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Knowing it may be difficult or impossible, this assignment from my editor was to find the man dubbed Edward Scissorhands who made national news last fall for trimming trees in a Fort Worth neighborhood in the middle of the night, for months, unauthorized and unwelcomed. The broadcast news outlets did not report a name or specific location, so I wasn’t sure what I would find. After I told my friend about the assignment, she said, “Good luck with that” after she clicked ’round in Google searches. But I found him. And here is the story about what I found.
The expression goes, there is power in numbers. But it seems that when those numbers involve a team of eight women on horseback who train together, ride together, cry together, laugh together, eat dirt together, and bleed together, they’re finding power in leading the way for others in a world where women will no longer stand to be the halftime show or an understated afterthought while still nodding to the heritage that brought them here. - Jocelyn Tatum
On my desk at home, I have a true-to-life-sized concrete sculpture of a skull with little porcelain bluebirds resting on its mouth, ears, eyes, and one on its crown. I found it at ArtsGoggle in Fort Worth 13 years ago when the local arts festival was just starting. I gravitated toward it because it reminded me how fleeting and fragile life can be. The birds, to me, represented the creativity that comes forth in the face of our finitude. The idea was that this mortal reminder would help me get past writer’s block. After all, as a journalist, these stories are not my own. They are your stories. I am merely the vessel who delivers them using my passion and acute sensitivity to humanity.
I borrowed this idea from 14th-century monks who kept skulls on their desks. A reminder of their mortality as they wrote their philosophical dissertations. “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” Sounds familiar, right? This symbol of death on my desk was a reminder to face my fears head on, and that I am just passing through this world, adding my thread to the massive tapestry that is the story of all us … (click title or here for full story).
Magazine
Hidden Fort Worth, and the research that went into this article, will prove to all that this city is anything but simple - it is rich with history, grassroots art, creative food and cocktails that you won't find on some menus, outdoor adventures that could compete with Colorado, and a tree you may have walked passed a hundred times yet never realized its story started in 1904 in St. Louis, predating the Cultural District.
Austin Wayne Underwood was born in 1978 with Down syndrome. His mother has since spent her life fighting to make sure he would have a normal life.
These are the lives of eight people who live in Fort Worth right under your nose. They are survivors who went through their own hell and back. They aren't merely surviving - they are thriving.
On a mid-September evening, a cool dry air settled on Fort Worth, denoting a change in the weather. It was just before dusk when the blue tarp walls came down that had for three years obscured the Kimbell's new construction like a tattered blue cocoon, momentarily revealing the Kimbell Art Museum's highly anticipated Piano Pavilion.
A local company believes that business should have a mission, so it participates in the Next STEP program that helps ex-offenders secure their first honest jobs after having many doors shut in their faces. Read the article here. It is a tear-jerker.
Opera singer Ava Pine sits in the middle of the stage at the Bass Hall during a late February choral performance of Elijah. She heard the cello singing to her right. In between arias, she closed her eyes and listened to all the components of the production weave together a story like a tapestry. She melted into her seat feeling both pure joy and peace.
This month we decided to profile four uniquely and thoughtfully designed office spaces in Fort Worth.
Beverly Carter blushed and looked down at the table admitting she never learned to make food from "a box."
The world knows little about the brothers Le Nain - Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu - who worked during the first half of the 17th century in Paris. This will begin to change on May 22 when the Kimbell Art Museum opens "The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of Seventeenth-Century France."
The night before her husband's assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy looks into a Monet painting titled "Artist's Granddaughter," which hung in their room at Hotel Texas in Fort Worth.
Architect Lawrence Halprin knew the key to the city in 1969…and it didn't involve any doors. Now, plans are underway to relaunch Fort Worth's original gateway to the Trinity River.
Download The Downtown Park You Didn't Know Existed
Through collaborative efforts by Near Southside, Inc. and Leadership Fort Worth, the first micro-park, or moveable, tiny park, breathed life into a once blah space, May 18. It is significantly placed in the heart of Fort Worth's hippest and historic neighborhood on the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Henderson Street.
Vivid colors and patterns transform a Monticello remodel from Traditional to Transitional for a family of five.
When I Googled "Women Shooting Guns," the first 10 hits were videos of women looking like idiots. One was titled Best of Funny Girls Shooting Guns Fails-Compilation 2014, another Top 11 Videos of Girls Shooting Guns That They Shouldn't Be. A petite blond shoots a shotgun, and the kickback knocks her over.
What is Texas Folk Art and what sets it apart? This is what I wanted to know when I heard about the small exhibition inside a frontal gallery at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth.
The Fine Line exhibition is coming back to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, April 16-May 31, asking the community one more time to overcome the stigma that comes with mental illness.
Like all good stories, “Dog Days” is a contemporary opera that is meant to make its audience think about what it means to be human.
Open Culture Hound
The children you’re going to meet in this story are your average kids in some ways —
- they play in the school band, have a black belt in tae kwon do, ride bikes or create tales about talking animals, but they are exceptional insofar as they dedicate their free time to raise money and awareness for other children in need.
Local World War II veterans return to Normandy nearly 70 years later.
Open Preserving History
I heard your parents fled Cambodia when you were 1 year old during one of history's worst cases of genocide under Pol Pot's regime. How did their experience shape the way they raised you in United States?
For the vast majority of us, buying wine can be intimidating. We wonder what will go with pulled pork, trout almandine, jalapeño cheese nachos or beef tenderloin. How do I find out what I like? Do I have to spend a lot of money to get a great wine? Are wines with screw tops not as good? And what do those enigmatic labels actually tell us?
The symbiotic relationship between nature, light and architecture will soon be on display in a Mira Vista home sometime in 2014
Casa Mañana is presenting Oswald: The Actual Interrogation from Nov. 9 – Nov. 17. This compelling performance examines the history and events surrounding the 48 hours that Lee Harvey Oswald was in the custody of the Dallas Police Department after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and coincides with the 50th anniversary of the momentous event.
The Fort Worth Japanese Garden was once a gravel pit and a cavalry unit dump filled with old plumbing and stable contents. When the architect behind the original and ongoing construction of the gardens, Al Komatsu, was first brought on to this project, he found a "tremendous ecological disaster" before him. But on its 40th anniversary, the people behind the project stand proud-it is one of the top Japanese gardens in the country attracting visitors from all over the world.
Open Fort Worth Japanese Garden Celebrates 40 Years
The historical journey of Magnolia Avenue from the 1920s to the thriving community of today.
If you're anything like us, you make hopeful plans to explore your hometown in new ways but don't actually make it happen often enough. So, with a fine line between‟"I totally agree; I've done that a million times" and "Why haven't I ever thought of that?," we came up with the Fort Worth Bucket List.
Dr. Kent Brantly's blue eyes are heavy and tired but reveal a joy and peace deep inside of him that few of us could comprehend. When he talks to you, his eye contact doesn't flicker. These are not the eyes of a weak man, but one who devotes his life to constant service of others and has seen the horrors of Ebola.
Museum leader demonstrates the power of imagination
Celebrating 10 years at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, Van Romans has overseen the fulfillment of many of his dreams: a new building, innovative programs and a continued commitment to education.
Fifteen years ago if someone had shot a cannon from Fort Worth’s world-renowned museum district, nobody would have noticed, joked Lori Eklund, senior deputy director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. But that has changed.
A woman with sad heavy eyes looks off into the distance. One of her daughters stares fearfully at you with a clenched jaw. Her sister has her fists on her waist and looks away as if she doesn’t want any part of it.
Life’s not a party for those struggling to find a better life. The Birthday Party Project can make one special day a lot more fun.
Fort Worth started as just that-a fort. It was an Army outpost built in 1849 to protect the American frontier. Here, drovers trailed more than four million cattle through the city, earning it the name "Cowtown." But that is all changing.
Give teachers the resources and support they need and they’ll change the world. That’s the Rainwater Legacy.
“Don’t Blink!” and “Enjoy the moment!” Both clichés I’ve heard time and again when trying to keep an infant alive, stressing out about how I am going to get work done on a snow day, raising a little boy to be as beautiful a human as he can be, and currently, sobbing uncontrollably on his last day of preschool (mainly because I can’t seem to slow down time and go back to that snow day three years ago, or back to cradling that infant five years ago). My work as a journalist and professor always got finished, but I “blinked” too many times.
Isabella Breedlove is taking the week off from her busy life as a 16-year-old. People in the music industry call it “tech week,” because of the countless hours spent on rehearsals and preparation for her big upcoming performance.
In a time when Fort Worth did not have many resources for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID/D), the Hill School was there for our family. I have an older brother who suffers greatly with ID/D and has his whole life. For families like mine, Hill School was a building of hope and a comforting place for my brother to thrive while also not being sequestered from other children, a problem that is all too common when approaching the needs of people living with ID/D. He attended Hill School in the ‘80s from first to fifth grade. They did not have a kindergarten program at the time, but that is going to soon change.
She was living on the first floor of her apartment complex in the coastal town Port Arthur when Hurricane Harvey plowed across the Texas coast as a Category Five hurricane that was followed by days of deluge that left haphazard lakes all over southeast Texas.
A medium-sized green, plastic trashcan sits zip-tied to a section of railing on Merrick Street in the Como neighborhood. It reads, “TRASH. Keep Como Clean,” in black Sharpie. On the day I visited, it has a fresh garbage bag inside filled halfway with newly-accumulated soda cans and napkins. A serene lake and wildlife area surrounded by old homes, some restored and some sagging, lie just beyond the trashcan with its plea.
Regardless of your musical preferences, who among you hasn’t caught yourselves tapping your toes to “Take a Chance on Me” or karaoked your hearts out to “Dancing Queen?”
If the world was not already a magical place, the holidays dust even more allure and charm onto everything.
Six-year-old Karsyn Ewbank cried when she had to leave Cook Children's Medical Center after a three-month stay for cancer treatment. She would miss her new best friends, the Oncology Child Life Specialist team, who taught her how to cope with cancer through drawing, sculpting and painting.
For 25 years, a nondescript tattered warehouse on Forest Park Boulevard transformed into a wonderland of magic, death and destruction by a staff made entirely of willing volunteers.
Nobody could have guessed how far this 26-year-old tiny dancer with a pixie bob could actually go in 10 short months, but when Chandler Joslin decided to light a fire in her community through the formations, transitions, entrances, exits and connection between dancers in the moving painting of choreography, she did it.
“Like the old-time Indian lodges, [The Amon Carter] faces the rising sun on the ground that drops away to the East,” Esquire magazine published June 1961 shortly after the museum opened.
ABRAHAM ALEXANDER’S AGONY REACHED A CRESCENDO JULY 7, 2016, when Micah Xavier Johnson opened fire on Dallas police officers at the end of a rally for black rights, killing five, injuring nine others and two civilians.
During a photo shoot for breast cancer awareness, the 5-foot-9-inch 39-year-old Coqueace “KOCO” Powell stands tall in her six-inch stripper heels.
For the first time since their beloved mother, Mary J. Blagg, died two years ago, the brothers reunited for Spring Gallery Night in the show Sibling Revelry.