The first Friday of each month, the Star-Telegram, the Modern, and Café Modern team up to bring you live music and cocktails in the museum's Grand Lobby from 5 to 8 pm. Bring your friends and enjoy diverse live performances, unique cocktail selections, and the opportunity to dine in Café Modern by night. A docent-led, 20-minute tour of the galleries is available at 6:30 pm (regular gallery admission applies). Gallery admission is free for Modern members and Star-Telegram Press Pass holders during First Fridays at the Modern.

November 11—Eric Fischl, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker featured in Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s, gained acclaim in the 1980s with large-scale paintings depicting middle-class American life with themes of adolescent sexuality and voyeurism.

Image: Eric Fischl, Bad Boy, 1981. Oil on canvas, 66 x 96 inches. Private Collection, Courtesy Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, Zurich

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Participating institutions in the Cultural District open their doors to area educators for this annual event. Join your colleagues to inaugurate the 2014–2015 school year.

March 25 – Kenneth Goldsmith is, among many distinctions, the 2013 inaugural Poet Laureate of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and founding editor of online archive UbuWeb. With eleven books of poetry to his name, Goldsmith’s writing has been called “some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry” by Publishers Weekly. He was invited to read at President Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at the White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama.

March 18 – Cynthia Daignault, a New York painter recognized for her tenacious and poetic spirit, makes work that highly regards its predecessors while honoring the present solitary and unsung moment within nature, technology, and unsuspecting spaces. With a BA from Stanford in 2001, Daignault has had early success with a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a 2011 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant.

March 11 – Triple Canopy is a magazine based in New York. Since 2007, Triple Canopy has advanced a model for publication that encompasses digital works of art and literature, public conversations, exhibitions, and books. This model hinges on the development of publishing systems that incorporate networked forms of production and circulation. Working closely with artists, writers, technologists, and designers, Triple Canopy produces projects that demand considered reading and viewing.

March 4 – HOMECOMING! Committee is an assembly of artists and creatives who seek to develop collaborative projects in conjunction with their individual artistic production, establishing initiatives and venues in which all manner of creative individuals can operate as co-collaborators. This relational aesthetics-like program has proven successful. The group’s first endeavor, Launch Party in 2011, set into motion what has been a flourishing exhibition and event schedule.

February 25 – Michael Petry presents “Nature Morte: Contemporary artists reinvigorate the Still-Life tradition” in conjunction with the publication of his new book by the same title. Dr. Michael Petry was born in Texas, but has lived in London since 1981. With a PhD in Arts from Middlesex University, Petry has diligently investigated art from various angles as an artist, author, co-founder of the Museum of Installation in London, and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), London.

February 18 – Stefan Kalmár, Executive Director/Curator, and Richard Birkett, Curator of Artists Space, a nonprofit art gallery and arts organization founded in New York by arts administrator Trudie Grace and critic Irving Sandler in 1972, share their insights into the history and current life of this alternative space that continues to set the bar.