Texas Adventure
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announces collaboration with conceptual artist Mark Dion.
Excitement is building at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, where a new exhibition is being created for early 2020. The exhibition will include a sitespecific, large-scale installation done in collaboration with New York conceptual artist Mark Dion.
The museum has commissioned Dion to undergo a series of journeys through Texas retracing the footsteps of 19th-century explorers including ornithologist and artist John James Audubon, watercolorist Sarah Ann Lillie Hardinge, architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and botanist Charles Wright.
The journeys will end with The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion, which will open at the museum in February 2020. Not only will the exhibition feature the large installation, but also works on paper, paintings, objects and archival materials from the museum.
“The Amon Carter Museum of American Art is pleased to be partnering with Mark Dion, an internationally renowned influential and innovative artist, on a project that not only celebrates the museum’s holdings of 19th-century works on paper and paintings, but the adventurous spirit of the history of Texas,” says Andrew J. Walker, executive director at the museum.
The exhibition, which is influenced in part by Dion’s 2008 exhibition Travels of William Bartram — Reconsidered at the Bartram’s Gardens in Philadelphia and other projects in which Dion retraced the footsteps of historical figures, will allow the museum to deepen engagement with history by bringing the past into the present day. Over the course of two years, Dion will visit four distinct areas of Texas, including the Gulf Coast, the artist’s first trip having taken place in Galveston in spring 2018; West Texas, beginning in Fort Worth and concluding in El Paso; a special visit to King Ranch and Austin; and finally, San Antonio.
During Dion’s journeys he will be accompanied by travel “guides” specific to each region, including fellow artists and botanists, as well as a Comanche educator, poet and artist.
For more information visit www.cartermuseum.org.