Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX January 17-May 24
In the exhibition New Horizons: The Western Landscape, highlighting some of the finest contemporary interpreters of the drama of nature in the American West, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art offers perspectives through fresh lenses. Viewers of the show may well find themselves seeing the actual landscapes of the region in new ways. As the exhibition literature states, “Drawing from diverse cultural and personal experiences, the featured artists explore themes of identity, memory, climate and place situated in the scenery of the West…a living, evolving terrain shaped by a wide spectrum of perspectives,” a land replete with “memory, myth and meaning.”
On view January 17 to May 24, the show includes painting and sculptures by Tony Abeyta, Bale Creek Allen, Sarah Ayala, Mick Doellinger, Craig George, Tiffany Huff, Dean Mitchell, Winter Rusiloski, Michael Scott, Kay Walking Stick, Don Stinson, Z.Z. Wei, Camille Woods and Steven Yazzie. Each of these artists brings new eyes to the ever-evolving West; each of them shows us forms we know or think we know. Then they shift, sometimes ever so slightly, or come up against forms that are unfamiliar, even jarring; and we find that we have to make sense of them all over again.
In Stinson’s LONE STAR AND POOL: LOBOS, TEXAS, the panoramic Western sky is familiar to us, perhaps comforting, as is the proportion of sky to land and the distant line of hills about a third of the way up from the bottom of the canvas. The kidney-shaped pool is distorted, as is the cracked, arid earth. And the pool itself is empty; brown weeds once sprouted in the brackish rainwater at the deep end. This familiar West is, in fact, the abandoned West, and the kidney—the organ that cleans the blood of mammals—is sick and empty. Why? What sort of calamity occurred here in this spectral suburban scene, a contemporary take on the ghost town trope of the Old West? And while the meaning may be perceived through a glass darkly, as it were, the story is open-ended and left for the viewer to write.
Pushing the concept of the Western landscape newly and even dimly seen and apprehended, the mark making in Rusiloski’s ANNIVERSARY STORM OVER ORION’S RIDGE evokes bows that are not rainbows but bows made of rain, bows raining down arrows of storm, as well as sails that are not sails but suggestions of winds that might fill sails. Shards of landscape and cloudscape almost resolve into shapes our eyes can rest on, but before they do, they merge and morph into other shapes, abstractions, that deny us the safety of forms we know. Something in the disposition of shapes and in the palette of Rusiloski’s work recalls Rembrandt’s STORM ON THE SEA OF GALILEE, one of the masterworks lost in the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, as if perhaps we might recover that painting in a dream.
With new images and voices making the familiar strange, making the comfortable uncomfortable, the works in New Horizons: The Western Landscape compel us to expand and restore the region to its majesty and mystery. —James D. Balestrieri
contact information(817) 738-1933cartermuseum.org
This story appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.
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