How did a trail art pilot grow into the KTX Biennial?
If you walk, run, or bike the southern stretch of the Katy Trail where it brushes past Highland Park and SMU, you already know the corridor. What you may not know is that the sculpture program you've been passing without much thought for the last few years was never meant to stay small. It was a test. And this spring, Dallas found out the test worked.
The KTX Biennial, announced in March 2026 by Friends of the Katy Trail, will bring nearly a dozen commissioned and existing works from artists around the world to the trail's 3.5-mile corridor starting in spring 2027. New York curator Jovanna Venegas, currently on staff at SculptureCenter and previously an associate curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is building the inaugural edition around a theme drawn from Ursula K. Le Guin's short story about explorers and a forest that feels their emotions back. Each installation will stay up for 18 months, the longest window Dallas allows for temporary public art, which means this isn't a weekend festival. It's closer to living with a rotating outdoor museum on your regular route for a year and a half at a time.
Highland Park sits at one end of that route. The trail runs through Uptown, Knox, and Highland Park, and its southeastern reach touches the edge of both Highland Park and SMU. That geography matters more than it sounds. Organizers haven't announced exact siting for the individual pieces yet, so residents here don't yet know whether their stretch gets the marquee installation or a quieter one. What they do know is that the corridor's most residential, least commercial end is now part of a citywide cultural conversation that used to live entirely inside museum walls.
How the Biennial Took Shape
Friends of the Katy Trail launched a smaller public art pilot back in 2021. That pilot put work by artists including Iván Argote, Eddie Martinez, and Carolyn Salas along the trail, alongside Texas-based artists Will Boone, Nic Nicosia, and Sara Cardona. A Brightcast report quoted Amy Bean, the organization's executive director: "People have come to love the surprise of sculpture as they traverse the trail." The organization later committed to a real budget, a professional curator, and a two-year cycle instead of a scattered rotation.
Here's the timeline:
- 2021 — Friends of the Katy Trail launches a pilot public art program to gauge interest.
- 2024 — City bond funding brings a new trail entrance and landscape restoration north of Knox.
- Spring 2026 — A fundraising campaign brings in $170,000 in operating funds for the first half of the year, a record for the organization.
- Spring 2027 — The inaugural KTX Biennial opens, timed to coincide with the Dallas Art Fair in April.
The next question is how the trail and its art program are funded.
Funding the Trail and Art Program
Keeping the trail itself in shape costs more than $1.5 million a year, before a single sculpture goes in the ground. The art program is funded by Friends of the Katy Trail, a membership-funded nonprofit, and campaigns such as the one that raised $170,000 this spring, rather than by a city department using general tax revenue. For questions about the trail's art program, Friends of the Katy Trail is the organization to contact.
The KTX Biennial is the trail's new recurring public art exhibition.
Highland Park Town Government and Community Events
In a study session this year, Highland Park's Town Council reviewed the fees the town's horse-drawn carriage vendors had paid the previous year.
As People Newspapers reported, the Rotary Club of Park Cities, a resident-run nonprofit, held its 23rd annual Fourth of July parade this summer, with retired U.S. Navy Adm. Patrick Walsh serving as Grand Marshal. The parade has benefited the North Texas Food Bank since 2016. At this year's parade, Rotary Club president Mark Kashar announced that the group had already reached its original goal of 3 million meals provided and raised the target to 5 million. This year's parade, combined with matching gifts, delivered more than 724,000 meals.
What This Means If You're Already Here
None of this changes what your house is worth or what school your kids attend. It changes what your walk looks like starting sometime in 2027, and it tells you something useful about who to pay attention to if you care about how this stretch of Dallas keeps evolving. If the biennial matters to you, Friends of the Katy Trail is the organization behind it. If community fundraising on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars and hundreds of thousands of meals is the kind of thing you want to be part of, the Rotary Club of Park Cities already has a 23-year track record of doing exactly that.
Over the next several months, expect to see planning activity along the trail as Venegas and her team finalize which works go where and how the Highland Park end of the corridor fits into the larger presentation. Nothing about your daily route changes yet. But the corridor you've been using for years is quietly becoming something closer to a rotating museum with your neighborhood as the wing nobody's finished hanging.
For Highland Park residents, the biennial is a new part of the trail's evolving public life.
If you're thinking about putting down roots in Highland Park and want to understand the community, Hilary Waters at Virtual City Real Estate has spent years helping people understand towns like Highland Park from the inside. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk through what matters to you in a neighborhood like this.
