Fort Worth, TX, January 16, 2025—The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) announces its 2025 exhibition schedule showcasing the Museum’s extensive collection and artist archives, art exploring the influence of Asian American artists over the decades, and the impact of modernism in American art. Exhibitions include the premiere of a multi-city tour of the private collection of Texas-based collector Charles Butt; a 60-year retrospective of artist Robert Bergman’s photography, many of which will be on view for the first time; and the nationally touring exhibition featuring a reexamination of the influence of Asian American art in the U.S.

The Carter-organized exhibition American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection presents and recontextualizes the multifold histories of American art by sharing Charles Butt’s vision of American creativity and opening his collection to the public for the first time. The Museum is also organizing the first in-depth retrospective dedicated to the artist Robert Bergman. Sparked by the Museum’s 2020 acquisition of 51 of his portraits, the exhibition presents a broad selection of works from the major series throughout the artist's career.

The Carter will also present the nationally touring East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art, which explores the continuing artistic influence of people of Asian descent and their indispensable role in shaping American art and culture. In continuation of the Carter’s establishment of the Gentling Study Center in 2019, the Museum is showcasing the first examination of Fort Worth artists Scott and Stuart Gentlings’ work produced in response to their interest in the musicians and fashion of the Age of Enlightenment featuring artwork and archival materials.

Exhibitions opening in 2025

Classically Trained: The Gentlings and Music

March 15–July 13, 2025

Classically Trained: The Gentlings and Music explores the two Fort Worth-based artists' fascination with the Age of Enlightenment (ca. 1685–1815). Inspired by advancements in learning and the explosion of creativity during the Enlightenment period, Scott and Stuart Gentling read extensively about the era, took up period instruments to compose their own music, and sought out texts and artifacts from the 18th and 19th centuries. This exhibition highlights the variety of ways the Gentlings’ immersive engagement with the Age of Enlightenment inspired their art making in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Organized by the Carter, Classically Trained features over 20 artworks by the Gentlings, including paintings, drawings, and music inspired by the Enlightenment world. These include a variety of still-life compositions, costume studies, and portrait paintings of period composers, such as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. These artworks will be accompanied by Enlightenment-era music as well as musical compositions by Scott Gentling.

Fortune of the Spirit | Robert Bergman

May 18–August 10, 2025

Robert Bergman’s photographs present his subjects with an extraordinary intimacy achieved by removing elements of distance. This intimate approach, combined with foregoing identification through titles, invites viewers to participate directly in the exchange with the subject. Fortune of the Spirit | Robert Bergman presents a broad selection of works from throughout Bergman's 60-year career and showcases his color portraits, many of which will be on view for the first time, alongside his rarely seen early street photographs and career-spanning abstractions. The 65 works in Fortune of the Spirit include the artist’s early black-and-white street photographs and his intimate color portraits captured between 1985 and 1997 during Bergman’s travels east of the Mississippi River. Accompanied by a lavish catalogue, the exhibition also marks the first time the Carter is presenting work from the Museum’s 2020 acquisition of 51 of Bergman’s photographs.

East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art

May 18–November 30, 2025

East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art explores the continuing artistic impact of the migration of people across the Pacific Ocean and their indispensable role in shaping American art and culture. The exhibition examines how the repositioning of America from west of the Atlantic to east of the Pacific reorients our perception of American art and its significant contributors. Organized by and drawn from the collection of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, East of the Pacific features artworks by over 32 Asian American artists that span from the mid-19th century through the present day, including ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, and prints. The exhibition is divided into six thematic sections, which reveal vital moments in Asian American history and the multifaceted contributions of Asian descendants to American art. These sections include Points of Contact, The East West Art Society, Visions of Chinatown, After Executive Order 9066, Histories of Abstraction, and Revisiting Other Sources: An American Essay.

American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection

September 7, 2025–January 25, 2026

American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection, organized by the Carter, is the first exhibition dedicated to the collection of businessman, philanthropist, and Texas native Charles Butt. This exhibition includes paintings and works on paper from the turn of the 20th century into the 1980s and features works by American modernist icons including Romare Bearden, Edward Hopper, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alma Thomas, and Andrew Wyeth, many of which have never been on public view. Featuring over 75 artworks, American Modernism highlights Butt’s vision of American creativity, his commitment to education, and opens his collection to the public for the first time. The exhibition, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, features four thematic sections that illustrate major throughlines of Butt’s collection, including Intimate Perspective, The Language of the Sea, Land Progressions, and Geometric Utopias/Dystopias. The Carter marks the debut of a multicity tour of American Modernism at institutions throughout Texas.

Exhibitions closing in 2025

Richard Hunt: From Paper to Metal

Through March 2, 2025

Organized by the Carter and drawn from the Museum’s holdings of Richard Hunt’s Tamarind Lithography Workshop prints, Richard Hunt: From Paper to Metal highlights the works on paper by one of the most illustrious and prolific sculptors of the 20th and 21st centuries. Hunt was the first Black artist to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1971. He created over 150 public sculptures across the country, and his work is in numerous institutions. From Paper to Metal examines the artist’s interests outside of the sculptural form. Featuring 25 lithographs from 1965 that have never been on view, the exhibition explores the spatial and figurative ideas Hunt executed in his Tamarind work, which informed the sole sculpture included in the exhibition, Natural Form, highlighting the transformation of 2D graphic ideas to the 3D direct-welded sculptural technique.

Cowboy

Through March 23, 2025

This exhibition brings together approximately 70 cutting-edge modern and contemporary artworks, including new commissions, from more than 25 artists including Asian American, Black, Indigenous, and Latino perspectives, all re-examining the significance of cowboy imagery in American culture. Cowboy, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver, shifts the narrative of this figure’s cultural power and significance to be both historically accurate and creatively imaginative. The exhibition reexamines the legend and lore of the cowboy through a new lens, exploring how the myth of the cowboy exists today. Works on view represent a range of perspectives and explore a wide array of themes, including the cowboy’s role in shaping our perception of masculinity and gender, as well as long-held assumptions about cowboys’ relationship to land and the way these assumptions come into conflict with the lived experiences of contemporary cowboys.

Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation

Through April 20, 2025

Exploring more than 60 years of Rufino Tamayo’s prints, Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation showcases the artist’s extensive engagement with prints and his ambition to add volume and texture to a traditionally two-dimensional medium. In these works, Tamayo's depictions and abstractions of the human figure are highlighted as fertile ground for formal experimentation. A selection of Mesoamerican sculpture complements the prints on view, examining an important source of inspiration for the artist. The exhibition, organized by and drawn exclusively from the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, considers Tamayo’s longstanding interest in prints as a means of probing new techniques and furthering artistic investigation.

Images (clockwise left to right): Scott Gentling (1942–2011), Amadeus, ca.2003, graphite, opaque and transparent watercolor on paper, L2025.10, © Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Robert Bergman (b. 1944), [untitled], 1998, inkjet print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Purchase funded with a gift from J. Tomilson Hill, P2020.83, © Robert Bergman. All rights Reserved. Derivatives expressly prohibited; Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956), Abstraction, ca. 1925, oil on board, Collection of Charles Butt, © Estate of Blanche Lazzell; Tokio Ueyama (1889–1954), Monterey Cove, 1924, oil on canvas, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund and the Asian American Art Initiative Acquisitions Fund, 2020.129

About the Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Located in the heart of Fort Worth’s Cultural District, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) is a dynamic cultural resource that provides unique access and insight into the history and future of American creativity through its expansive exhibitions and programming. The Carter’s preeminent collection includes masterworks by legendary American artists such as Ruth Asawa, Alexander Calder, Frederic Church, Stuart Davis, Robert Duncanson, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, and John Singer Sargent, as well as one of the country’s foremost repositories of American photography. In addition to its innovative exhibition program and engagement with artists working today, the Museum’s premier primary research collection and leading conservation program make it a must-see destination for art lovers and scholars of all ages nationwide. Admission is always free. To learn more about the Carter, visit cartermuseum.org.