Amon Carter Museum history

The museum published Paper Talk: The Illustrated Letters of Charles M. Russell in 1962, the first of many books on the art of the American West to originate from the Amon Carter.

Within its first 10 years the Carter had already acquired work by John James Audubon, Stuart Davis, Dorothea Lange, and more; organized major exhibitions including a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe; lent paintings to hang in the White House; and built its first expansion, which opened in 1964.

The following year, 1967, American Art–20th Century: Image to Abstraction brought more than one hundred paintings by America’s leading early modernists to Fort Worth from New York.

In 1977 another addition was completed, but the Carter continued to grow and needed more space.

Mitchell Wilder died in 1979 after a brief illness.

In their place a much larger facility was erected, culminating in a grand reopening in 2001.

The Carter in 2003 after the addition of an extension by Philip Johnson, the building's original architect.

In 2010, the museum changed its name to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art to clearly convey what it had been doing for almost 50 years: collecting and exhibiting the best of American creativity.

In 2011, on the occasion of the museum’s 50th anniversary, the museum was renamed the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.