Arts advocates plan path forward for Fort Worth’s fragile cultural scene

If you have a couple of hours to spare on Saturday, March 29, and care about the fragile cultural scene in Fort Worth, get your ticket now for Arts Fort Worth’s inaugural Arts Forward Summit at Texas Wesleyan University.

“This is an important event for the community to get together to support our cultural ecosystem as we try to find the best way forward for the arts,” said Wesley Gentle, executive director and president of Arts Fort Worth, who has steered it through a tumultuous period.

In 2023, the grant-making and advocacy organization doled out nearly $1.2 million in funds to large, like the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, and small, such as Decolonizing the Music Room.

But in 2024, a city council-led committee determined the Fort Worth Community Arts Center needed to be sold to the highest bidding developer due to $26 million in deferred maintenance. The organization thus lost the contract to manage the facility, formerly occupied by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. It included galleries, studios and performing arts spaces.

With Arts Forward, the organization has set a progressive agenda with established and emerging interdisciplinary voices in the community talking about hot topics. The programming is a result from community feedback, components of the 2014 educational plan and the staff’s expansive and exhaustive research into the big trends in how the arts promote community engagement.

Panels include the negatives and positive effects of artificial intelligence on art, innovation in arts education and how the arts promote mental and physical health and community healing. Among those taking on the heavy topics are Debbie Dacus, a music therapist whose family played a transformative role at Casa Mañana, Lauri McKay Bevan, who leads Imagination Fort Worth, William E. Girón, the executive director for the perpetually underfunded and underestimated Artes de la Rosa — Cultural Center for the Arts, Christopher Blay, the new director of public programs at the National Juneteenth Museum and Stephen Fung, a professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center who also works in the renowned Performing Arts Clinic.

Randy Cohen, vice president of research at Americans for the Arts, a national arts advocacy organization, is the keynote speaker. Mayor Mattie Parker will talk about the impact of the arts followed by an announcement from one of the organization’s partners.

At the core of the gathering, though, is that a lot of the city’s and county’s medium and small arts organizations are also underdogs.

“The question at the core of this is we need a strong and thriving art ecosystem,” Gentle said. Arts organizations have lamented the lack of a strong and diverse financial network for the arts. Just because it’s a city of well-endowed and strong art museums doesn’t mean it is as friendly for other arts organizations.

“In Fort Worth we have cooperation but not as a guide star,” Gentle said. “We’ve seen successful communities and it’s not one office but a strong network of groups and individuals.”

The goal is to make Fort Worth one of those communities.

The event also coincides with the Fort Worth Arts Dealers Association’s Spring Gallery Night.

Tickets and more information for the summit are available at artsfortworth.org/summit.

More information about Spring Gallery Night can be found at FWADA.com/gallerynight.

This story was originally published March 26, 2025 at 11:04 AM.