Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s 2025 season features diverse set of artists

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s recently announced 2025 schedule includes a diverse set of artists who span the forefront and margins of the canon.

The Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte is an interdisciplinary artist who builds sculptures, installations and paints. In “Alex Da Corte: The Whale,” curator Alison Hearst focuses on the past decade of his paintings. The show gets its name from Swiss psychologist’s Carl Jung’s night sea journey theory, in which the hero is devoured by a whale and descends into a land of ghosts. Painting to him represents “the mouth of the whale.” And like his other artworks, his paintings are in bright colors and reference pop culture, sex and power. It runs March 2–Sept. 7.

Running concurrently from March 15–July 27 is curator María Elena Ortiz’s latest dive into the museum’s permanent collection. “Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling” culls from Abstract Expressionism, one of the museum’s strengths, and adds references to artists of color. Williams (1926–90) and Bowling migrated from British Guiana (now Guyana) to Europe and the United States in the mid-1950s to escape national upheaval. The paintings incorporate African diaspora and the Indigenous cultures of South America into what otherwise may be seen as a Western movement, and highlight the complexities of colonialism on culture and in art.

Guest curator Christopher Blay, a TCU graduate who was a visible part of the local art scene before moving to Houston, returns with “David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time.” The title is taken from James Baldwin’s novel “The Fire Next Time,” but also refers to the fact the Dallas artist David-Jeremiah artist loves fire. Assembled are 28 paintings standing 10 feet tall each. Unlike some works, which feature fire, viewers instead instigate the fire in their heads. “David-Jeremiah’s work resides at the edge of the fire, and we see our faces and selves reflected back in the flickering flames,” Blay described in the curatorial statement. It runs Aug. 16–Nov. 2.

“Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting,” running from October-Jan. 18, 2026, is the first retrospective of the American figure painter Jenny Saville. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Senior Curator of Contemporary Collections Sarah Howgate and managed at the Modern by chief curator Andrea Karnes, is a collection of fifty works spanning her career. Saville helped propel figurative painting into the twentieth century while also questioning who gets to paint women and how female beauty is portrayed. As a modern artist, she works representation but also reveres the process and paints with sheer joy and passion.

This story was originally published December 13, 2024 at 2:26 PM.