Nancy Whitenack Has Run Conduit Gallery for 40 Years. She Still Hasn't Stopped Discovering Artists.

Nancy Whitenack didn't come to the gallery world through the usual channels. She came through a classroom.

Born in Plainview, Texas — a small town on the Llano Estacado where the horizon goes on forever and the population sits around 20,000 — Whitenack earned a BA in education from Baylor University and spent thirteen years teaching in Dallas ISD. She co-founded the Talented and Gifted Program, identifying and nurturing students with exceptional creative abilities. She had never worked in a gallery. She had never managed artists. She had never hung a show, written a press release, or hosted an opening-night reception.

Then, in 1984, she opened Conduit Gallery.

## Elm Street, Deep Ellum, 1984

The first space was on Elm Street in Deep Ellum, in a warehouse where Whitenack also lived — upstairs. This was Deep Ellum before the murals, before the craft cocktail bars, before the developers discovered it. In 1984, the neighborhood was raw: cheap rent, empty storefronts, and the kind of ambient grit that attracts artists before it attracts anyone else. Whitenack opened her gallery downstairs and slept above it, a setup that made the separation between art and life approximately zero.

"A large part of running a gallery is about education," Whitenack has said, and the phrase reveals the through line of her career. She didn't stop being a teacher when she became a gallerist. She redirected the instinct. Every opening, every studio visit, every conversation with a collector became a form of instruction — not pedantic, not condescending, but rooted in the belief that looking at art is a skill that can be learned and that the gallery's job is to create the conditions for learning.

## The Design District Move

In 2002, Whitenack moved Conduit Gallery to the Design District, joining a migration of serious galleries away from Deep Ellum's increasingly commercial atmosphere and toward the quieter warehouse blocks along Hi Line Drive and Riverfront Boulevard. The Design District wasn't yet the gallery center it would become — that would take another decade and the arrival of spaces like Barry Whistler Gallery and Liliana Bloch Gallery. But Whitenack was early, as she had been in Deep Ellum, and her presence helped establish the neighborhood's credibility as a destination for serious contemporary art.

The Design District years solidified Conduit's identity. Whitenack built a roster of artists who shared her commitment to rigor and her allergy to trend-chasing. Annabel Daou, the Lebanese-American artist whose delicate text-based drawings explore language, silence, and the space between words. Gabriel Dawe, the Mexican-born, Dallas-based artist whose Plexus installations — thousands of threads stretched across architectural spaces in gradients of color — have appeared at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery and the Amon Carter Museum. Kirk Hayes, whose large-scale abstract paintings push color and surface into territory that feels both controlled and volatile. Stephen Lapthisophon, the conceptual artist and writer whose work bridges visual art and poetry. James Sullivan, whose paintings hold a tension between figuration and abstraction that never quite resolves — and is better for it.

## 1845 East Levee Street

In 2026, Whitenack moved again — this time to share a building with Cris Worley Fine Art at 1845 East Levee Street, a new address in the evolving geography of Dallas's gallery scene. The shared-building model reflects a broader shift in how Dallas galleries operate: collaboration over competition, shared overhead, and the mutual benefit of drawing collectors to a single destination where they can see two strong programs in one visit.

The current show, Catherine Howe: Life-Size, fills Conduit's new space with large-scale paintings that test the relationship between the painted surface and the human body — canvases scaled to the viewer's physical presence, demanding a kind of engagement that small work can't command. It's a characteristically ambitious choice for a gallery opening in a new space, and it signals that Whitenack, at 40 years in, has no interest in playing it safe.

## The Long View

Forty years is a long time in any business. In the gallery world — where spaces open and close with the regularity of restaurants, where a single bad year can end a program, where the economics of showing serious art in a mid-market city are genuinely brutal — forty years is extraordinary. Whitenack has survived the Deep Ellum years, the Design District years, a pandemic, and multiple economic downturns. She helped pioneer the Design District as Dallas's gallery center. She built careers for artists who are now in museum collections. And she did it with a philosophy rooted not in commerce but in education — the conviction that showing people art, and teaching them to see it, is work worth doing.

"It's been a joyous ride," she told visitors at the East Levee Street opening. The simplicity of the statement is quintessentially Whitenack: no drama, no self-mythologizing, just a woman from Plainview who followed her curiosity into a warehouse on Elm Street and never stopped.

Conduit Gallery is located at 1845 East Levee St, Dallas, TX. Open Tuesday through Saturday. For a broader look at the Dallas gallery scene Conduit helped build, our guide to the Dallas art scene in 2026 maps the full landscape.