We owe you several posts - about Sandow Birk's Depravities of War - 15 large-scale woodcut prints on sekishu /japanese rice-/ paper, each measuring 48 x 96 inches - and Muriel Hasbun's barquitos de papel and other stories. I owe you a post about the current exhibiitons: Ginger Geyer: The Porcelain Reformation, Kenneth J. Hale: Art into Landscape (both curated by Dr. Rick Brettell) and Jacqueline Bishop: Losing Ground: Imaginary Landscapes. But first, to warm up, I am going to write about our jungle next door. 

If you have ever visited The MAC by way of Oak Grove, you know of the cemetery behind us. Greenwood Cemetery is an old cemetery, and I blogged about it last year in Spring when the Flowering 'japonica' Quince was in bloom.

What has been fascinating me for quite awhile are two things about it.

First, that around the cemetery it is always 10 degrees cooler! I notice this because I ride my bicycle to work here at the MAC and ride alongside the south edge of Greenwood. In summer: 10 degrees cooler. In winter: 10 degrees cooler. It is so striking and so obvious that one cannot help but be curious what Dallas would be like without so much concrete!

Second, on the south-east corner, adjacent to perfect grid of north-south and east-west roads, there is a very large.. "jungle." It is completely overgrown with trees, brush and vines and impenetrable. And because it is so secluded, it is home to en entire fauna. I have seen raccoons and I have seen red foxes dart in and out of this wonderful overgrown eden.

It is hard to see. There is a one-way sidestreet down the south side named Clyde Lane, and on the east side, in the State-Thomas neighborhood, is Woodside.

It is not quite Central Park by any means, but the closest thing we have here in Dallas to the Guggenheim Museum or The Met on 5th Avenue.