This past weekend, my great friend Brian from the Public Trust hosted the CADD Bus Tour. He invited me on the fantastic voyage to help and take pics to publicize the event from the inside out. So you’re coming along for the ride now!

This tour was traveling to several Dallas galleries but was focused on the Obey Propaganda installation by Shepard Fairey that took place a couple weeks ago. His goal was to create murals in 10 visible spots around town. I very much respect a project of this magnitude and appreciate his effort to bring so much attention to our city! His art has made our town that much more beautiful.

The tour started at the Dallas Contemporary where the previous weekend held the Obey party. If you were on the CADD Bus Tour, you get a sweet swag bag including some Sleepy Dan extras and a signed Obey lithograph that I was helping roll up…

The gallery tour started with drinks and Brian giving a rundown of all the places we’re gonna visit, starting with a Rob Pruitt installation currently up at the Dallas Contemporary. Very interesting display of creative texture and medium.

The Obey pop up shop was still open at the DC gallery and packed with merch…

They even had framed pics for sale of all Obey installations around Dallas. I am by no means a great photographer and there are so many bloggers sharing pics of his Dallas work, so I am sure you can easily find pics of all the murals…

We took a luxury bus gallery hopping all over Dallas while Brian gave an inside story about the designers and what drives them to succeed.

Just to show an example of the mural size, this Obey mural is about 20 foot tall x 100 foot long and right outside the DC gallery.

At each site, Brian explained how the murals were constructed and why each site was chosen to be a part of the Obey installation.

The process was simply cutting out printed paper and applying paint in the negative space. Each structure had a brick surface and levels of paint were applied for each detail layer.

All murals were in the downtown Dallas area, several were located just off the MHH bridge. Beautiful scenery… after all the construction is done!

We traveled to the Sour Grapes studio where they were hosting an open gallery.

This group is the Dallas powerhouse of artists! All year long, they’re hosting and taking part in events all over town, and have carved out an amazing following because they use so many types of medium.

The Sour Grapes team has tons of affordable work and so much fun to hang with! They took the time to tell to everyone how they started out in high school as a graffiti team then transformed into this artist group that takes pride in how much they give back to the Dallas artist culture. Very impressive!

To complete the event, we traveled to the Omni hotel in the downtown area for a guided tour of their art holdings on several floors then had drinks at the beautiful bar level overlooking the famous Dallas skyline at night. The recently remodeled Omni has an amazing light display on the surface of the whole building, so the surrounding skyline reflects the dancing colors at all angles… Truly a beautiful end to an amazing adventure into the arts community of Dallas!