Photography by Yuvie Styles.
To the people of Atlanta, this Lake Highlands High School graduate and L Streets resident is well-known as “Cousin Dan.”
Here in Lake Highlands, if you’ve heard the name Daniel Scoggins, it’s probably in association with his public art sculpture.
Several years ago, we heard an artist was donating a large-scale Pegasus assembled from scrap metal and new steel sourced from junk yards and estate sales to the Lake Highlands Public Improvement District.
Scoggins is that artist. At the time, he was living in Georgia, where he had moved to attend Savannah College of Art and Design. He applied for a grant from a nonprofit organization called Dashboard for money to go toward a public art sculpture in Texas.
Dashboard gave Scoggins $20,000 for Pegasus, the largest amount they give to any one artist annually.
“They do awesome work,” Scoggins says. “After getting the grant, it’s on me to find a home for it.”
So he started talking with his mom and sister and other folks here in Dallas who could potentially help.
“And that’s when I was introduced to Kathy Stewart,” Scoggins says. At the time, neighborhood resident Stewart oversaw the Lake Highlands Public Improvement District; now she oversees Uptown, Inc., and Vicky Taylor manages the LH PID.
“They were doing some signage on the trestle right behind the high school football stadium. They were going to do some landscape features,” Scoggins says.
“Their landscape architect caught wind of my sculpture, somebody mocked up a little model, and it had to be approved by the school district. RISD approved it. I found that out reading The Advocate.”
Since that approval in August 2021, Pegasus has been sitting in an East Dallas shop owned by one of Scoggins’ buddies, awaiting installation. Scoggins isn’t complaining. He knows everyone has a lot going on. (The Advocate has reached out to the PID and the City about timing or an installation, but at the time of publication, we hadn’t received a response.)
Pegasus has already made the journey from Atlanta, where Dan created it at a place called South River Studios. The owner of that space, Phil Proctor, a longtime public artist, metal worker and sculptor, had turned his compound into a collective of artists’ studios, Scoggins says.
After high school graduation, he strayed from the visual arts path for about a decade, adopting the alter ego “Cousin Dan” — musician, performance artist, a tad comedian. His cousin Kristin, who’s a year older, calls him Cousin Dan. And “it has a nice ring to it,” he says.
“By the time I was through with art school, I was kind of through with that scene — just seemed pretentious, and I was bored with it,” he says. “I had a little
bit of graduation money and bought a beat machine and just started making music, doing a couple open mics and making silly internet videos.”
That led to opening for a friend’s band.
“My act began to develop, and then the music aspects took off for me. I was able to make a living doing this.”
The art background gave him an advantage.
“Because I had the visual aesthetic stuff,” he says. “The musical side of being a musician, I would go to shows, and I’d be bored, so I tried to make it the show that I would want to go to see, and it turned out that other people would like to see that show.
“There’s a tongue-in-cheek aspect. It tightrope-walks on the line, as far as funny. Like it is funny, and it’s also kind of good.”
He’s not just winging the musician part. He took classic guitar lessons from Clair Greer in our neighborhood, he says. And some of his first lessons were also from Zach Galindo, who now runs Lake Highlands School of Music.
With some prodding, Scoggins comes clean about his high school metal band.
“It was called something like Awake (said in melodramatic voice),” he says. “That was my only other experience being on stage. I love that.”
The live show met its death when the pandemic came along. But that made way for him to pursue the Pegasus project.
“I think the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
He also went back to painting and some mural work. He’s getting his portfolio together so maybe he can do some industrial or interior art for clients.
“I would like to get back into the visual arts. It’s a bit more fiscally viable than just trying to be a famous musician.”
And he needs the money, because he married his love, Victoria, and returned to Lake Highlands where they are raising the new baby, June, named for Victoria’s grandma.
Also, in a case of wrong place/wrong time in 2012, Scoggins caught a bullet outside of an Atlanta nightclub, after which he posted a gurney/ambulance selfie with the caption, “Just got shot, y’all.”
We learned that by reading an old Huffington Post article. Cousin Dan did not mention it in his interview. Responding to a follow-up query, he said: “Oh, yeah. I definitely got shot.”
Search Cousin Dan on music-streaming platforms.
