The Amon Carter Museum Comes to the Fort Worth Show - Benefit Booth 2

Amon Carter Museum of American Art:
Art for the Purpose of Creating Community  

Stacy Fuller, Carter Museum

“We are using an art museum to build community between generations and between different audiences,” said Stacy Fuller, Director of Community Engagement at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Director of Community Engagement? Isn’t that an amazing title? Isn’t that an amazing mission for an institution founded in Fort Worth in 1961 as a permanently free museum for the public to enjoy and appreciate American art?

The Fort Worth Show of Antiques & Art welcomes the Amon Carter Museum as one of our two Benefit Booths at the March 5,6,7, 2015 Show---which will soon be here. The other Benefit Booth is for The Art Station. www.theartstation.org


Things to know about the Amon Carter Museum, the shining star of Fort Worth:

---The Amon Carter Museum provides free admission year round, as well as free admission for all special exhibits and for all community programs. During the current construction, the museum is open free full time—use the Lancaster Ave. entrance.

---Community programs at the Carter range from school tours for children to docent visits to share art with Senior Citizen Centers all across Fort Worth and more. 

The “Sharing the Past through Art” program reaches out to citizens with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers to use art in order to spur memory and connectedness. Stacy told me about the day that Alzheimer’s participants were visiting the museum and looking at artwork when an elementary school tour came through the same gallery. An Alzheimer’s patient who had not used words in years suddenly greeted the school kids warmly and asked if they were enjoying the art. “The Sharing the Past program,” Stacy goes on, “uses art as a starting point to help people remember and talk about their pasts. It might be a painting of a cat or a dog, and it may take several months, but the art helps people connect with their memories and with each other.”

To find out more about “Sharing the Past through Art” and all the other free community programs sponsored by the Amon Carter Museum, contact stacy.fuller@cartermuseum.org
or see www.cartermuseum.org   Some Community Programs are on a short break and will re-start at the conclusion of the spring construction project.

In the meantime, the museum is coming to the

Fort Worth Show! 

Amon Carter Gift Shop

You can meet the museum staff and volunteers in person at their Benefit Booth at the Fort Worth Show March 5,6,7, 2015. The Museum Gift Store has dug to the back of the storage room to bring out posters, books, gifts, notecards and more for good deals in their Fort Worth Show booth. In addition, you’ll have first and only dibs on vintage furniture decoupaged with posters of art from the museum’s wide collection of American art. There will be a “Georgia O’Keeffe dining table” as well as other smaller examples of “art furniture.” All booth proceeds benefit the Amon Carter Museum.

To emphasize the free admission and free programs of the Amon Carter, some art posters will be free to visitors at the Fort Worth Show, while supplies last.  

Another thing to know about the Amon Carter Museum:
The art is broad!

Amon Carter himself started with what is arguably the world’s best collection of Remingtons and Russells. But since the 1960s the museum’s collection grew broadly to include American photography, modernism, 19^th c. American masterpieces, “Outsider Art” and many other American forms. Today the collection includes over 200,000 objects and a research library with 140,000 items. 

"Tactile" of William Harnett's
 Attention, Company! allows
 visitors with eyesight
 impairment to feel the art.

My current favorite painting in the Amon Carter is Winslow Homer’s “Crossing the Pasture” from 1872. The caption on the wall near the painting talks about the two brothers walking across a pasture as speaking to the re-bonding and healing of America after the Civil War.   

Perhaps like most people in Fort Worth, I have a personal memory of the Amon Carter Museum. When I was in High School (PHS), our English teacher sent us to the museum to look at an exhibit of Eliot Porter’s nature photography. “Look at it until it speaks to you.” I did and it did.

Later that year, on the week of High School graduation in the wee hours, my friends and I gathered on the front steps of the Amon Carter, a perch designed by architect Philip Johnson, to look over the museum’s sculptural mesquite tree and beyond to the sun coming up over Fort Worth.  

Museum Hours: Tues-Sat. 10a-5p   Sun. noon-5p 
Admission: Free!

3501 Camp Bowie Blvd—Use Lancaster Ave. entrance through late spring 2015.

The Amon Carter Museum is Barrier-Free.  

Special Exhibits:

May 23-Aug. 23, 2015 a visit from Samuel F.B Morse’s painting “Gallery of the Louvre”

June 6, 2015-June 5, 2016 Texas Folk Art, including Outsider Art

July 7-Sept. 13, 2015 Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection  

Details at www.cartermuseum.org