Few states are as emblematic of the mythology of the American West as Texas – a fact recognised by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which has over the years organised several exhibitions that explore how artists have responded to the dry, dusty landscape and its violent history. In 2024 the museum put on ‘Cowboy’, which examined the role of cattle herders in the popular imagination; last year 40 photographs from Richard Avedon’s series In the American West (1979–84) – commissioned by the museum itself – had an outing. Now the Amon Carter is turning its eye to contemporary interpretations of the West, bringing together 14 paintings and sculptures that cast the landscape in different lights (17 January–24 May). Highlights include Camille Woods’s To Have and To Hold (2024), in which two turquoise figures of ambiguous gender stare out at us from a nighttime woodland, and Don Stinson’s Lone Star and Pool: Lobos, Texas (2000), a photorealistic panorama in which an abandoned swimming pool lies sunken amid a desolate sun-cracked landscape.
Find out more from the Amon Carter Museum’s website.
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