Opening This Weekend at the Carter! 🎉

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (the Carter) will present the first exhibition dedicated to the collection of businessman, philanthropist, and Texas native Charles Butt. Bringing together over eighty works, American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection, presents and recontextualizes the multifold histories of American art by sharing Butt’s vision of American creativity and opening his collection to the public for the first time. American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection premieres at the Carter on September 7, 2025 where it will be on view through January 25, 2026 as the first stop on a multicity tour at institutions throughout Texas. 

The exhibition includes paintings and works on paper from the turn of the twentieth century through the early 1980s and features works by American modernist icons including Romare Bearden, Edward Hopper, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alma Thomas, and Andrew Wyeth, among others, many of which have never been publicly viewed. Reflecting Butt’s commitment to education and his keen entrepreneurial eye, his collection embodies a distinctly American commitment to technical, conceptual, and aesthetic innovation. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, Charles Butt has also made a promised gift to the Carter of Rufino Tamayo’s The Family (1925). Considering Tamayo’s active role within the American Modernist movement, the promised acquisition of The Family, a foundational work included in the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, will add further depth to the story of American creativity told by the Museum’s holdings. 

American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection features four thematic sections that illustrate major thought lines of Butt’s collection. These include:  

Intimate Perspectives: The exhibition’s first section explores the significance and role of intimacy and trust in artmaking. Pairing works by artists who had close relationships, “Intimate Perspectives” reveals the influence that interpersonal exchanges and confidences had on these artists and their output.

The Language of the Sea: The sea is a fundamental motif in the canon of art history, and following a childhood spent near the Gulf of Mexico in Corpus Christi, Texas, it is also a major influence on Charles Butt’s collecting practice. This section of the exhibition concentrates on artists’ connections to and associations with America’s coastlines, foregrounding the salient economic and socio-cultural symbols often found in marine paintings.

Land Progressions: This section explores the significance of land to the creation of American Modernism, and how artists reimagined the familiar visual tradition of landscape art to respond to their environments.

Geometric Utopias/Dystopias: The exhibition’s final section consists of geometric abstractions alongside paintings depicting urban and rural post-industrial scenes: factories, farms, and machinery. Placed in tandem, the works in this section are emblematic of the fragility, and in some cases pessimism, of American society in an industrial age.

In line with Butt’s commitment to education, the exhibition features robust, bilingual interpretive and educational components, including a free takeaway brochure featuring an interview between Charles Butt and Andrew Walker. The Carter will also publish a fully illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition, featuring the interview as well as essays by Shirley Reece-Hughes and Erika Doss (The University of Texas at Dallas). 

For more information about the Carter click HERE.