The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth has announced a partnership with three Texas museums, made possible by a grant from the Art Bridges Foundation.
The Art Bridges Cohort Program was established in 2018 to support exhibition partnerships that expand access to and broaden the definition of American art. Cohorts, composed of an organizing museum and regional partners, share collections and resources to collaborate in the development of traveling exhibitions. Other cohorts have been established across the U.S., led by organizing museums, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
In a press release Paul R. Provost, Art Bridges Foundation CEO, stated, “Expanding access through collaboration and collection-sharing is at the heart of the Art Bridges Cohort Program, and we’re delighted to have the Amon Carter Museum of American Art leading a cohort with museums across Texas. Countless visitors will be introduced to the Carter’s collections through these exhibitions, and we’re confident the program will deepen engagement with their communities.”
The Carter’s cohort includes the Amarillo Museum of Art, the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, and the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa. The inaugural exhibition developed by the museums is In Our Own Words: Native Impressions, featuring twenty-six printed portraits by artists Daniel Heyman and Lucy Ganje. To create the pieces the artists collaborated with the works’ subjects, who are present-day members of North Dakota Indian Nations. Along with a visual representation of each sitter, the exhibition features their personal oral history in their own words, as told to the artists as they sat the portraits. The exhibition first debuted at the Carter in 2018 and will be on view this spring at the Art Museum of South Texas. Later this year, the show will travel to the Amarillo Museum of Art; dates have not yet been announced for the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa.
The second exhibition, Photography Is Art, explores the history of the medium and highlights the fact that it took nearly 100 years from the invention of photography for museums to begin actively collecting and displaying photographs as artforms. The show was on view at the Carter in 2021 and will begin traveling to the cohort museums in the fall/winter of 2024.
In Our Own Words: Native Impressions will be on view at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi from April 21 through September 30, 2023. Learn more about the exhibition at the museum’s website.