Amon Carter Museum of American Art

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art, also known as the Carter, is an art museum located in the cultural district of Fort Worth, Texas, United States. Established to house the personal collection of Fort Worth newspaper publisher and philanthropist Amon G. Carter Sr., the institution opened in 1961. It holds a permanent collection of paintings, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by leading artists working in the United States and its North American territories during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the greatest concentration of works spans the 1820s through the 1940s, the museum also maintains significant holdings of photographs, prints, and works on paper produced up to the present day. Admission to all exhibits, including special exhibitions, is free.

The museum opened in 1961 as the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, originally built around Amon G. Carter Sr.'s collection of more than 300 works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Carter spent the last ten years of his life, until his death in 1955, laying the legal, financial, and philosophical groundwork for the museum's creation. His will stipulated the establishment of a museum in Fort Worth dedicated to American art. Under its first director, Mitchell A. Wilder, the institution adopted a broader vision. Wilder interpreted American art history as the story of artists working at successive frontiers, prompting the collection to expand in multiple directions, from early American landscape painters of the 1830s to twentieth-century modernists, leading to its current name and scope.

The Carter's collection was built upon portrayals of the Old West, nineteenth-century expansionism, and the settlement of the North American continent, later expanding to encompass masterworks emblematic of major turning points in American art history. It features paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by artists such as Alexander Calder, Thomas Cole, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Martin Johnson Heade, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, and Alfred Stieglitz. American photography is a major area of strength, documenting the full spectrum of the medium from its earliest years to the present. The photography holdings contain over 45,000 exhibition-quality prints by roughly 400 photographers, including the works and archives of notable figures like Laura Gilpin, Eliot Porter, and Karl Struss, as well as more than 2,300 photographs by Clara Sipprell.

Over 400 works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell form the core of the Old West collection, encompassing drawings, illustrated letters, prints, oil paintings, sculptures, and watercolors. More than sixty works by Remington and over 250 by Russell were purchased by Amon G. Carter Sr. beginning in 1935. Signature Remington works include A Dash for the Timber (1889), which established him as a serious painter; The Broncho Buster (1895), his first bronze sculpture; and The Fall of the Cowboy (1895). Notable Russell works include Medicine Man (1908), a detailed portrait of a Blackfeet shaman, and the bronze Meat for Wild Men (1924). The museum also holds significant expeditionary art and depictions of Native American life by documentary artists such as John James Audubon, Karl Bodmer, and George Catlin, who recorded topography and diverse Indian cultures. Another highlight is Thomas Eakins' painting Swimming, acquired in 1990, and Grant Wood's Parson Weems' Fable (1939).

The museum building was originally designed by architect Philip Johnson, combining the warmth of bronze with a cream-colored, complex Texas shellstone. Set on the western point of its plot, the east facade faces a terraced plaza offering views of downtown Fort Worth and neighboring institutions like the Kimbell Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. A sheltered portico leads to a double-height hall of shellstone, dark bronze, brown teak, and pink-gray granite, originally flanked by five equal exhibition galleries and a mezzanine level. As the collections grew, the building underwent multiple expansions. A 1964 addition of over 4,000 square meters by associate architect Joseph R. Pelich added offices, a library, and storage. A 1977 expansion by Johnson and John Burgee added 11,000 square meters, including a 105-seat auditorium. By 1998, the trustees announced a major project to triple the exhibition space. Johnson led the design, calling it the building of his career. The museum closed in August 1999, removed the 1964 and 1977 additions, and reopened on October 21, 2001, increasing the total size by nearly 15,000 square meters while preserving the original 1961 structure.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art is located in the cultural district of Fort Worth, Texas, United States, adjacent to the Kimbell Art Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. A rotating selection of works from the permanent collection is on view year-round during regular museum hours, and several thousand works can be studied online via the museum's official website. Admission to the museum for all exhibits, including special exhibits, is free to the public.