Fort Worth, TX

The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth

Address: 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 76107 - MAP
Phone: (817) 738-1933
Web: www.cartermuseum.org

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art was opened in 1961. A self-made man by the name of Amon G. Carter had expressed his desire to build a public institution to house his art collection. Although he never saw the museum come to be, Carter's will provided for the establishment of the expanding institution.

The museum's first director, Mitchell A. Wilder, had a broad vision in mind while building the Carter Museum's art collection. Wilder wanted to expand the museum's collection to feature paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs and books that would tell the story of the "successive frontiers" of American history through various styles and subjects.

Today, the museum houses approximately 700 works of art by artists like Alexander Calder, Thomas Cole, Stuart Davis, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, Charles Demuth, Martin Johnson Heade and Alfred Stieglitz. The museum is also home to one of the most extensive photography collections, featuring more than 30,000 prints by 400 photographers. Some of the photographers featured are by Laura Gilpin, Eliot Porter and Karl Struss. The museum also boasts a 160-seat auditorium, a library with 40,000 volumes and the only one between the two coasts to have the 7,500 microform reels of the Archive of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.