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Highs, lows and uh-ohs: Dallas area's most memorable arts and entertainment moments of 2017

The year’s best, worst and most unforgettable moments in Dallas-area arts and entertainment

As 2017 comes to a close, we look back at some of the biggest local arts stories this year — and even offer a few updates. In no particular order, here are the memorable moments that our critics and staff writers selected:

A Texas ballet star's last dance

Leticia Oliveira's fierce, physical style stood out whenever she moved on stage. So it was a surprise when the Texas Ballet Theater star decided to retire from dancing in June at age 39. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Oliveira spent the last 10 years of her 23-year career as TBT's prima ballerina, dancing all of the major roles in artistic director Ben Stevenson's oeuvre.

Her next challenge is running the company's Fort Worth ballet school. In demand at ballet galas around the world, she credited her longevity to good training and great genes. Rather than keep dancing until she couldn't, Oliveira decided to go out on top.

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Manuel Mendoza

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Dallas Theater Center wins a Tony

Kevin Moriarty and Dallas Theater Center won the Tony Award for best regional theater at the 71st annual Tony Awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in New York City June 11. The occasion inspired the famously informal Moriarty, artistic director of the 58-year-old company, to dress up.

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He received a bit of good-natured teasing afterward from his 80-year-old aunt, a nun, who emailed him to say she was disappointed he didn't wear his usual tennis shoes.

Nancy Churnin

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Director David Lowery destroyed a house in Irving, and we got a really good movie out of it

Dallas native David Lowery's year started with the world premiere of A Ghost Story at the Sundance Film Festival. It ended with shooting Robert Redford in what's being billed as the star's final film, Old Man and the Gun. Now he's working on the script for a new adaptation of Peter Pan with his writing partner, Toby Halbrooks. That's a great year by any standard. The coolest part? Lowery still writes and spends his downtime at his East Dallas home.

You might run into him at the movies, where he's just another film lover, chatting amiably, having some popcorn. He may have destroyed a house in Irving for a key scene in A Ghost Story, but Dallas remains home. Long may he stay.

Chris Vognar

Their feet in the door

"Five guys from Booker T" sounds like the title of a movie, one that we'd all love to see. And maybe we will one day. Because the story of five students from the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts who headed to the Juilliard School in New York in September is quite a story. Back in May, the Booker T. quintet learned that they would be eastward bound, to a school that accepts only 12 male and 12 female students from around the world into its dance program.

Michael Granberry

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Kusama's 'Pumpkins' flood our Instagram accounts

You don't often see the words "infinity mirrors and glowing pumpkins" in the same sentence. But you can revel in the combination at the Dallas Museum of Art, which in October opened a guaranteed crowd-pleaser called "Yayoi Kusama: All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins," which, in case you're wondering, offers "the only Infinity Mirror Room of its kind in a North American collection" by the 88-year-old Japanese artist.

The DMA show, which lingers until February, proved to be a sensation, despite allowing visitors only 45 seconds inside and two at a time to see 62 acrylic yellow pumpkins covered in black polka dots.

Michael Granberry

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What's in a name? (Apparently, $10 million)

In April, the beleaguered AT&T Performing Arts Center got a sweet surprise. It revealed that the Galveston-based Moody Foundation was offering $12 million toward eliminating ATTPAC's once-daunting capital debt and $10 million more in artistic grants if Dallas City Performance Hall would undergo a name change.

In what became a no-brainer, the building is now called Moody Performance Hall. The Moody folks promised to award "flexible grants" to "small and emerging" arts groups in Dallas.

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Michael Granberry

Mexico, Mexico, Mexico

Agustín Arteaga, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, had himself an impressive first year. Arteaga oversaw the landmark exhibition, "México 1900-1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and the Avant-Garde." The DMA had reason to be bullish on the show, which proved to be a juggernaut, critically and at the gate.

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DMA officials announced in July that the museum finished the 2017 fiscal year with its highest attendance in a decade and the second highest in its history. The only exhibition that has scored higher was "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs" in 2008.

Michael Granberry

Dallas Black Dance Theatre's new dynamo

It took Dallas Black Dance Theatre two tries to find the successor to founder and longtime artistic director Ann Williams, but the wait was worth it. The perfect choice turned out to be right under their noses: Oak Cliff native Bridget L. Moore, a graduate of the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts around the corner from the DBDT studios.

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Moore has already begun putting her stamp on the company since taking the helm in February, bringing in a wider range of guest choreographers, premiering her own new work and collaborating with other Dallas dance troupes. Moore is home, running the group she grew up watching and admiring.

Manuel Mendoza

A masterpiece slipped through the DMA's fingers

When Leonardo Da Vinci's historic painting, Salvator Mundi (Christ as Savior of the World), sold for $450.3 million in late 2017, it stunned the art world. But the sale carried with it an even more stunning revelation in Dallas-Fort Worth. The Dallas Morning News revealed that, in 2012, the then-director of the Dallas Museum of Art, Maxwell Anderson, approached his board about buying the painting. Anderson was in talks with three art dealers who offered to sell it to the DMA for $125 million, more than 260 percent less than what it sold for at a Christie's auction in 2017.

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Not only that, but the painting, now deemed the most valuable artwork in the history of the world, sat in a storeroom at the DMA for eight months. Too bad.

Michael Granberry

Dallas embraces the indie bookstore with the funny name

For literary Dallas, the big news of 2017 was the new store with the funny name. Interabang Books opened at Preston Road and Royal Lane in July, giving readers the homegrown, well-stocked independent bookseller the city had been lacking for years. The shop has since welcomed national celebrities such as Ann Patchett and Mark Bowden, and general manager Jeremy Ellis is already working on programs for spring and summer.

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The store has worked to adapt to customer tastes, Ellis says — "People love their interior decorating books" — but he notes that literary fiction and even works in translation are thriving. "We feel the love every day. It's very gratifying. And proof that Dallas will support an indie bookstore."

Michael Merschel

Yay, Irving?

Before Irving Music Factory opened, we wrote that it had one of the most interesting, exciting lineups of any entertainment venue right now in Dallas-Fort Worth: Dave Chappelle, Brad Paisley, ZZ Top, Kiss, Lauryn Hill, the Flaming Lips, Harry Styles. What's more, the new development can seat as few as 2,500 inside or as many as 8,000 in a convertible, indoor/outdoor venue. But then the newly christened venue — hello Toyota Music Factory — took a grand belly-flop: It had to move or cancel its first six days of performances because of construction woes. Yikes.

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Now, more than three months after that rocky start-stop, the development is still unfinished, despite the fact that it has hosted more than a dozen concerts, comedy shows and even Hillary and Bill Clinton. It's exciting to have top talent in the 'burbs, though we're still waiting for that big moment when the venue feels as cool as the lineup.

Sarah Blaskovich

Dallas arts scene emergency-exits over 'inappropriate behavior'

In a year where personal accountability became a national talking point, Dallas joined the conversation after two arts leaders were forced out of their jobs over unspecified allegations of "inappropriate behavior."

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Gavin Delahunty, senior curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum of Art, who brought the renowned Jackson Pollock show to the DMA, was forced to resign, as was Lee Trull, a talented director on the Dallas theater scene, whose most recent credential included directing Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol at the Dallas Theater Center. In Trull's case, women stepped up to share stories with the website Theater Jones and The Dallas Morning News alleging harassment. So far, neither man has responded to requests for comment.

Michael Granberry

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The dean of Texas architecture dies

Frank Welch, the genial Dallas architect who imbued modernism with a distinctive Texan tinge, passed away in June at the age of 90. A protégé of O'Neil Ford, Welch achieved prominence in the 1960s for a weekend house of rustic simplicity, known as "the birthday," built on a client's ranch in West Texas. His work, which was primarily but not exclusively residential, reflected his personality: generous, unpretentious and assured in its place in the world.

Mark Lamster

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Lee Park loses its name and a statue in a very un-civil debate

In spite of all the major exhibitions, the historic auctions of major local collections, or the record number of gallery exhibitions, the biggest local art story of 2017 was the removal of Alexander Phimister Proctor's double equestrian monument of General Robert E. Lee and an unnamed soldier from its granite pedestal in what used to be called Lee Park.

Lee now joins Louis XIV and Louis XV, discredited leaders of former communist countries and other historical figures as a man so toxic at the time of removal that his historical reputation trumped that of the artist who created the sculpture. Lee resides safely in an undisclosed location, awaiting an unknown fate. For me as an art historian, this is a better situation than having the sculpture defaced on its pedestal. Let us only hope that the old saying — "time heals all wounds" — proves true.

Rick Brettell

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An acclaimed sculptor debuts a Frisco statement piece

In August, just before the start of the 2017 football season, the Dallas Cowboys made news of a different sort. At its $1.5-billion practice facility, The Star in Frisco, the Dallas Cowboys Art Collection unveiled Huddle by internationally acclaimed sculptor Tom Friedman.

At the time, Huddle inflated the Cowboys' portfolio to a total of 79 artworks by 53 artists, with 18 falling under the category of site-specific commissions.

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Not that everyone likes it, however. The Fake Jerry Jones, a.k.a. Gordon Keith on The Ticket (1310 AM and 96.7 FM), had this to say: "Did you see that giant statue made out of Reynolds Wrap they showed on TV? Why the hell did I spend $2 million on somethin' that looks like when it heats up popcorn's gonna bust out of it?"

Michael Granberry

Willie Nelson broke our hearts and reminded us he's human

Dallas Morning News staff writer Brendan Meyer never planned on writing a story about Willie Nelson's April concert in New Braunfels: "I was just there as a fan.

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"Willie was 83 at the time of the concert. He came on stage and started 'Whiskey River,' but something was off. His guitar seemed to be out of tune. Everyone in the crowd knew it except Willie. When he finished, he gently put the guitar down and walked off stage. His band kept playing without him. Nobody was singing. Willie was gone for five minutes. Then 10. Was he OK? Quietly, we all wondered the same thing: Had we just seen Willie Nelson play his last song? A few more minutes went by. Then Willie returned. His guitar was still out of tune, but the crowd didn't care. We were just happy to see Willie, even though it wasn't the Willie most fans had seen many times before, or the Willie they'll remember."

Hamilton doing Dallas!

Dallas Summer Musicals hasn't announced a specific date, but folks have plunked down a whole lot of Hamiltons — the Founding Father on the $10 bill — for a chance to secure seats to Hamilton, the hottest show in the world, at Fair Park Music Hall in the 2018-2019 season.

The DSM announcement that it locked in the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-, Tony- and Grammy Award-winning juggernaut generated $1.2 million in subscription sales shortly after the news broke. It underscored a remarkable turnaround for the once-struggling nonprofit.

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Nancy Churnin

Two tragedies and comebacks

Two artistic directors were physically attacked and returned to their theaters with the help of their devoted companies and the larger community which raised money for their care: Derek Whitener of the Firehouse Theatre and Matthew Posey of Ochre House Theatre.

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Whitener, who had been savagely beaten by two masked assailants in a Target parking lot in Dallas on Jan. 14, woke from brain surgery unable to speak, move or recognize anyone. As he teetered between life and death, community support and his determination to direct Pippin in July got him back on his feet at the Firehouse Theatre in Farmers Branch.

On Jan. 30, Matthew Posey, artistic director and founder of Ochre House Theatre, was shot in the leg and the face by an unidentified assailant in Deep Ellum during a run of Dr. Bobaganush, Posey's original play in which he starred as the title character. The bullets nearly severed his tongue and knocked out all but six of his teeth. After rehabilitation and support from his theater family, which raised $40,000 for his medical care, he reopened and returned to the show March 8. "The world is good," he said.

Nancy Churnin

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You say Lebowitz, I say Leibovitz

Fran Lebowitz, who has an answer for everything, was flummoxed for one beat on Aug. 1 at the Winspear Opera House when a man in the audience asked her if she was still taking great photographs. "That's Annie Leibovitz," she said after a short pause. "She's tall and blonde — now. And I am neither."

Annie Leibovitz came to the Dallas Museum of Art Nov. 14, but nobody asked her about the sardonic social commentary for which Lebowitz is justly famed.

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Nancy Churnin

Novelist Merritt Tierce breaks up with Texas (and we can't blame her)

Dallas-area writer Merritt Tierce earned rave reviews for her 2014 debut novel, Love Me Back, and then promptly went broke. She chronicled her inability to earn a living as a writer in a popular essay last year for Marie Claire, where she described taking a job delivering mail for $16.65 an hour. Well, this year, things changed.

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Tierce moved to Los Angeles for a dream gig: writer for Netflix's hit TV show Orange Is the New Black. (Tierce dazzled the show's creator at a writer's residency.) How's she doing? "I've loved every minute," reports Tierce from L.A. "There seems to be a dark superstition in Hollywood that you have to beat people down, that you need to inflict a toxic bro culture on them, to get to the good stuff, and [show creator] Jenji Kohan has demonstrated by example that that just isn't true." Tierce is currently working on Season 6 of the show, which is shooting in New York and airs next summer. We'll be watching.

Christopher Wynn

First American and first African-American wins the Nasher Prize

Chicago artist Theaster Gates won the third annual Nasher Prize for Sculpture. The 44-year-old Gates is the first American and first African-American to win the award. The civil rights statements behind much of his bold and provocative work are significant at a time when the U.S. is grappling with a re-examination of race and the divisions it creates. Gates will receive the award, which comes with a $100,000 honorarium, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas on April 7.

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Michael Granberry

The Cliburn struck a new chord

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, held every four years in Fort Worth, stirs up inevitable controversies about competitions as ways to identify great artists. Extensively reorganized this year, with a mostly new jury, the Cliburn added yet another round this time, so that finalists — and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra — sounded exhausted by the end. But Yekwon Sunwoo, from South Korea, validated his first prize with a surprisingly introspective, elegantly played recital a few months later.

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Scott Cantrell