All the World’s a Stage: Celebrating Performance in the Visual Arts, the Dallas Museum of Art exhibition opening on August 30, 2009, will showcase a fresh look at the Museum’s collections in an interactive installation to commemorate the opening of the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts and the completion of the Dallas Arts District. Nearly 125 works spanning 2,600 years of human creativity, including paintings, sculptures, photography, and objects from around the world, will illustrate how dance, music, and theater performance is an essential human instinct.

All the World’s a Stage, on view through February 28, 2010, will use the breadth of the Museum’s collections to depict how performance, in all its varied forms, has been created, transformed, and documented by visual artists, working in concert with dancers, musicians, and actors to both shape and record their efforts.

Encompassing all time periods and cultures, and a broad range of media, the exhibition features such masterpieces as Pietro Paolini’s Bacchic Concert, Jean-Antoine-Théodore Giroust’s Oedipus at Colonus, Pablo Picasso’s The Guitarist, Romare Bearden’s Soul Three, and a group of Edward Degas’s pastels of ballet dancers, as well as masterworks from the Museum’s distinguished collections from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Organized across time and culture, thematic groupings of artworks in the exhibition include why we perform, how we perform, who is a performer, where performances take place, and what makes a performance.

Of special note, All the World’s a Stage: Celebrating Performance in the Visual Arts has been organized collaboratively by all of the DMA’s curators, and the exhibition design will include a presentation space within the galleries that will host a variety of performers at special times throughout the exhibition.

All the World’s a Stage: Celebrating Performance in the Visual Arts is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. Air transportation provided by American Airlines.

The discovery of the 35,000 year-old flute demonstrates the earliest known flowering of music-making.  An amazing example of the enduring human impulse to perform, the DMA will further illustrate the power of performance and its connection to the visual arts in the forthcoming exhibition, All the World’s a Stage.