On the National Endowment for the Arts’ Art Works website, Rocco Landesman blogged about last week’s visit to North Texas, his tour of AT&T PAC, the Dallas Museum of Art and his dinner with arts patrons Rusty and Deedie Rose.

Here’s what he wrote in his “Postcard from Dallas and Santa Fe”:

We toured the AT&T Performing Arts Center with Mark Nerenhausen, who’s the president and CEO there. The arts district is an amazingly bold architectural district, too; the buildings there are very thrilling to see. And it’s a whole arts district that’s been put up very rapidly in the last couple of years. It’s probably been 25 years in the planning, but it seemed to have gone up very quickly. I also went to the Dallas Museum of Art where the museum’s director, Bonnie Pitman, gave us a tour. They’re one of our Blue Star Museums, and it was great to see the exhibits with Linda Fuller and her daughter Callie. Linda’s husband is on active duty with the National Guard, and it’s terrific that they can take advantage of this program.

Dallas is a kind of poster child for how arts transform communities and places. You see a kind of collaboration that goes on in the arts community in Dallas that’s not typical. These organizations all talk to each other, they interact, and they work together. Later that night I had dinner at the home of Rusty and Deedie Rose—Deedie used to be on our National Council. They brought together a lot of the arts leaders in the community and the people who run Dallas’s various arts organizations. We talked about points of intersection between the arts community in Dallas and the NEA, and it was a productive meeting. The lesson I took away from Dallas is that I think that the essential element in progress in the arts is collaboration, is the organizations and the civic leaders working together. And I think you really saw that in Dallas.