Breaking Ground: Dallas gallery shows the artists behind UTSW’s landmark sculpture project

On the Donald Seldin Plaza of UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas stands one of North Texas’s most quietly extraordinary concentrations of contemporary sculpture. It arrived not through a museum’s acquisition committee but through the sustained personal passion of Nobel Laureate Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein — who, alongside his scientific contributions to understanding cholesterol metabolism, has spent the better part of a decade commissioning permanently sited works from twelve of the most significant sculptors practicing today. The result is a collection that would hold its own in many dedicated institutions.

Now Talley Dunn Gallery — which served as curatorial advisor across the project’s entire development — has gathered twelve of those artists together in a gallery context for the first time. Breaking Ground presents selected studio works, paintings, drawings, and mixed-media pieces alongside each artist’s broader practice, creating a closer examination of the ideas and materials that shaped the permanent commissions. The cast is formidable: Joel Shapiro, whose abstract bronze and wood structures have been central to post-minimalist sculpture since the 1970s, is represented alongside Ursula Von Rydingsvard, whose monumental cedar forms occupy a singular place in contemporary craft. Roxy Paine brings his trademark branching structures; Ugo Rondinone, Giuseppe Penone, Christopher Wool, Elmgreen & Dragset, Leonardo Drew, Joseph Havel, and the late Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen complete a roster that is, by almost any measure, exceptional.

Ursula Von Rydingsvard, Osiem II, 2016, cedar and graphite wall sculpture, Breaking Ground exhibition — Osiem II, 2016, cedar and graphite. Image: Talley Dunn Gallery

The exhibition’s premise is that monumental public sculpture is often encountered at a distance, in passing, against a backdrop of daily life. By bringing works into the gallery, Breaking Ground invites the slower attention that studio pieces afford. The relationship between permanence and material change is a recurring argument: Penone carves natural growth into white Carrara marble; Von Rydingsvard accumulates cedar into forms that feel simultaneously archaic and alive. Paine translates the branching logic of biology into industrial steel. Shapiro — who died in 2025 — is present here in what amounts to a posthumous reunion with the garden he helped shape.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Roxy Paine’s solo presentation Overgrown Neuron at the same address. An open house takes place Saturday, June 13, from 1 to 5 p.m., offering visitors a direct opportunity to engage with the works and the gallery team. Breaking Ground continues through August 29. Talley Dunn Gallery is at 5020 Tracy Street, Dallas, open Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. and Saturday noon–5 p.m. Inquiries: frontdesk@talleydunn.com.

For nearly a decade, the project’s scale and ambition have lived primarily outdoors, embedded in the life of a medical campus. Breaking Ground is the first opportunity to encounter those works — and their makers — on a different register entirely.

Tags: Talley Dunn Gallery