Greg Metz: Artist, Curator, Educator
Greg Metz is Clinical Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Humanities, Visual Arts Studio Program. He has been a faculty member since 1994. He holds a B.F.A. degree in printmaking from East Texas State University (1974) and an M.F.A. degree in printmaking from Indiana University (1979). He was awarded a fellowship to study at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art (1973) and a full fellowship to the Indiana University MFA Graduate Program. His teaching responsibilities at the University of Texas at Dallas have involved 2 and 3D design, printmaking, sculpture, drawing as well as teaching graduate seminar courses in relational aesthetics, interventionist art, social practice, visual arts studio practices and contemporary gallery and exhibition studies. He has served as Gallery Director of UTDallas’ Main Gallery from 1996- 2017 and the SP/N Gallery from its inception in 2017 .
Greg Metz has exhibited artworks nationally and internationally in a variety of venues including: Grand Palace, Amsterdam, Koln Cathedral, Koln Germany, General Post Office, Dublin, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Washington National Mall, Dallas Museum of Art, San Antonio Art Museum, Arlington Art Museum and numerous public and private collections. His work is primarily issue oriented and political in nature focusing on art as propaganda and editorial, earning him reviews in San Francisco’s Art Week, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Mother Jones, San Diego Chronicle, Boston Herald, Washington Times, NPR radio, New York Times as well as numerous regional publications. After returning to Dallas in 1979 he designed and built props for the motion picture industry and award-winning sets for theater. In 1992 he was awarded the prestigious Otis Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art while also receiving a New Forms Initiative Grant funded by the NEA. and the Rockefeller/Warhol Foundation. He has been awarded the ‘Best Artist’ category 3 times by the Dallas Observer.
In 1990 Greg Metz initiated an ‘Artist Advisory Board’ to the DMA to have input into the Dallas Museum of Arts programming. He was the lead artist on the initial prototype for the Dallas Master Plan’s Percent for the Arts Program. He later worked to establish ‘Project Teamwork’ bringing art education into public schools through collaboration with the Dallas Museum of Art. He Co-founded and chaired as president ‘Dallas Artist Research and Exhibition, a non-profit artist-run organization of 400 members, whose mission is to show and support experimental artists and their research while advocating for artists’ rights in Greater Dallas. This led to his co-founding of the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, an alternative arts and performance center in Dallas. He also Co-Chaired the 2006 Texas Sculpture Symposium, which brought in prestigious artists such as Mary Jane Jacobs, Mel Chin and Jim Harithas of ‘The Station’ in Houston and notable artists Robert Pruitt, Lawrence Miller and David Hanson. In 1997 Greg adopted the TVAA Annual High School Art Competition with over 1,000 North Texas entries, bringing it to UTD’s Main Gallery. Under his direction it has become one of the most prestigious High School art competitions in Texas for the last 21 years.
Metz has continued his public arts participation with his students, creating artistic, innovative ‘art cars’ to compete in the annual Houston Art Car Parade where they won first prize out of 800 world-wide entries for three years in a row. He has also employed his curatorial practice and installation design experience in presenting over twenty-five, provocative to sublime, first rate exhibitions in the Main Gallery at UTD transcending the limitations of this multiuse, free access space. In 1999 he assembled a national Graffiti Show bringing in 11 of the most notorious ‘low profile’ scrawl artist in the country. In 2006 he curated a show at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, “Drawing Under the Influence” which was widely reviewed and included 4 Whitney Biennale artists. Other curated exhibitions include, ‘Unreal’ at UTD which premiered David Hanson’s Philip K Dick’s Robot model installation, one of the most advanced lifelike interactive robots to date and featured, ‘Capital f’ the role failure plays in inspiring creativity, ‘unNatural Disaster’; human intervention in realigning nature, ‘Botany of Desire’, which examines the similarities of the symbiotic, creative roles that plants and artist play in insuring their own survival and thus the desire to give meaningful identity to the their surrounding environments. His 2015 experimental curatorial exercise involved 2 venues, 5 diverse curators, each presenting artists whose works address warning signs to impending potential crisis in the exhibition ‘Code Yellow’. Metz curated the inaugural exhibition ‘Critical Mass ’ for UTD’s new state-of-the-art SP/N Gallery which included 20 years of successful artist alumni artists, Spring 2017. In 2018 Metz curated and extensive retrospect of renown Dallas artist Tracy Hicks. In 2022 he curated a retrospective exhibition with an extensive 150 pg. catalogue chronicling the many contributions and influences Dr. Richard Brettell has initiated in the development of the Cultural Arts of Dallas, the University of Texas at Dallas and the DMA over the last 30 years. Metz has lately focused more on the ‘social engagement’ aspect of art, demonstrating the importance of artist collectives in response to social, cultural and environmental engagement through collaborative actions to affect change. Such efforts have resulted in the exhibition ‘StayBite: Modes of Operation’ which included a group of interventionist collectives from the West Coast to present varied profiles of their interactions using their art as tools to create change and awareness. He organized and implemented one of Dallas’ first Flash Mob Art Actions, ‘Making the Invisible Visible’, creating and assembling a network of ‘Artists’ in performing a dialogical intervention in the ‘Dallas Arts District’ advocating for more debate on healthcare issues for artists. In 2011 Metz was nominated for the prestigious Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship with his proposal for creating a ‘Museum of the Accident’ and then in 2013-14 he was lead artist in the production of, MacArthur Fellow, Rick Lowe’s ‘Trans.lation’ project for the Nasher Sculpture Center’s 10 Year Anniversary exhibition ‘XChange’. This Social Sculpture has initiated a program to help establish a critical identity to Dallas’ most unique cultural asset that resides in one of the most racially diverse and densely populated immigrant community in the Southwest United States. In 2013 Metz was featured prominently in the Dallas Museum of Art’s exhibition entitled “Dallasites”curated by Leigh Arnold. His most current research practice has been directed at ‘Understanding and Expanding the Viability for a More Sustainable Art Market Through the Development of New Models and Methodologies for a Broken/ Limited Gallery System’. As a result he has initiated a start up ‘art services’ enterprise introducing ‘leased’ curated exhibitions into the corporate and institutional work environments on a rotational basis complete with educational programing. In 2017 Metz headed the design team to establish a new 5,000 sft. studio lab for printmaking and sculpture and a 6,000 sft. Gallery exhibition complex that now serves as the UTD’s primary campus gallery.