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Fort Worth Opera and the Kimbell Celebrate Fort Worth’s Heritage
Fort Worth Opera will present Cowboys & Culture, a multimedia concert celebrating the music, stories and spirit of the American West, on Thursday, February 5, 2026, at 6:30 p.m. at the Kimbell Art Museum’s Renzo Piano Pavilion.
Presented during the closing week of the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo, Cowboys & Culture features internationally acclaimed dramatic tenor Clifton Forbis, current professor and chair of voice at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, alongside Fort Worth Opera’s 2025–26 Hattie Mae Lesley Resident Artists: soprano Melissa Martinez, mezzo-soprano Madeline Coffey, tenor Coleman Dziedzic, and bass-baritone José Olivares.
Projected artwork by contemporary Western painter Kevin Chupik will be woven throughout the concert, pairing visual storytelling with vocal performance. Between musical selections, Fort Worth Opera Producing Director Kurt Howard will interview Chupik live onstage, inviting audiences into the ideas behind the imagery and the West it reflects.
The evening’s musical program includes Western-themed operatic repertoire and American works, with selections from Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, Craig Bohmler and Steven Mark Kohn’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and Héctor Armienta’s Zorro, plus traditional selections that reflect the West’s mythic pull and Fort Worth’s own cultural identity.
Clifton Forbis, photo courtesy of Fort Worth Opera
“As the Opera marks its 80th season, we wanted to embrace all of Fort Worth in the celebration,” said Angela Turner Wilson, General and Artistic Director of Fort Worth Opera. “’Cowboys & Culture’ isn’t just a slogan here, it’s what we’ve always been: proud of our Western heritage, and proud of the artistic tradition that has grown alongside it for generations.”
Forbis echoed that idea, describing opera as something that has always belonged to everyday people — an art form that traveled west as the country grew, and still feels rooted in community no matter how big the stage.
“Before my day and anybody else’s, there were traveling companies going from city to city doing shows,” Forbis said. “And it’s not just back then. Opera isn’t this rare thing that only exists in some far-off world. Even for the performers, most of us are just normal folks. One of my favorite things about working festival season at the Met was going down to the canteen and seeing friends you haven’t seen in a year, just sitting and having lunch. It’s like coming home, right there in the biggest city.”
Performing with Fort Worth Opera will carry an even stronger sense of homecoming for Forbis as his first professional appearance — right out of the graduate program at SMU — was in the Opera’s 1990 production of Stewart Copeland’s Holy Blood and Crescent Moon.
Forbis went on to a wide-ranging international career as an in-demand dramatic tenor, but always returned for major milestones close to home, such as the opening of Bass Performance Hall in 1998, a concert with Denyce Graves to open the Winspear in Dallas in 2009, and the title role in Verdi’s Otello during the Winspear’s inaugural season.
“Clifton has worked at the highest level, on the biggest stages, and he still carries himself like the person next door,” Turner Wilson said. “That combination — excellence without pretense — is part of what makes him so special, and it’s exactly the spirit we want audiences to feel in Cowboys & Culture.”
As part of Fort Worth Opera’s long-standing commitment to developing emerging talent, Forbis will share the stage with the company’s Resident Artists, four talented singers at the start of their professional careers.
“It’s fun to watch the next generation emerge onstage in front of you,” Forbis said. “It’s a special feeling to hear these incredible young people and know that the business I love is going to be in good hands.”
Kevin Chupik, Railhead
Image courtesy of Fort Worth Opera
For Western art lovers, the evening presents an opportunity to see Kevin Chupik’s work through a musical lens — and hear the story behind it, in the artist’s own words. A Texas-trained painter, Chupik earned his BFA from Texas Christian University and his MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His subjects bring traditional Western imagery into conversation with modernity, often with touches of irony or humor, and his work is collected nationally and internationally.
“Kevin’s work feels right at home in this program,” Turner Wilson said. “It has real respect for Western heritage, but it also has personality — it’s fresh, it has wit, and it invites you to look twice.”
Chupik’s work is currently on view locally in Grit and Grace at William Campbell Gallery in Fort Worth from January 15 through February 7, 2026.
Cowboys & Culture, a Concert at the Kimbell Art Museum
60 minutes, no intermission
Kimbell Art Museum, Piano Pavilion
3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, TX 76107
Thursday, February 5, 2026 — 6:30 p.m.
For tickets and more information, visit fwopera.org.
