Artful development

Fort Worth museum creates new program that champions local artists

A new initiative at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art will champion local artists while connecting more people to the Fort Worth museum.

Through the new Carter Community Artists program, the museum will look beyond its own walls and select four area artists to help with planning and leading programs on site, off site, and digitally. At the same time, the museum will help forge relationships among artists working in the Fort Worth area who may know of each other but have not previously worked together. A win-win for everyone.

The artists chosen for the inaugural year of the program are Christopher Blay, Lauren Cross, Diane Durant, and Arnoldo Hurtado.

"Throughout the year-long commitment, participating artists will be involved in a variety of projects and programs for children and adult audiences, with the flexibility to adapt to each artist’s particular areas of practice and expertise," the museum says in a release.

Of particular importance, the museum says, will be the artists' work with local students."Working in partnership with Amon Carter museum education staff, each artist will have the opportunity to be involved in developing and leading afterschool, homeschool, and summer programs; teacher workshops; and recording sessions for the museum’s distance learning program, which reaches students of all ages around the globe," the museum says.

The content produced through the project may be used on school tours, in digital assets, or in interactive materials such as gallery exploration kits designed for visitors to engage in a self-guided experience, they say.

Over the course of the program’s commitment — each October through the following September — the artists will meet six times to discuss and develop concepts and programs. Applications will be available each May and will be reviewed by a committee of museum education and curatorial staff, with selections announced in August of each year.

Here's a closer look at the first class of Carter Community Artists, as described by the museum:

Christopher Blay
Christopher Blay is an artist, writer and curator with a BFA from Texas Christian University (2003). He curates the Art Corridor Gallery at Tarrant County College Southeast and is an art critic for Glasstire. His work incorporates photography, video, sculpture, and performance, and his most recent work, Portraits With Strangers, is Blay’s return to photography, focusing on the mechanical and mediated process that creates an image. Two other recent projects, KWTXR, exhibited at UNT on the Square gallery, and The Seven Deadly Things at 500X Gallery are based on the fictional character Kara Walker Texas Ranger, and responds to historical violence against African-Americans. Blay’s ongoing public art project on East Rosedale Avenue in Fort Worth and his Coombs Creek Park sculpture Dindi (for Annibel) are two projects that connect the artist’s work to public spaces. In 2013, Blay received the SMU Meadows Museum’s Moss/Chumley award for his “proven track record as an active community advocate for the visual arts,” and the Nasher Sculpture Center’s Artist Microgrant in 2015. Blay was also the Spring 2017 Visiting Artist at the Dallas Museum of Art’s Center for Creative Connections, and is the first guest curator at Fort Worth Contemporary Art.

Lauren Cross
Lauren Cross is an artist, curator, and scholar, whose interdisciplinary artistic practice and scholarly work addresses gender and critical multicultural approaches in arts practice, arts entrepreneurship, curatorial studies, museum studies, and art history. Cross holds a BA in Art, Design and Media from Richmond, The American International University in London, England (2006); a MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA (2010); and a PhD in Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies from Texas Woman's University (2017). She is currently Program Coordinator & Senior Lecturer for the Department of Art Education + Art History's Interdisciplinary Art and Design Studies (IADS) program, and the founder of the arts non-profit WoCA Projects in Fort Worth.

Diane Durant
Photographer Diane Durant earned her BFA from Baylor University (2001); MA/BC from Dallas Theological Seminary (2004); and MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas (2007, 2013), where she currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Photography and Assistant Director of the Photography Program. She is the former president of 500X Gallery and past editor of The Grassburr, The Rope, Sojourn, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. In 2017, she edited and wrote the introduction for Rozafa's Milk, an anthology of poems from the Albanian-American Society of Writers published by Mundus Artium Press. Durant’s photographs have been included in Sun Magazine and featured online with Don't Smile, AINT-BAD, and Lenscratch. She is a member of both the Leadership Team for the Society for Photographic Education's LGBTQ Caucus and the Board of Directors for the Cedars Union, a non-profit arts incubator in North Texas. She currently lives in Fort Worth with her daughter, their four dogs, and a multitude of penniless cats.

Arnoldo Hurtado
As a social practice artist, performer, and painter, Arnoldo Hurtado aims to educate audiences of their systemic and social impacts on communities of color through performance, storytelling, projects, and forums. A native of Fort Worth, Hurtado first studied painting at the Heritage Hut with the Brown family at an early age. He later graduated with a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Texas (2010), though his professional practice began in Cambodia where he dedicated two years volunteering with the Peace Corps (2011–2013). Since then, he has been traveling, teaching art, and organizing grassroots community initiatives. The concept of traveling to and learning from different communities is so ingrained in his work that in 2017 he transformed an ice cream truck into a nomadic studio space, the Artscream Truck, equipped to pop-up and present work or be a space for creating. Hurtado was the inaugural recipient of the Sylvia Hougland Emerging Artist’s Fund from Make Art with Purpose (MAP), which supported the creation of a 110-foot community mural, Convivo, in his native North Side of Fort Worth.

Arnoldo Hurtado is one of the first artists chosen as a Carter Community Artist.

Photo courtesy of Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Arnoldo Hurtado is one of the first artists chosen as a Carter Community Artist.

museums

Ancient Sculpture News

Fort Worth museum one of only 3 in U.S. to get rare sculpture exhibit

Lorenzo di Masi/Torlonia Collection

The Torlonia Nile

A major exhibition of ancient Roman masterworks is coming to the U.S. for the first time to be viewed at only three museums — including the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.

Called Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection, it's an assemblage of works stewarded by the Torlonia Family beginning in the early-19th century, and will be installed at the Kimbell from September 14, 2025 – January 25, 2026.

As part of the Foundation’s mission to showcase these historical works to the public, the exhibition will premiere at the Art Institute of Chicago on March 15 through June 29, before traveling to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Its third stop will be at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, from March 14 - July 19, 2026.

The Torlonia Collection was established during the course of the 19th century by the Franco-Italian banker Prince Giovanni Torlonia and his son Alessandro, then handed down over generations, eventually growing into the largest private collection of ancient Roman sculptures.

Today, the Torlonia Foundation represents the culmination of the Family’s continued passion for art. Created at the behest of Prince Alessandro Torlonia (1925–2017), the Foundation’s mission is to preserve and promote the Torlonia Collection and Villa Albani Torlonia.

In 1876, Prince Alessandro Torlonia (1800-1886) created a museum to house and exhibit the Family’s holdings, which was open to small groups until its closure at the onset of World War II. The sculptures remained unseen by the public from that time until the Foundation’s first exhibition at the Musei Capitolini in Rome in 2020. That was followed by a stint at the Louvre, the first presentation of the collection outside of Rome, where it has drawn more than 600,000 visitors to date, an unprecedented feat.

The exhibit
The curators of Myth & Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection are Lisa Ayla Çakmak and Katharine A. Raff of the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition is co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Torlonia Foundation, in collaboration with the Kimbell Art Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and The Museum Box. All of the sculptures in the exhibition have been restored by the Foundation with the support of Bvlgari.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Torlonia Foundation, edited by Lisa Ayla Çakmak and Katharine A. Raff, with essays by Silvia Beltrametti and Salvatore Settis.

The North American presentation will feature 58 highlights from the Torlonia Collection, including 24 newly restored works that have not been on view in nearly a century. The sculptures date from approximately the 5th century BCE to the early 4th century CE, with the majority of the works dating to the High Imperial period (1st–2nd centuries CE). Highlights include examples of the most emblematic genres of ancient marble sculpture, acquired by the Torlonia Family from the most prominent collections of Rome’s patrician families, as well as from excavations made on the Family’s own estates throughout Italy.

“The Foundation is excited to be sharing the Torlonia Collection with audiences in North America for the first time. This exceptional group of ancient sculptures is a testament to the enduring cultural legacy of ancient Rome, as well as the vision and passion of multiple generations of the Torlonia Family,” said Alessandro Poma Murialdo, President of the Torlonia Foundation.

The presentation is organized thematically in six sections, featuring sculptures found on the Torlonia Family’s properties in Rome and the surrounding suburbs and their estate in Porto, Portugal, as well as a number of exceptional sarcophagi (stone coffins), among the largest sculpted works in marble to survive from ancient Rome.

The tour reinforces the work of the Foundation to advance the appreciation and understanding of this unparalleled collection and the rich cultural heritage it represents. The Foundation’s mission is carried out through a continuous joint effort between the public and private sectors, including with the cooperation of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The Foundation is supported by a longstanding collaboration with Bvlgari as the principal sponsor of the restoration project since its inception in Rome and throughout the global tour, and Chiomenti, who has lent invaluable support to the Foundation’s core activities.

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