The Modern Announces 2023 Exhibition Schedule

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth has announced the schedule of exhibitions for 2023.

Modern Masters: A Tribute to Anne Windfohr Marion

Through January 8, 2023

Modern Masters: A Tribute to Anne Windfohr Marion highlights the contributions of one of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s greatest patrons, tracing her support over nearly a half century. This exhibition of eighty works by forty-seven artists includes five renowned pieces from her collection, given to the Modern on her passing in 2021: Arshile Gorky’s The Plow and the Song, 1947; Willem de Kooning’s Two Women, 1954–55; Mark Rothko’s White Band No. 27, 1954; David Smith’s Dida Becca Merry X, 1964; and Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum III, 1967.

In addition to the recent gifts, this tribute features work from post–World War II art movements, including a major group of works by the Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock; iconic minimalist works by Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, and Richard Serra; and post-1970 photography by an international field of artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Yasumasa Morimura, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as works by other key artists such as Francis Bacon, Howard Hodgkin, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, and Sean Scully, among many others.

Each of the works presented in this exhibition was made possible by Anne Marion, Anne and John Marion, or The Burnett Foundation, in addition to gifts donated anonymously or in partnership with the Sid W. Richardson Foundation.

Nam June Paik, Video Flag Y, 1985. 84 ten-inch television sets, three Plexiglas cases, fans, LaserDisc players, LaserDiscs, and video tapes. 72 x 144 x 50 inches. JPMorgan Chase Art Collection © Estate of Nam June Paik

I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen

February 12–April 30, 2023

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen, a thematic group exhibition that examines the screen’s vast impact on art from 1969 to the present. This exhibition surveys more than sixty works by fifty artists over the past five decades. The artists included examine screen culture through a broad range of media such as painting, sculpture, video games, digital art, augmented reality, and video.

Screens have shaped culture in profound ways, affecting nearly every aspect of life today. Their pervasiveness has bred a 24/7 breaking-news cycle, the looming corporate-sponsored virtual-reality “Metaverse,” unlimited accessibility and content, and an ease in how ideas and images are distributed. I’ll Be Your Mirror starts in 1969—which saw the televised Apollo moon landing and the launch of the internet’s prototype, ARPANET—the watershed year where collective connectivity through screens was first mobilized in mainstream culture. This era forged what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan presciently deemed in the 1960s a “global village,” a place where distance is collapsed and people from across the world readily interact. Following this trajectory, contemporary life is hybrid and increasingly mediated through screens. These flat and finite surfaces embody more than what meets the eye—they hold up a mirror to society and contribute to the formation of meaning in life and mainstream culture.

More than 25,000 square feet of gallery space will be devoted to the exhibition, which will include iconic works by prominent national and international artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Cory Arcangel, American Artist, Gretchen Bender, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Arthur Jafa, Nam June Paik, Hito Steyerl, and Andy Warhol, and as well as several leading artists living in Texas, including Liss LaFleur, Kristin Lucas, and John Pomara. Several new and never-before-seen works by key figures Caitlin Cherry, Simon Denny, Kahlil Robert Irving, and Hasan Elahi will debut in I’ll Be Your Mirror. This is the most in-depth show of its kind in the Southwest region and only one of a few presentations exploring art and digital technology in the past decade at this scale. The exhibition is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and is curated by Curator Alison Hearst.

Robert Motherwell, Face of the Night (For Octavio Paz,1981, Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 180 inches, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund, © 1981, Dedalus Foundation Inc. / Licensed by VAGA at
Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting

June 4–September 17, 2023

Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting will be the first presentation in more than a quarter century to fully examine the mastery of Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), a major figure who shaped postwar art. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is an especially fitting venue to mount this exhibition given its institutional commitment to the artist’s work, holding over fifty works in a variety of media in its collection and hosting the final retrospective organized during Motherwell’s lifetime in 1991.

Organized by guest curator Susan Davidson, Pure Painting will feature a selection of visually compelling works chosen from throughout the artist’s lengthy and influential career. Beginning with the abstracted-figurative works that dominated Motherwell’s first decade of painting as he emerged in the New York art world in the early 1940s, the exhibition will highlight the subsequent key series that defined his oeuvre, offering new insights into his evolution as an artist. Although he was equally proficient as a collagist, a printmaker, and a draftsman, it is Motherwell’s expansive sense of painting that this retrospective will explore.

Jammie Holmes, I HAVE A DREAM, 2021. Acrylic and oil petals on canvas. Courtesy the artist. Image courtesy PD Rearick

Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible

August 13–November 26, 2023

Jammie Holmes: Make the Revolution Irresistible is Jammie Holmes’s (b. 1984) first solo exhibition in a museum. The artist is known for his figurative and expressive paintings depicting everyday themes that honor communities in the United States. Like artists Gordon Parks and Faith Ringgold, Holmes reacts to the social turmoil of his generation, creating works imbued with courage and determination. The social and economic struggles of his hometown, Thibodaux, Louisiana, inspire the artist to explore history and community in imagery that ranges from Black soldiers in Vietnam to home life to individuals mourning the passing of loved ones. Mixing loose figuration with symbolism and combining images, words, and letters, his paintings are infused with layers of meaning. With a profound sensibility, these paintings show the courage and spirit of the Black people.

Make the Revolution Irresistible exemplifies the Modern’s commitment to highlight living artists making significant contributions to the modern and contemporary art discourse. This exhibition presents a selection of large-scale paintings including new works created for the exhibition. Collectively, these works contextualize Holmes’s oeuvre as a force within contemporary art practices. Holmes’s narratives reflecting on Black life in the Deep South resonate with universal questions regarding the human experience.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Genesis, 1993. Oil, paper, newspaper, fabric, and charcoal on canvas, two panels: 60 × 100 in. (152.4 × 254 cm). High Museum of Art, Atlanta; purchase with funds provided by AT&T NEW ART/NEW VISIONS and with funds from Alfred Austell Thornton in memory of Leila Austell Thornton and Albert Edward Thornton, Sr., and Sarah Miller Venable and William Hoyt Venable 1995.54. © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Photograph courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map

October 15, 2023–January 7, 2024

The Modern will host the retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, an in-depth look at the work of a groundbreaking artist.

The largest and most comprehensive showing of her work to date, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures. Smith engages with contemporary modes of art making, from her idiosyncratic adoption of abstraction to her reflections on American Pop art and Neo-Expressionism. These artistic traditions are incorporated and reimagined with concepts rooted in Smith’s own cultural practice, reflecting her belief that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Using satire and humor, Smith’s art tells stories that subvert commonly held conceptions of historical narratives and illuminate absurdities in the formation of dominant culture. Smith’s approach blurs traditional categories and questions why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value.

Across decades and mediums, Smith has deployed and reappropriated ideas of mapping, history, and environmentalism while incorporating personal and collective memories. The retrospective will offer new frameworks in which to consider contemporary Native American art and show how Smith has led and initiated some of the most pressing dialogues surrounding land, racism, and cultural preservation—issues at the forefront of contemporary life and art today.

This exhibition is organized by Laura Phipps, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Project Assistant.