The Denton Craft Mafia, a network of university and community craftsmen and women, will host its first fashion show Monday. Started by a group of students near graduation, the network means to bring crafters together to share information and ideas as well as help young artists produce portfolio-worthy art as they make the jump into the professional art world.

The fashion show features live performances by The Silver Arrows, The Dreamtigers, and Super Love Attack. Members of the Denton Craft Mafia are designing the evening's garments. Patrons have a chance to win gift certificates.

Denton galleries are poised for high traffic this season, with everything from new sculpture to paintings lining walls and gallery floors.

The exhibit brings Chinese and American artists together in a show that challenges the viewer to go deeper than surface, veering away from the initial response - taking the art for simple representations of objects or figures - and delving into the commentary that might be within. The show was organized by the artists, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing and the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University.

Ai Weiwei has made a name for himself by reconstructing represenative and symbolic elements of Chinese culture. In this show, Weiwei has taken Ming and Qing Dynasty furnature and robbed ir of the most practical function, but maintaining its linear, clear elegance.

Xiaoze Xie has been fascinated by stacks of newspapers and books on library shelves for the past few decades. These days, Xie has used newspapers that are "hot off the press" in his paintings. This way, he injects photographs and bits of text about violence and war, as well as writings and imagery about the mundane.

My Things is Hong Hao's latest series of photographs. They show arranged and scanned ordinary objects to document the artist's personal life. By depicting all of his books, from childhood revolutionary comics to famous Chinese classics and publications on Western contemporary art and catalogs, Hao shows how a panorama of cultural and political ingredients can influence or limit a person's development.

UNT professor and artist Vernon Fisher was inspired by the American custom of carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns to make art that questions, through simple illustrations, our complicity in deconstructing or dividing up the world, or whether we just innocently witnessed it.

Mexican-born Enrique Chagoya uses Mexican fold and religious art to create tension between indigenous art and American pop culture and European art history. His work is a hybrid of all three approaches.

Dan Mills' USA Future State series take imperialist leanings a step further. The result is his imagined empire-building scheme, based on the online CIA World Factbook for information on politics, military armament and energy. He creates colorful maps of "future states."

Photographer Hai Bo also addresses the personal experience, but in the context of a bigger picture. His latest work is of people who live between the urban and rural areas of China.

Painter Ingrid Winther Scobie has a solo show at Cappuccino Cafe, titled "A Series About Red."

Scobie's new work establishes the artist as a risk taker who is far from married to her earlier perspective. She explores red and its compatibility with her subjects. In almost every painting, Scobie uses red where it doesn't naturally occur. Consequently, her color palette shifts and co-opts colors that interact with red rather than restoring realistic order.

For example, in Chilean Sausage Market, the hanging baskets and bunches of meat are re-interpreted in tropical colors, affecting the look of floral bouquets. In San Miguel: Central Plaza III, Scobie soft-pedals the red for a more realistic painting that catches Mexican arches in the late afternoon light.

"I have an emotional connection to all of the places where I was. I loved the look of the market," she said. "But I didn't want to use the colors the way they were there. I had to push it."

In the East Gallery of the Center for the Visual Arts, "Follow the Dream" exhibits work by artist with disabilities. The show features work by artists with addictions, brain trauma, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and both physical disabilities and mental illnesses.

"Follow the Dream" is organized by a nonprofit organization of the same name, which has been exhibiting since 2000.

Finally, artist Ruth Francis recently renovated a ranch house near Ponder, then put out the call to area artists to fill it with art. Members of the Visual Arts Society of Texas and the Trinity Arts Guild responded.

"I had all these local artists come in and fill our rooms with this incredible art," Francis said. "I was overwhelmed. I'm from New Mexico, and everyone knows how much art happens there. But I was overwhelmed."