Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth opens exhibition schedule with celebration of surrealism

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth joins museums across the world in celebrating the 100th anniversary of surrealism, the trippy early 20th century art movement, and begins its 2024-25 exhibition schedule with “Surrealism And Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940,” which opens Sunday and runs through July 28.

Surrealism, like many art movements, is known by a single personality. Here we have a mustached Salvador Dali and hallucinogenic paintings and sketches tapping the unconscious. Yet women and people of color were pivotal to the complex movement, as curator María Elena Ortiz, an expert in the art of Latin America, the Caribbean and United States, shows.

The show gets its name from the essay “1943: Surrealism and Us” by French artist and writer Suzanne Césaire. She forcefully argued that the western movement had the potential to liberate those in her homeland of Martinique, and the Afro-Caribbean people.

Ortiz uses the essay’s premise to show how artists over time have referenced and responded to the movement through the lenses of the Afro-Surreal and Afrofuturism, which relate to surrealism’s broad ideas including introspection, liberation and history.

Locals will recognize some of the artists, such as Romare Bearden, Kerry James Marshall and Kara Walker. They, too, should be delighted by others who making their Fort Worth debuts, like Hew Locke and Dalton Gata.

Immersion, diversity and color are a theme the rest of the season, with three solo shows bringing younger artists who reflect, push boundaries and can make you smile or cry.

Running May 24-Aug. 25 is “Rebecca Manson: Barbecue”, Brooklyn-based Rebecca Manson’s the first solo exhibition, and “Freeman + Lowe: Sunset Corridor,” which runs Oct. 6–Jan. 5, 2025. Both are curated by assistant curator Clare Milliken.

Manson is a sculptor, and one who pushes the medium to the edge of being a theme park. Immersion and interaction are part of her practice. There’s plenty to see. Barbecue is about beauty, with the artist creating navigable mounds set among autumn falling and fallen leaves reveals a tension that at any moment a flick of flames from the grill could set everything on fire and end it all. It’s an apt metaphor for an election year.

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe continue their tale of a metroplex — that is the imagined San San Corridor, a merger of San Diego and San Francisco. The concept is based on a midcentury 20th century futurist theory that their dynamic growth led to a merger in 2000. “Sunset Corridor” is the latest chapter. In this alternative universe, subversive and rebellious young people occupy buildings megacorporation IBM’s buildings, hack into crucial infrastructure and create a vibrant underground music scene. They build around five architectural “zones” and pair it with video.

“Diaries of Home” features the photographs of 11 powerhouse women and nonbinary artists such as Laurie Simmons, subject of a show at the museum in 2019, and Letitia Huckaby, perhaps the city’s most well-known photographer. Curated by chief curator Andrea Karnes and Milliken, each were chosen for how they weave ideas of family, community and home and shake up traditional depictions about domestic, familial and communal spaces. It runs Nov. 17–Feb. 2, 2025.

Looking at the work of the Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte is like getting a sneak peek at decades of Pantone’s color of the year, wrapped on random objects and sold at a kitschy dollar store. He’s a multidisciplinary artist who critiques pop culture and consumerism with snark and color. He’ll be on display beginning March 2025 in the solo show “Alex Da Corte: The Whale.” Curator Alison Hearst focuses on the past decade of his career and his paintings, of which there are and includes more than 40 in the show along with several drawings, and a video portraying painting as a performative act. Described as a “beautiful trash-scape of contemporary culture” it, like the rest of the season is something you cannot find at a local dollar tree.