DALLAS, TX.- In anticipation of Dallas’ first-ever Super Bowl in February 2011 at the new Cowboys Stadium, the Dallas Museum of Art presents an exhibition of contemporary work by the artists whose large-scale and site-specific commissions are on view at the stadium as part of the Dallas Cowboys Art Program. Drawn from the DMA’s collections and from select local private holdings, Big New Field: Artists in the Cowboys Stadium Art Program features some twenty works by the artists in this innovative and groundbreaking public art project, including Franz Ackermann, Olafur Eliasson, Daniel Buren, Annette Lawrence, Terry Haggerty, Teresita Fernandez, and Doug Aitken among many other others.

On view from December 5, 2010, through February 20, 2011, Big New Field is curated by Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art. Wylie is a founding member of the Art Council for the Dallas Cowboys Art Program, which was launched in 2009 by Cowboys owners Gene and Jerry Jones and their family. In addition to celebrating the art in Cowboys Stadium, Big New Field highlights the emergence of North Texas as a leading center of contemporary art and architecture.

“The Art Program at Cowboys Stadium has enriched the North Texas art community with a unique commissioning program that brings together sports fans and art aficionados alike,” said Bonnie Pitman, the DMA’s Eugene McDermott Director. “With this exhibition, we hope to deepen that experience at the Dallas Museum of Art by providing audiences with further understanding of the work and practices of these leading contemporary artists who hail from North Texas, the United States, and beyond.”

Visitors to Big New Field will have the chance to view and learn more about the acclaimed artists in the Dallas Cowboys Art Program by experiencing different aspects of their work. A vibrantly colored collage painting by Trenton Doyle Hancock, for instance, is another chapter in this Texas-born and -raised artist’s fanciful Mounds saga. Lawrence Weiner’s text piece offers a less specific experience of words on a wall than his work at Cowboys Stadium, while Dave Muller’s multi-part watercolor shows him working on a similar grandly conceived scale but to different ends. Paintings by Matthew Ritchie, Jim Isermann, Jacqueline Humphries, Mel Bochner, Gary Simmons, Wayne Gonzales, Ricci Albenda and Garth Weiser likewise all point to different aspects of these accomplished artists’ rich and multi-faceted bodies of work.

“The Cowboys Stadium Art Program is an amazing joining of forces that has allowed literally millions of people the world over to experience contemporary art, something they might not come into contact with in their daily lives,” said Charles Wylie. “The opportunity to have so many learn about contemporary art and artists is something we want to reinforce with this exhibition, and of course we also want to celebrate the vision and commitment of the Jones family, who made this extraordinary initiative happen. The response from the contemporary art world to Cowboys Stadium has been one of astonishment and delight, and this is exactly what we wish to extend to all of our visitors to Big New Field.”