Opening September 2019: Five Exhibitions and Installations Featuring Work by Gordon Parks, Camille Utterback, Justin Favela, Scott and Stuart Gentling, and James Surls The Museum Will Reopen on September 14 Following Three Months of Closure with a Daylong Party on the Porch Celebration from 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

Fort Worth, TX, May 21, 2019—The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announces its fall exhibition schedule and plans for free reopening events this September following three months of closure for expansive renovations. The museum will reopen with nearly two weeks of members-only preview days prior to our grand reopening for the public on September 14. Everyone will be able to experience the renovated galleries, the reimagined installation of the collection, our fall exhibitions and the revamped plaza providing much-improved accessibility to our main entrance. The September 14 community celebration begins at 10 a.m. with a daylong event during our annual Party on the Porch featuring live music, food trucks, and cash bars.

On June 3, 2019, the museum building and galleries will close to the public to complete the building-enhancement project that began in October 2018. During the summer, renovations will extend from the upper galleries to the museum’s first floor and campus, culminating in the total transformation of the visitor experience at the Carter. “We are entering the beginning of a historic period of change at the museum. Through the support of our community, we are able to change the way our visitors experience our collection and our iconic building,” said Andrew J. Walker, Executive Director.

“We are excited to reopen our doors this fall and introduce the new Carter to our community through fun events and great art.”

The combined results of the renovation will be significant. All the gallery spaces will have been enhanced with new sightlines, moveable walls for highly configurable layouts, state-of-the-art lighting and hardwood flooring throughout the upstairs galleries. The photography vaults have been expanded to allow for decades of future collection growth and to preserve these holdings with the latest advances in climate control. And finally, our main campus and front entrance will feature increased accessibility. Through this enhancement project, the Carter is changing the way people experience American creativity and opening our doors still wider to welcome old friends and new audiences to one of the country’s great holdings of American art.

“Through our new installation – which aims to be elegant, dynamic and thought-provoking – the collection will sing in ways it never has before,” said Brett Abbott, Director of Collections and Exhibitions. “The museum is poised to inspire more people more deeply in the years ahead, and I look forward to sharing the new galleries with our community.”

The new galleries will showcase the permanent collection, with engaging thematic installations that draw connections between the historical collection and contemporary works by American artists. In the enlarged special exhibition space, where the museum features traveling exhibitions, visitors can see the major exhibition Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950, chronicling the formative beginnings of Parks’ extensive and groundbreaking career. Additional exhibitions in the new space include Set in Motion: Camille Utterback and Art That Moves, an interactive digital installation presented in conversation with works by prominent female artists in the Carter’s collection and private collections; Puente Nuevo by Justin Favela, a site-specific commission by Las Vegas-based artist Justin Favela; Seeing in Detail: Scott and Stuart Gentling’s Birds of Texas, featuring the collaborative watercolor series of Texas birds by these beloved Fort Worth artists; and Seven and Seven Flower, a large-scale sculpture by Texas artist James Surls. Carter members will be the first to see these exhibitions and the newly renovated Carter with members-only hours and events Tuesday, September 3 through Friday, September 13 (the museum will be closed on Monday, September 9).

On Saturday, September 14, the museum will reopen to the public with an extended celebration of our fifth annual Party on the Porch from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Beginning at 10 a.m., visitors are invited to explore the museum’s new galleries and exhibitions, and to participate in an array of new programming including art-making in the galleries, themed self-guided tours and a Family Pop-up Space. Celebrations continue outdoors beginning at 6 p.m. with live music, local food trucks and more. Stay tuned for the lineup to be announced this summer.

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950

September 14 – December 29, 2019
Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation, this exhibition explores the early years of Parks’ career as an influential photographer who captured the essence of the civil rights movement in addition to breaking barriers for African Americans. Through some 150 photographs, as well as rare magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and books, the exhibition offers an expansive and intimate look at how this pioneering African American artist became one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.

Puente Nuevo by Justin Favela

September 14, 2019 – June 30, 2020
The museum commissioned contemporary artist Justin Favela to create an immersive installation exclusively for the Carter. Based in Las Vegas, Favela draws on his own Mexican and Guatemalan heritage to reinterpret art work from the past using massive amounts of cut tissue paper – the same material used to construct piñatas. Favela will cover the walls of our gallery with his own murals inspired by works in our collection, including nineteenth-century color lithographs of Mexico, and will create a sculptural tissue-paper tribute to the museum’s mobile Untitled (ca. 1942) by Alexander Calder. His work bridges past and present and creates connections across cultures, bringing dynamic color, energy and fun to the museum experience.

Seeing in Detail: Scott and Stuart Gentling’s Birds of Texas

September 14 – December 1, 2019
When you view Scott and Stuart Gentling’s watercolors of Texas birds, you’ll want to get close. The level of detail is extraordinary—hundreds of brushstrokes for each feather, and there are hundreds of feathers. Seeing in Detail features 23 of Scott and Stuart’s watercolors from the museum’s permanent collection. It’s the first of two consecutive exhibitions at the Carter dedicated to these Fort Worth artists and their unique approach to painting the natural world.

Set in Motion: Camille Utterback and Art That Moves

September 14 – December 8, 2019
This exhibition pairs an interactive installation by new-media artist Camille Utterback with a century of art depicting motion from the Carter’s collection. In Utterback’s Untitled 5 (2004), visitors’ movements in the gallery space are run through computer software written by the artist that translates them into an animated digital painting that constantly evolves. Although thoroughly contemporary, Untitled 5 builds on a rich lineage of artwork that records or transforms human movement, including the abstract expressionists Utterback considers her forbearers. Set in Motion includes a selection of work by women who experimented to pursue this difficult goal, from well-known masters like Georgia O’Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler to underappreciated artists like Barbara Morgan and Anne Ryan.

James Surls, Seven and Seven Flower (1998)

September 14, 2019 – through summer 2021
Upon entering the museum, visitors will have a chance to marvel at James Surls’ otherworldly sculpture Seven and Seven Flower, a complex portrait of family, land and self. The acclaimed Texas artist transformed pine and steel into writhing blossoms suspended in space to evoke a dynamic relationship between the earthly and the spiritual. Seven and Seven Flower directly connects to the museum’s collection of twentieth-century sculpture yet transcends time as a universal expression of ethereal beauty.

About the Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Designed by renowned architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005), the Carter opened in 1961 and houses a preeminent collection of American art including painting, photographs, sculpture and works on paper. The paintings collection spans from early 19th-century expeditionary art to mid-20th-century modernism and includes masterworks by artists such as Frederic Church, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe and John Singer Sargent. The museum is one of the nation’s major repositories of American photography from the 19th century to the present and holds the archives of luminaries such as Laura Gilpin, Eliot Porter and Karl Struss. It is also home to nearly 400 works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, the two greatest artists of the American West. Admission is free. Open: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sunday 12–5 p.m. Closed Mondays and select holidays.