DOING IT UP RIGHT: Our former colleague, the late architecture critic David Dillon, is being honored with the establishment of the David Dillon Center for Texas Architecture (pay wall) at the University of Texas at Arlington. Sally, David’s widow, gave UTA the archives of material he worked on writing books and working as the Dallas Morning News‘ architecture critic for 25 years.  The center’s first effort will be a public symposium on architectural criticism April 26-27 at the Nasher Sculpture Center. 

SPEAKING OF ARCHITECTURE: Wang Shu, 48, became the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker Prize. It’s a challenge: Who can we get to commission him to design a building in downtown Dallas? And one with flashing lights? Which is my segue to the Dallas Center for Architecture beginning its Point/Counterpoint series tonight with a panel, Bright Lights. Great City?, about those lively lights — building bling! — we’ve put all over new constructions around town. KERA’s Jeff Whittington will moderate.

AND NOW ON TO THE VISUAL ARTS BEAT: Glenn Ligon: America, the extensive and acclaimed mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work at the Museum of Modern Art of Forth Worth, gets the Glasstire treatment from Colette Copeland as well as the Art This Week video interview. A very sharp-looking show: It looks perfectly at home in the beautifully minimalist Modern, all black and grey and white — until you read what Ligon’s works are saying. Then it gets explosive.

VISUAL ARTS, PT. 2: Journalists are getting around to checking the arts-funding records of the Republican candidates. Somewhat amazingly, when he was in the House, Rick Santorum voted to keep funding the NEA despite the anti-Mapplethorpe-and-Serano furor raised by fellow conservatives … You might not have noticed because of all the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge hoo-ha, but the Dallas Museum of Art is opening a national touring exhibition this weekend, Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties. The DMA’s Uncrated blog has some photos of the 130 works being, well, uncrated from their pretty pastel crates.