On the evening of Saturday, August 29, the Craighead Green Gallery in the Dallas Design District will open its final exhibition program under the name its founders built over three decades. A reception at 167 Parkhouse Street will mark the start of two concurrent shows — Thom Jackson's "Out of Context" and Anders Moseholm's "Fenestrations" — together presented under the umbrella title "The Art of Being Out of Place." It is a fitting last act. Both artists explore what it means to be suspended between the familiar and the foreign, caught between belonging and isolation. And the gallery that hosts them is itself about to become something new.
That transition has been quietly unfolding for more than a year. In January 2025, William Bardin — a young German art historian who joined the gallery in 2021 — purchased the business from founding owners Kenneth Craighead and Steve Green. Rather than impose a sudden rebrand, Bardin chose a deliberate transition, keeping the Craighead Green name while developing his own vision for the space. The two exhibitions opening August 29 are the final chapter under that name. After they close on September 26, the gallery will officially become Bardin Gallery.
"This transition is not about leaving that legacy behind," Bardin said in a press release. "It is about carrying it forward with deep respect while continuing to grow, evolve, and create new opportunities for the artists we represent." The sentiment echoed what Green, the outgoing co-founder, shared with Bardin during a public conversation earlier in August.
The two artists in this final show span the breadth of the gallery's program. Thom Jackson presents Out of Context, photographs featuring previously unreleased works from both his fine art and fashion photography practice. Jackson's images portray figures who appear emotionally or physically removed from their surroundings, inviting reflection on identity, resilience, independence, and the universal search for belonging.
Across the room, Anders Moseholm, a Danish painter born in 1959, offers a complementary statement in oil. Trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Visual Arts in New York, Moseholm has exhibited across Europe. He has shown at Craighead Green in 2018 with "The Time&Space In Between" and again in 2020 with "Wrong Memory." "Fenestrations" extends that exploration: large-format oil paintings of urban landscapes reduced to blacks, whites, and muted grays, where architecture dissolves into blurred surfaces, stripping familiar places of certainty.
The two shows together suggest that transformation is not about erasing what came before but about creating new ways of seeing and understanding.
Bardin's own story is a kind of displaced narrative. Raised as the mayor's son in the German town of Gross-Umstadt, he studied art history at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg before a contemporary art course shifted his classical focus. He worked at EIGEN+Art Lab in Berlin, then — through an aunt in Dallas, a mutual friend, and a handful of FaceTime calls — he found himself on a plane to Texas within two weeks. Five years later he is the owner of the gallery.
For visitors on August 29, the reception will offer a last chance to see the exhibition under the founding name. It will also, in a quiet way, offer the first glimpse of a new identity. Bardin's vision retains the annual "New Texas Talent" exhibition and the gallery's long-standing roster of artists while gradually bringing in new faces from Texas and beyond. His stated ambition is to expand the dialogue between regional and local talent and the artists from elsewhere in the country and abroad — a mission not so different from the one the founders settled on in the 1990s, after they learned that showing everything means showing nothing in particular.
The evening of August 29 marks a double portrait: one in which the era of Craighead Green Gallery is ending, and one in which the Bardin Gallery is just beginning. For the artists and the audience, it is a night of goodbyes and hellos, of images out of context and cities in need of being seen. As the exhibition's title suggests, it is all part of a longer narrative, where the past is never lost, only transformed — and where the new name will still carry some of the old stories on its walls.