new series of paintings that are pretty unlike anything I’ve done before. The work with Kerlin is the first diptych I made in my studio here in Dallas — the first finished painting.”
Of his childhood artistic beginnings, Rodriguez said, like most artists, he wasn’t a very good student and had a hard time sitting still and keeping himself contained. Eventually, an art teacher gave him a box of oil paints and told him to sit in a corner and busy himself.
“And that’s what I did,” he recalled. “I took them home, and I would just paint these random, Salvador Dali-esque wannabe surreal paintings late at night. I haven’t stopped painting since I was 17.”
“It was my only strength,” he chuckled of his lauded artistic talent. “At this point, it really is the only thing I know how to do.”
Author
Josh Hickman
Josh Hickman is a national award-winning journalist, visual artist, sometime musician, and author of seven books. His writing For People Newspapers often focuses on arts & culture, local small businesses, local history & government, and interesting personal stories. His paintings include a commission for Dallas County and a donation to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
