5 Best Sights in The Arts District, Dallas and Fort Worth

A pair of 19th-century Chinese guardian lions from the Qing Dynasty is the first clue you've arrived at the Crow Collection (across the street from the Nasher Sculpture Center). The private gallery—a tranquil, intimate space—showcases the remarkable Asian art collection of philanthropists and native Dallasites Trammell and Margaret Crow. The museum also hosts traveling exhibits and displays treasures from China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia. Don't miss an 18th-century carved sandstone facade from an Indian home.

This multipurpose center offers performance spaces for the Dallas Opera, Dallas Theater Center, Dallas Black Dance Theatre, Texas Ballet Theater, and Anita N. Martinez Ballet Folklorico. The complex consists of an opera house, an indoor theater, and an open-air theater. A 10-acre, on-site park is designed to tie the spaces together and attract the public to the site regardless of performance schedules.

Housed in a series of white limestone galleries built off a central barrel vault, this museum remains one of the city's greatest cultural institutions. The permanent collection covers a lot of territory, from the arts of Africa, Asia, and ancient Greece to a painting collection with works by artists as diverse as esteemed colonial painter John Singleton Copley and contemporary German painter Gerhard Richter (part of a strong and growing contemporary collection). A popular draw at the museum is an installation that re-creates rooms in the Mediterranean villa belonging to Texas swells Wendy and Emery Reves. The Center for Creative Connections, designed for families, allows patrons to interact with art and artists.

The I. M. Pei–designed space is a place of sweeping dramatic curves, ever-changing vanishing points, and surprising views. Inside is the Herman W. and Amelia H. Lay Family Organ, a hand-built, hand-installed Fisk organ with 4,535 pipes. Free tours are offered four days a week (days vary) at 1 pm. Check the website, or call the center for current tour information and a list of upcoming performances.

The late Raymond and Patsy Nasher—real-estate developers, civic leaders, art lovers, and philanthropists—collected modern and contemporary sculpture for decades, before giving the collection, valued at $400 million, to the city in 1997. The center, which opened in 2003, is an international draw with an extensive representation of great masters—Borofsky, Calder, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Matisse, Miró, Moore, Picasso, and Rodin. The building, which has 10,000 square feet of gallery space, is faced with Italian travertine stone and topped with a glass roof to let in natural light. The 1.42-acre outdoor sculpture garden is landscaped with pools, fountains, pathways, and more than 170 trees. The view of Downtown from the calming green space is spectacular, especially after dusk.