Fort Worth Key Magazine

Jean Shin: The Museum Body
2024-07-13 - 2025-06-30 | Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
For her installation at the Carter, titled Jean Shin: The Museum Body, Shin seeks to create a textile-based “portrait” of the Museum’s staff, both those visible and invisible to the general public, who enable a museum to function. The installation will consist of donated garments representing 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 clothing will be collected from members of the Carter’s staff—including curators, conservators, educators, executive leadership, facilities staff, and more—and then deconstructed, re-assembled, and installed with a focus on adapting to the unique architecture of the space. The democratization of the collected garments invokes the breakdown of institutional hierarchies.
As with much of Shin’s work, Jean Shin: The Museum Body deconstructs the familiar to create something entirely new. Shin sees the clothing’s seams as the structure—the mechanisms of an institution, the system in place that enables it to retain its function—whereas the actual fabric itself, the individuals within the institution, are what provide protection, warmth, and softness. In her creation of a soft sculpture, she nods at the concepts of “soft power” and “soft skills” often found in museum spaces, probing the role of identity and visibility within the greater context of a community. With the original 2004 MoMA project being Shin’s first solo exhibition, this new iteration bridges the years in between, capturing not only the changes within Shin’s own career but also the tectonic shifts that have occurred at the core of the global workplace.
Jean Shin: The Museum Body is organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. The exhibition is supported in part by the Alice L. Walton Foundation Temporary Exhibitions Endowment.

Re/Framed
2024-10-19 - 2025-04-30 | Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 3501 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
The practice of cutting silhouette portraits in paper emerged as a popular art form in the late 18th century. Since then, artists have continued to experiment with the silhouette’s stark profile and dramatic contrast of light and dark. In this latest rotation of Re/Framed, on view throughout the Carter’s galleries, explore works that examine the historical roots and powerful contemporary presence of silhouettes in art today.
See works by Ruth Asawa, Richard Misrach, Erwin E. Smith, Kara Walker, and more that capture their subjects in shapes and shadows and encourage viewers to take a second look.
Re/Framed gives visitors to the Carter a new way to look at the Carter’s collection. Several times a year, artwork will be rotated allowing guests to see the works through a different lens. Works that are part of Re/Framed are located throughout the Museum’s collection galleries and can be identified by the window icon on their labels.
Untitled (#553)
Richard Misrach
Inkjet print
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Gift of the artist in honor of Finis Welch

Wicked Threads: The Artistry of Costume in Oz
2025-01-17 - 2025-04-27 | Arlington Museum of Art, 201 West Main Street, Arlington, TX, 76010, United States
Following the release of the highly anticipated film, the Arlington Museum of Art will debut a collection of costumes from Wicked (2024) celebrating the artistry of the costume design and twenty-one years of the beloved Broadway musical Wicked. One of the most beloved and enduring musicals on the stage, Wicked (2024) makes its journey to the big screen this holiday season as a spectacular cinematic event. On the surface, Wicked is the origin story of how Elphaba became the Wicked Witch of the West and Galinda Upland became Glinda the Good. It’s a story of an unlikely friendship between two young women—one ostracized, one adored — and how the untapped power of one will reshape their lives and Oz, forever.

Alex Da Corte: The Whale
2025-03-02 - 2025-09-07 | Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
Alex Da Corte
The Anvil, 2023
Neoprene, EPS foam, upholstery foam, staples, thread, polyester fiber, epoxy clay, MDF, plywood
© Alex Da Corte, Courtesy of the Artist
Photo: Natalie Piserchio

March 2, 2025 – September 7, 2025

Alex Da Corte: The Whale, the first museum exhibition to survey the interdisciplinary artist’s long relationship with painting, focuses on the past decade of Da Corte’s career, and includes more than forty paintings, several drawings, and a video that considers painting as a performative act.
Da Corte is globally recognized for his hybrid installations combining painting, performance, video, and sculpture. Immersed in the history of art, design, and pop culture, Da Corte’s combinations evoke mixed feelings, such as fantasy and malice, while crossing hierarchies of high and low culture. His works combine modernist color theory and the spatial experiments of post-minimalist sculpture to consider topics including consumerism, persona, sex, invisible labor, taste, power, and desire.
The exhibition’s title, The Whale, emblematizes the artist’s vast mining of contemporary culture, a process that Da Corte describes as “analogous to the Jungian night sea journey, looking backward and collecting the past as an act of commingling with spirits, either cultural or personal.” Da Corte sees the medium of painting as “a cavity for these ghosts”—much like museums themselves. Painting, forever brimming with the weight of its own history and historically itself an uncanny threshold of consumption, represents “the mouth of the whale” to Da Corte. The artist situates himself here, within a crowded, beautiful trash-scape of contemporary culture, digesting advertisements, animation cels, compact disc graphic design, art history, and more. The ephemeral pop culture source materials referenced in Da Corte’s paintings make evident how the things we identify with, or use to define us, evolve over time.
To realize this reconstructed vision of painting, Da Corte stretches the medium’s traditional boundaries. The exhibition incorporates Puffy Paintings in stuffed, upholstered neoprene, Shampoo Paintings comprised of drugstore hair products, and sculptural Slatboard Paintings, where found objects protrude from the slatted grooves found in everyday commercial displays. The remaining paintings in the exhibition are reverse-glass paintings, in which the artist employs a process often used in animated celluloids and sign-making. Da Corte creates the image in reverse-order, applying the front-most layer of paint to the back side of the glass and building up subsequent layers, with the background added last. In addition, the exhibition encompasses the artist’s source materials and ephemera, providing a fresh perspective on his process. Galleries adjacent to the exhibition will present a selection of works from the Modern’s collection, extending the exhibition’s deep exploration of Da Corte’s catalysts and influences.
Organized by the Modern and Curator Alison Hearst, the exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with a special contribution from Da Corte and essays by Hearst, poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, art historian Suzanne Hudson, and Kemi Adeyemi, associate professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington.

Alex Da Corte: The Whale is made possible in part with support from Matthew Marks Gallery.

Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling
2025-03-15 - 2025-07-27 | Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, organized by the Modern and Curator María Elena Ortiz, celebrates the work of these two artists and their contributions to the story of abstract painting in the late twentieth century. Williams (1926–90) and Bowling (b. 1934) migrated from British Guiana (now Guyana) in South America to European and American cities in the 1950s, escaping social upheavals in their native country. Expanding on the international legacies of abstraction that are among the Modern’s central concerns, these artists’ works show that, even in moments of despair, art creates a space for refuge, reckoning, and imagination. This exhibition puts both artists in conversation, illustrating Williams’s powerful commitment to investigating abstract forms and Bowling’s painterly and experimental approach. Williams was Bowling’s elder, and together their works provide an opportunity to reflect on the power of art and abstraction in the twentieth century.
Feeling Color presents Bowling’s influential Map series, 1967–71, and his later poured paintings, which evidence sociopolitical concerns and explore the materiality of paint. Williams’s works include examples from two painting series, Shostakovich, 1969–81, and The Olmec-Maya and Now, 1981–85, alongside other paintings and drawings. These works reflect the artists’ histories by combining modernist abstraction with imagery derived from African diasporic dwellings and the Indigenous cultures of South America, each pointing to the complexity of their postcolonial heritage. These are works that embrace color, movement, experimentation, and abstraction to convey human emotion.
Aubrey Williams, born in British Guiana, is an important figure in British postwar painting, representing an approach toward abstraction that incorporates cross-cultural and transatlantic conversations. Originally trained as Agricultural Field Officer in Guyana, Williams moved to London in the 1950s to study engineering but changed course, earning an art degree from the St. Martin’s School of Art. The artist travelled extensively throughout Europe, created works in Jamaica and Florida in the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually settled in London until his death. Awarded the Commonwealth Prize in Painting by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, Williams was a founding member of the 1960s Caribbean Artists Movement in London. His works have been exhibited internationally and are included in several prestigious collections in the US and Britain.
Frank Bowling OBE RA was elected to Britain’s Royal Academy in 2005 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008. He is a pivotal figure in British abstract painting, contributing to the canon for over six decades. Born in British Guiana, Bowling migrated to London in the 1950s to study art. Eventually, he moved to New York City, keeping art studios in both cities. In New York, he cultivated a community that included critic Clement Greenberg and like-minded artists such as Jack Whitten and Al Loving Jr. His work has been exhibited widely and is part of prestigious collections around the world.
Image:
Aubrey Williams
Maya Dynasty, 1980
Oil on canvas, 91 x 182 cm
© Estate of Aubrey Williams.
Courtesy the Estate of Aubrey Williams and October Gallery, London

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945
2025-03-30 - 2025-06-22 | Kimbell Art Museum, Kimbell Art Museum, Camp Bowie Boulevard, Fort Worth, TX, USA, Fort Worth, TX, United States
In the first half of the twentieth century, Germany experienced the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the revolution that followed, the liberal Weimar Republic, the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II. Modern art played an important role in the discourse of the period, while politics influenced the arts.
This exhibition brings together more than seventy paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie, the distinguished modern art museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. It traces the German experience in the visual arts over four decades. Beginning with the Expressionist reaction and opposition to the conservative artistic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the exhibition includes works by such figures as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Otto Mueller, and Max Pechstein. The Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement typified the modern style of the 1920s, represented by painters including Otto Dix, Kurt Günther, and Christian Schad. Between the wars, exposure to the abstraction of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso influenced the German artists Gabriele Münter, Lyonel Feininger, Hannah Höch, and Oskar Nerlinger. Painters and sculptors including Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Käthe Kollwitz, and George Grosz issued strident challenges to society; their voices would be silenced under the Nazis. And response to Hitler’s repression of modern art and political opposition came from Max Beckmann, Karl Hofer, and Horst Strempel. Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945, organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, concludes with an epilogue that examines the ambiguous aftermath of World War II.
Image: George Grosz, Pillars of Society, 1926, oil on canvas. Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. © 2024 Estate of George Grosz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

The Hatmaker’s Wife‭
2025-04-17 - 2025-05-10 | Circle Theatre, Circle Theatre, West 4th Street, Fort Worth, TX, USA
‬April 17‭ ‬‮–‬‭ ‬May 10‭, ‬2025
Book by Lauren Yee‭ | ‬Regional Premiere
The Hatmaker’s Wife‭ ‬by Lauren Yee is a captivating grown-up fairy tale where reality and imagination intertwine‭, ‬exploring themes of identity‭, ‬family‭, ‬love‭, ‬and the distractions that pull us away from these things that matter most‭.‬
When a young woman and her boyfriend move into their new home‭, ‬they uncover the magical history of its previous occupants‭: ‬a distracted hatmaker and his long-suffering wife‭, ‬who has left him‭, ‬taking his beloved hat along with her‭. ‬Through a whimsical and surreal narrative‭, ‬the play redefines the concepts of family‭, ‬home‭, ‬and love‭, ‬bending time and space in delightful ways‭.‬
The story unfolds with a large dose of magical realism‮—‬walls that literally talk‭, ‬words that appear out of nowhere‭, ‬a house that‭ ‬comes alive‭, ‬and‭, ‬obviously‭, ‬a golem with a softness for Cheetos‭. ‬A truly fantastical adventure‭, ‬The Hatmaker’s Wife‭ ‬is a modern fable that is part ghost story‭, ‬part fairy tale‭, ‬showcasing Lauren Yee’s imaginative and humorous take on what it means to find real love‭.‬
‭*‬contains adult language and situations‭*‬
