KERA News

Johnathan Johnson

KERA • August 18 2023

Dallas gets its first cat café. Here's a look

It’s Tuesday afternoon, around 1 o’clock, and the main room at Whiskers and Soda cat cafe is buzzing with a low din of 30 cat-happy customers, many of them children.

Aly Of Lucky Button Photography

KERA • July 31 2023

Hip-hop is 50! Dallas celebrates music and culture

When Andrea Tosten was hired at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center at the beginning of the year, she brought a big idea with her: promoting the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.

August 11 is the official birthday of the music and subculture that started in 1973, and Dallas is ready to party.

Andrew Scott

KERA News • April 24 2023

UT Dallas students light up Dallas Arts Month at the Omni Dallas Hotel with "Cosmic" light shows

On just about any night, the Omni Dallas Hotel is lit—all 23 stories with its LED neon colors, flashing digital designs and messages to downtown onlookers.

Juan Figueroa

KERA News • April 21 2023

Get an Eye-ful with a surreal garden trip at the Eyeball during the Dallas Art Fair

Get ready for a family-friendly, surreal garden excursion during the Dallas Art Fair, April 21-23. Visit the Dallas Eye, the iconic downtown landmark at 1601 Main Street. White rabbits not included.

Sally Verrando

KERA News • April 11 2023

Four artists dust off their West Texas boots for Dallas' Lone Gallery's debut exhibition

Faint melodies of mariachi music float on the air like pied pipers, luring outsiders to a corner building in an obscure section of Dallas’ Design District North. Opening the door, the staccato beat blasts the ears as the eyes fill with shades of indigo, terra cotta and forest green. It’s the premiere of Lone Gallery.

Barak Epstein

KERA News • March 29 2023

Free student filmmaking workshops offered by Oak Cliff Film Festival in Dallas

High school students interested in filmmaking can register for free workshops, sponsored by the Oak Cliff Film Festival and the nonprofit community group For Oak Cliff.

WHAT: Free student filmmakers' workshops

KERA

KERA News • March 28 2023

Austin's award-winning Lady Bird Lake loo is the place to go

Hikers and bikers at have places to go when nature calls, thanks to the first of the Lady Bird Trail restrooms.

Designed by local architects and runners Juan Miró and Miguel Rivera, the first facility was built in 2007 in the shadow of I-35 on the Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail near downtown Austin.

Senga Nengudi

KERA News • March 22 2023

How everyday objects create vivid 'performative sculpture' at the Nasher Sculpture Center

Pantyhose stretched to surreal limits. A lumpy anti-Zen sandscape scattered with found objects. Plastic rainbow-colored tubes reminiscent of elongated unfrozen ice pops.

KERA

KERA News • March 14 2023

Original details preserved in Texas' oldest Black church invite memories of the past

The Allen Chapel AME Church, completed in 1914, is the oldest African American church in Texas. It sits several blocks east of Sundance Square in historic downtown Fort Worth. Early worshipers had said the church’s rectangular shape reminded them of a blacksmith’s shop, where enslaved people decades earlier had often attended church services.

Sally Verrando

KERA News • March 6 2023

A mosaic of everyday memories: Neighbors reminisce for South Dallas Cultural Center installation

In a pandemic lockdown, what’s a storyteller to do?

Filmmaker Adriane McCray was itching for a project.

“I was trying to figure out how to scratch that itch,” McCray said, “as well as to create in ways that I normally do but can't because of the isolation.”

Sally Verrando

KERA News • March 2 2023

Art with a twist on traditional craft and personal stories at Fort Worth's Kinfolk House

A new exhibit, "Woven Together" at Kinfolk House in Fort Worth, puts a twist on traditional women's crafts that play off nostalgia and also offer a fresh perspective, said Jessica Fuentes, the executive director of Kinfolk House.

It feels right at home in the 100-year-old historic house in the Polytechnic neighborhood of Fort Worth. It had belonged to artist Sedrick Huckaby's grandmother Hallie B. Carpenter, who was known as Big Momma, until her death in 2008.

Huckaby bought the house from a f