Despite its status as the principal art museum in a city of considerable wealth, the rather modest permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art is proof that either north Texans don't collect much great art or they don't donate it on a grand scale to local institutions. One notable exception to that rule is Raymond Nasher, one of the world's foremost collectors of contemporary sculpture. A local businessman by way of New York who made his banking and real estate fortune in Dallas (with the shopping mall NorthPark Center, among other properties). Nasher finally decided, after years of being wooed by the Dallas Museum of Art as well as major institutions like the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to establish a public sculpture garden in his adopted city. The $50 million project is being entirely funded by the private Nasher Foundation.

The Nasher Sculpture Center is slated to open in fall 2003 on a 2 1/2-acre site adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art, in a glass-and-marble structure designed by the renowned architect Renzo Piano. The center is certain to change the way art fans think about Dallas. The collection, amassed over 4 decades by Ray and his wife Patsy, is considered by some art experts to be the finest private collection in the world. The 54,000-square-foot center will feature an outdoor sculpture garden landscaped by Peter Walker, with pieces from Nasher's immense collection exhibited both indoors and out. The collection includes some of the finest individual works from the likes of Joan Miró, David Smith, Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, and many others. With an auditorium and classroom, the center will also focus on the study of modern sculpture. Even though the Nasher Center is still in the works at this writing (only one major sculpture, by Richard Serra, a piece that previously announced the entrance to the Dallas Museum of Art, has been installed), I've seen much of Nasher's collection and interviewed him for an art magazine at his Dallas home, and I'm certain the new Nasher Sculpture Center -- which has some of the biggest names in art and architecture attached to it -- will quickly become one of Dallas's most highly prized treasures.

The Nasher Center is bounded by Woodall Rogers Freeway, North Harwood, Flora, and Olive streets. For more information, including hours and prices (the center had not yet been inaugurated at press time), see www.nashersculpturecenter.org.