About
“I claim all parts of Dallas.”
My practice moves between studio, neighborhood, institution, newsroom, boardroom, and public space—places that are usually kept separate, but never really are.
Biography
Darryl Ratcliff is a Dallas-based artist, writer, and cultural strategist whose work explores culture as infrastructure.
Working across social sculpture, public art, poetry, criticism, and civic systems, Ratcliff builds collaborative, durational projects that make the usually invisible labor of care, memory, and collective power visible. He treats listening, gathering, circulation, and institution-building as artistic materials.
Ratcliff co-founded Ash Studios in 2012, a 20,000-square-foot, Black- and Brown-led social sculpture in South Dallas. His projects include Creating Our Future, Decolonize Dallas, The Plant Library, and Movement Portal #1, a permanent civic gateway developed with Fort Worth’s historic Black Lake Como community.
He is the founder of Gossypion Investments and Friends of Darryl Ratcliff. His work with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Art and Culture Design Committee and Dallas’s Moving Minds & Money initiative extends his artistic inquiry into value, ownership, trust, and the structures that determine what—and whom—a society chooses to support.
Ratcliff is a Rabkin Prize recipient and YBCA 10 Fellow. His honors include two Nasher Artist Grants and the Dallas Museum of Art’s Kimbrough Fund Award. His writing has appeared in The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, and Patron, and his work and ideas have been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and FIELD.
The larger practice