The Carter’s 2024 exhibition calendar debuts new projects by contemporary artists including Dario Robleto and Jean Shin

Fort Worth, TX, January 18, 2024—The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) announces its 2024 exhibition schedule showcasing the Museum’s extensive artist archives, new work by living artists, and highlights from the Carter’s works on paper collection, including artwork that has never been on view before. Exhibitions include an examination of the acclaimed photographer and cinematographer Karl Struss, who won the first Oscar for cinematography, through the Carter’s photography and archive holdings; the debut of the final film in a trilogy of work by interdisciplinary Houston-based artist Dario Robleto; and a nationally touring exhibition featuring contemporary artists’ reexamination of the concept of the cowboy in American culture.

In addition to Robleto’s solo exhibition and the nationally touring Cowboy exhibition, the Carter’s commitment to featuring artists working today includes the Museum’s commissioned installation by Jean Shin. Known for her works created from found items, Shin will create a textile-based sculptural installation created from the clothing of Museum staff members. The Carter will also present one of the first exhibitions to examine the work of sculptor Richard Hunt. Presenting work from the Carter’s Tamarind Lithography Workshop holdings, on view for the first time since their acquisition, the exhibition highlights Hunt’s process and evolution, which informed his sculptures.

Exhibitions opening in 2024

Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood

May 12–August 25, 2024

This Carter-organized exhibition is a multimedia examination of photographer and cinematographer Karl Struss’s storied career, focusing on his transition from fine art photography to the world of moving pictures. Featuring archival materials, original film, and over 100 photographs from the Carter’s extensive Struss Artist Archive and supplemental loans, the exhibition spotlights his innovations in image making and contributions to the film industry, closely examining his impact on Hollywood’s Golden Age and the field of cinematography at large. Moving Pictures brings into focus Struss’s unique position as a leader in both still photography and moving pictures, tracing his career from New York—where he was elected to Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession group in 1910—to Los Angeles, where he moved in 1919 in the wake of World War I, commencing a defining era of his career and joining the wave of westward migration by Americans eager for a fresh start.

Dario Robleto: The Signal

May 12–October 27, 2024

Internationally celebrated Texas artist Dario Robleto’s solo exhibition Dario Robleto: The Signal debuts at the Carter in May 2024. Known for his multidisciplinary, research-driven approach, Robleto’s work probes questions about the order of the universe and the human-made systems we employ to perceive and describe it. Spanning film, sculpture, and works on paper, The Signal represents the culmination of Robleto’s multiyear exploration of the Golden Record, the gold-plated phonograph disk containing sounds and images selected by a team at NASA to portray life on Earth to extraterrestrials. Supported by related sculptures and works on paper, the centerpiece of the exhibition is Robleto’s newly commissioned work, Ancient Beacons Long for Notice, an immersive, 60-minute film based on the approved contents of the Record and the choice to exclude from the record a rare and forgotten document—the first audio recording of warfare.

Drawn to Nature

May 25–September 29, 2024

This exhibition, organized by the Carter, highlights the Museum’s works on paper holdings from the 18th through the 21st centuries. Celebrating both historical and modernist artworks, the exhibition presents depictions of nature from the first investigations of the American landscape by European American artists to modernism’s use of up-close observation of nature as a way of rendering the real world through abstraction. With work by artists including Ruth Asawa, John James Audubon, Thomas Moran, and Sandy Rodriguez, the exhibition explores botanical and zoological beauty in all of its minute complexity while celebrating the Carter’s collection.

Jean Shin: The Museum Body

July 13, 2024–June 2025

Jean Shin is transforming one of the Museum’s first-floor gallery spaces with a site-specific installation in which she will create a textile-based “portrait” of the Museum’s staff members, both those visible and invisible to the general public, who enable a museum to function. The installation, done in her signature artistic practice of massive scale and evocative use of found items, will consist of donated garments intended to represent the collective work of the people within the institution. Separating the fabric from its seams, Shin will shape these elements into a large-scale wall mural with immersive hanging elements that will activate the gallery walls and ceiling. The Museum Body is a reiteration and expansion of Cut Outs and Suspended Seams (2004), a project presented by Shin 20 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art QNS.

Cowboy

September 28, 2024–March 16, 2025

This exhibition brings together approximately 70 cutting-edge modern and contemporary artworks, including new commissions, from more than 25 artists including Asian American, Latino, and Indigenous perspectives, all re-examining the significance of cowboy imagery in American culture. Cowboy, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Denver, aims to shift 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.

Richard Hunt: From Paper to Metal

October 12, 2024–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 which 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 Forms, highlighting the transformation of 2D graphic ideas to the 3D direct-welded sculptural technique.

Rufino Tamayo: Innovation and Experimentation

November 24, 2024–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 ambitions 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.

Exhibitions closing in 2024

Trespassers: James Prosek and the Texas Prairie

Through May 12, 2024

Less than 1 percent of native prairies exist across the state of Texas. This conservation concern is the catalyst for more than 20 new works created by artist and naturalist James Prosek. For two years, Prosek traveled to grassland habitats across the state, ranging from urban restoration projects to unplowed remnant prairies, documenting the rich plant and wildlife diversity of these spaces. Trespassers: James Prosek and the Texas Prairie features a new large-scale silhouette painting, one of Prosek’s signature working styles; watercolor portraits of plants collected during his travels; and trompe l’oeil clay and bronze sculptures of wildflowers. Through these works, Prosek investigates the allure of Texas’s grasslands while raising broader questions about the boundaries that shape, limit, and define prairie spaces in the present day.

Leonardo Drew: Number 235T

Through June 9, 2024

Sculptor Leonardo Drew is the latest contemporary artist to transform the Museum’s first-floor galleries with a new site-specific commission. Known for his large-scale, multi-dimensional installations, Drew employs organic materials to create topographies that are looming in size and stunning in their intricacies. For this project, Drew anchored sculptural pieces that he refers to as “planets” and surrounded them with hundreds of smaller objects as he worked to identify the interconnectedness of them all. This commission is the latest in a series initiated by the Carter in 2015 to respond to works in the Museum’s collection through the perspectives of American artists working today.

^{Images (left to right): Kenneth Tam (b. 1982), Silent Spikes, 2021, two-channel video (20:29), commissioned by the Queens Museum with support from the Asian Art Circle of the Guggenheim Museum, Photo by Jason Madella; Portrait of Jean Shin, Courtesy the artist and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Photo by Joseph Hu; John James Audubon (1785–1851), Hooping [sic] Crane. Grus americana. Adult Male., 1834, aquatint and engraving with applied watercolor, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, 1965.163; Kenneth Alexander (1887–1975), Karl Struss with His Cinematography Oscar for the Film Sunrise, ca. 1929, gelatin silver print, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P1983.23.185; Dario Robleto (b. 1972), American Seabed (detail), 2014, fossilized prehistoric whale ear bones salvaged from the sea (1 to 10 million years), various butterflies, butterfly antennae made from stretched and pulled audiotape recordings of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” concrete, ocean water, pigments, coral, brass, steel, Plexiglas, Courtesy of the artist, © Dario Robleto; Richard Howard Hunt (1935–2023), Natural Forms, 1968, welded steel, courtesy Terry Dintenfass Inc., © Richard Hunt.}

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.