Picasso's Clay and Cusco's Gold Are Free on Thursday Nights at the Meadows

After 5 p.m. on a Thursday, the eighteen Picasso ceramics on Bishop Boulevard are free to see. Most of the museum's other open hours this fall come with a ticket price, a football crowd, or both.

The Meadows Museum lists admission to its exhibitions and upper galleries at $12 for adults, $10 for seniors 65 and over, and $4 for non-SMU students. It also says admission is complimentary on Thursdays after 5 p.m. Doors close at 5 p.m. every other open day of the week, but on Thursdays the museum stays open until 9. That gives you four free evening hours each week. A couple visiting on a Saturday afternoon pays $24 for the same galleries.

Both fall exhibitions, Picasso Beyond the Canvas and Spectacles of Power and Faith: Colonial South American Art from the Thoma Foundation, run through January 24, 2027. Starting November 5, that leaves twelve Thursdays on the calendar, two of which fall on closure days, Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. The museum has scheduled much of its evening programming on those nights, and the football schedule has mostly avoided them.

The Weekend Is the Harder Visit Until Mid-November

The Meadows shares a block with Gerald J. Ford Stadium. The museum's own visitor page tells fall guests that part of its parking garage is used for game-day parking. It also says to expect heavy traffic and altered traffic patterns for several hours before and after kickoff, and that DART's free campus shuttles run modified schedules on game days. On any other day, museum parking in the underground garage is free, with the entrance at Bishop Boulevard and Schlegel Street.

As of today, the Mustangs have two home games left. The SMU football schedule lists Virginia Tech on Friday, November 6, at 6 p.m., and Wake Forest on Saturday, November 14, with kickoff still to be announced. After that the team plays away at Notre Dame on November 21 and closes the regular season at Stanford on November 28.

The free evening on Thursday, November 5, comes one day before a Friday kickoff that brings game-day traffic to Bishop Boulevard. Check kickoff for the Wake Forest Saturday on smumustangs.com before you plan around it. If you'd rather leave the car at home, the museum recommends DART rail to SMU/Mockingbird Station, then the free SMU Red Express 440 shuttle to the Bishop at Binkley stop, about a four-minute walk south of the entrance.

Eighteen Ceramics, Many Shown Together for the First Time

Picasso Beyond the Canvas has eighteen ceramic objects, all gifts to the Meadows. They come from the Tonti family, the estate of Stephen Kahn by way of the Bywaters Special Collection, and Catherine B. Taylor. The museum says many of them are on public display together for the first time. The two pieces shown on the exhibition page carry 2025 accession numbers and the credit line of The Robert ('83) and Tina Tonti Family. Both pieces are recent additions to SMU's holdings.

The works date from 1953 to 1963, the peak of Picasso's ceramic output. He took up clay seriously after World War II at the Madoura pottery studio in Vallauris, France. The museum frames his ceramics as a democratic medium, since they could be made affordably and circulated widely in a way his paintings could not.

Two pieces anchor the show. Face with Pinched Nose from 1959 is a ten-inch earthenware plate that turns a human face into a painted game. Woman Lamp from 1955 is a sculptural vessel that turns an everyday, utilitarian object into a female figure, with eyes set into its handles. The show is organized by the Meadows and funded by The Meadows Foundation.

At this scale, eighteen objects take one unhurried pass. On a free Thursday you can see them in the first half hour and still be in the galleries for a 6 p.m. talk.

Sixty-Three Paintings and the Gold Thread Running Through Them

Spectacles of Power and Faith is the larger show. It brings 63 paintings made between 1600 and 1850 in present-day Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, all drawn from the collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. The exhibition page covers religious imagery, portraits, and paintings on copper. Named works include Our Lady of Bethlehem of Cuzco with Donor, The Surrender of Seville to King Ferdinand III, Noah's Ark, and Archangel with Sword.

The museum's Thursday lectures keep coming back to one feature of these canvases, the painted cloth. The series opened October 29 with a lecture on brocateado. That's the technique viceregal painters and sculptors used to imitate brocades woven with gold- or silver-wrapped thread, using rich color and gold leaf or gold paint. The second lecture follows on Thursday, November 19, at 6 p.m. Julia McHugh, curator of arts of the Americas at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art, presents "Painting Textiles: The Power of Cloth in Colonial Peru." Her talk covers how Cusco School artists painted locally recognizable fabrics on the Virgin Mary, saints, and elites, and how that helped make Cusco a major center of the colonial art market.

Free Thursday admission doesn't cover the lectures. Both are held in the Bob and Jean Smith Auditorium with limited space and require advance registration. They're free for members and SMU students, faculty, and staff, and cost $10 for everyone else. The galleries are free that evening, so you can see the brocades in person before hearing about them.

The Thursday Calendar, in Order

1. Thursday, November 5, 6 to 6:20 p.m. A docent-led Spotlight Talk on the Portrait of Alessandro Farnese in the Virginia Meadows Galleries. It's part of the fall series on artists and objects from across the Spanish empire, and no registration is needed.
2. Thursday, November 5, 7 p.m. Movies with the Meadows shows El viaje a ninguna parte, Fernando Fernán Gómez's 1986 film about a traveling comedic troupe in 1940s Spain. It won Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay at the first Goya Awards in 1987. The series is co-presented with Dallas Film. The film runs 140 minutes in Spanish with English subtitles, the museum describes the screening as intended for mature audiences, and space is limited with advance registration required.
3. Thursday, November 12, 6 p.m. A Book Club Tour built around Ruta Sepetys's The Fountains of Silence.
4. Thursday, November 19, 6 p.m. Choose between a public guided tour that starts in the lobby with no registration, or the McHugh lecture in the auditorium. Both start at the same time.
5. Thursday, November 26. The museum is closed for Thanksgiving.

On a weekday lunch break, there's a 12:15 p.m. gallery talk on Spectacles of Power and Faith on Friday, November 13, the day before the Wake Forest game.

After November 14, the Weekends Open Up

With no home games left after the Wake Forest Saturday, the late-November weekends at the Meadows have no game-day parking. The museum has scheduled most of its family programming for those weekends.

Saturday, November 21, starts with Children's Drawing from the Masters from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. A Sensory Cart runs from 1 to 3 p.m. that Saturday and again Sunday, and a public guided tour begins at 2 p.m. On Sunday, November 22, Open Studio runs from 1 to 4 p.m., and the listing notes that it doesn't include museum admission. Drawing from the Masters follows at 1:30. Another 2 p.m. tour is set for Saturday, November 28. Public tours are free with regular admission. The museum's admission page describes a youth offer that has since lapsed, so confirm current pricing for children with the museum before you go.

The City of University Park holds its Annual Tree Lighting on Sunday, November 29, from 3 to 7 p.m. at Centennial Park, formerly Goar Park. The program includes holiday carols and dance performances on the main stage before the tree is lit. The city's event page estimates attendance at about 3,000 residents and visitors each year.

December's schedule so far is lighter. A public tour is set for 2 p.m. on Saturday, December 5, and a noon-hour gallery talk on "The Catholic Monarchy at the Meadows" is on Friday, December 4. Both exhibitions stay up through January 24.

At Identity House Real Estate, we think the best evenings in University Park are often the ones just down the street, like a 5:30 walk through Picasso's Vallauris ceramics before a talk on the gold in Cusco's brocades. If the design side of these shows sparks ideas for your own rooms, we'd be glad to talk it over. Begin Your Lifestyle Search.