When I first moved to Texas, the farthest west I had ever lived for more than a few months was Philadelphia. My Texas knowledge was cursory at best: I had been to the DFW airport for layovers and Austin to visit a friend, but I was told Austin did not really count as Texas; it was an entity unto itself.
And so, 11 years ago, with scarcely more than the Marlboro Man and the cartoon of immigrant mouse Fievel Mouskavitch headed to the “Wild West” as my visual vocabulary of Western, I found myself moving to Fort Worth for a museum job. When I came for my finalist interview before “pulling the trigger,” I confess I had to look up where in Texas Fort Worth was.
I was astonished to see the Kimbell Art Museum during my site visit. I had studied the building in my undergraduate art and architectural history class and remember thinking to myself, “That is a beautiful building. Too bad it’s someplace I’m never going to go.”
When I visited Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for the first time, I thought “This is an impressive city. I can live here.” And so, rather than selecting a Southern East Coast city that was also competing for my move, I decided on Fort Worth and Fort Worth decided on me. I figured we’d have a three-year relationship or so and then I’d “mosey.” Such is the way with cultural gigs — to move up, one often must move on. Plus, I told myself, I do not plan to turn 40 here. Forty seemed like an age to get serious and to be where you wanted to settle down. Texas was to be an adventure, albeit a temporary one.
Despite never having set up camp out West, friends will tell you that my superpower is genuinely meeting people where they are. I was determined not to reduce my new life to stereotype. My Austin friend told me that Texas would suit me — the combination of the rusty and the new, the juxtaposition of cattle and culture, the deliciousness of Dr Pepper, tortillas, and avocados as far as the eye can see — would be something that an open-minded imbiber of cultural mores would appreciate. And I did. I found the queries from museum patrons baffling when they asked how I was acclimating to my “new culture.” I thought, “I move from world-class art museum to world-class art museum to my apartment. For all anyone knows, I could be in Pittsburgh.” Why I chose Pittsburgh as a point of comparison, I don’t know.
Maggie Adler
I will confess that when I first arrived, I was quietly disappointed that there were no tumbleweeds, that people weren’t hitching up horses everywhere, and that I didn’t really see much in the way of regalia. I did go to a JoAnn Fabrics in the early days and was charmed by a man buying bronco fabric for the windows of his RV. But that was about it. Still, I wanted boots; I wanted an adventure. I found myself compelled by young men who quoted literature but worked with cattle and oil — a combination I did not customarily conjure as a viable dating type when I was in Massachusetts. The bar was different here.
Whenever my “Yankee” friends came to visit, I was perturbed by their admonitions, limited expectations, and closed-mindedness. On and on I’d retort “This is my life. This is not a theme park. Texas is not full of stereotypes. This could be anywhere — and the best part for an arts professional is that everyone is invested in culture. They all put their support behind ‘their’ museums.” I felt that treating this place I had chosen to inhabit as a stereotype of misogyny, conservatism, and bigotry, was not giving Texas credence. I loved earnestly using the term “y’all” as inclusive. I thought of the trailblazing women who had started thoroughly modern museums here, from Carters to McNays to Menils.
And it was not just “outsiders” looking at Texas whose attitudes I felt it was important to combat. I met my favorite person, a sculptor born and bred here, and I thought it patently ridiculous how assiduously he denied his Texan identity. That he carried a utility knife with him always, or could crack a pecan against a pecan in his hand, I reminded him, was “super Texan.” I couldn’t believe that was a denigrating mark (which is how he saw it), because I was coming to understand how incredibly rich, nuanced, and vibrant the culture was here.
Mark Dion and Maggie Adler
I became the most ardent Texas apologist. I worked with passion on all occasions to say “This place isn’t what you think it is” and I think I became almost “from here” as much as an outsider can. A friend descended from one of Texas’ great families and a friend who grew up dirt poor on a patch of land outside of San Antonio collaborated on a design for a symbolic cattle brand for me, having benighted me with the honorific of “almost as Texan as a Texan.”
But I will confess to being tired these days of my one woman “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign, particularly my Fort Worth cheerleading. I started returning home from travel only to be irked by the ubiquitous airport announcements. Dallas’ mayor in his seemingly neutral accent would welcome DFW arrivers to his 21st century city, rife with opportunity for business and culture. By comparison, Fort Worth’s promo sounded like everything I had fought to debunk. I can’t remember the exact words, but to me they felt like a twangy “Howdy y’all. Mosey on down to Fort Worth, where twice a day we drive cattle down the Main Street and you can two-step and drink yourself silly down at Mule Alley.”
I think the mayor did mention world-class art museums and business opportunities, but the cadence and tone compared to Dallas’ polish stuck in my craw. I would fight diligently when people compared the two cities — it felt like the rivalry of two elite liberal arts colleges asserting their differences when they were cut from the same cloth. People from Dallas, so convinced of their superiority, were not even engaged in what I now realize is a one-sided debate.
The airport announcements about the “Modern West being alive in Fort Worth” didn’t really help my malaise. First, those of us in the cultural sphere draw a distinction between “Modern” and “Contemporary.” Modern connotes retro: Picasso, Jetsons, midcentury furniture … past projections into the future. Contemporary is au courant — of the now. Second, in an age of reckoning with problematic aspects of the past — the subjugation of non-white people most prominent on the list — do we really want to assert a relationship with notions of the mythic “West?” Can a city of today be polished and presentable in the worn chaps of yesteryear’s tropes? Why not more publicly herald Fort Worth as the home of Dr. Opal Lee, the Grandmother of Juneteenth, who is still marching in her 98th year for rights and privileges that should be self-evident?
In this age of divisive politics, I am beginning to own my hard-won Texas ennui. Like the proverbial boyfriend that I have been crazy about but of whom my friends disapprove, I’m starting to see that I might have been overcompensating. I am coming to the realization that no matter how much I try to dress Fort Worth up to represent the best aspects of what it is, the naked truth of it without the dressing is not what I’ve promoted it to be.
As a cultural worker in the 12th largest city in the U.S., I have worked like a fiend to have the art spaces represent a whole picture of the communities they serve, often to closed-minded retorts that could curl your hair. A city of this size and hoped-for stature devotes little to public support of the arts — the community arts center has shut its doors and the public art program, of which I am a commissioner, does remarkable work with precious little in the way of resources and is constantly on the chopping block. Y’all is supposed to mean “all.” Representation on walls, in books, and in public programs matters. This is a city rich in a vast variety of cultures, a mix of all sorts of people, and yet it’s a city that barely reflects that publicly, with a deeply invested oligarchy, where the beleaguered voices of a vocal “the old days were better” minority hold disproportionate sway.
“Cowboy” at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Image courtesy of Maggie Adler
Not too long ago, I was responsible for bringing an exhibition to Fort Worth that challenged a monolithic mythic notion of the cowboy. I left my museum before it opened, but the show was intended as a juxtaposition with heralded paintings of the late 19th and early 20th century by artist Frederic Remington, who, having lived in Westchester County, New York, was about as much cowboy as I am (currently less, since I have at least a decade more of residency “out West”). Remington’s paintings are inherently fictionalized though full of verisimilitude. Sure, they have some truthiness to them, but they are, fundamentally, calculated artistic works catering to a New York elite audience hungry for dime novel action.
Like any good businessman, Remington was astute at confirming what his audiences wanted, and his patrons were the white robber barons closing the open range, putting in railways, erecting property lines. His protagonists mirror his buyers, or, at least those patrons’ fantastic notions of what heroism might look like if they were less deskbound and more engaged in “the strenuous life.” Moved by recognition by the East Coast upper crust, Remington was far more successful at engaging in artistic romanticism as it pertains to the West than he was at lived experience — his post-Yale University attempt as a Western sheep farmer was abortive. That Remington should be held up as a paragon of cowboy identity in Texas museums, when, after a brief visit to Fort Worth in 1888, he had only complaints about food, lodging, and mosquitoes, calling Fort Worth “a miserable little frontier town,” is deeply ironic. And yet, apart from those invested in revisiting stereotypes in historical depictions of Indigenous people, Remington’s works elicit very little museum visitor ire.
As any good historian or contemporary ranch hand knows, the cowboy way of life is inherently multifaceted. Historically, countless Mexican vaqueros, Asian laborers, gay cowboys, Black cattlemen, and Indigenous workers played integral roles in the cultivation and building of the American West. Attend a professional rodeo today and note that many cultures and identities are well represented. The museum chose the exhibition Cowboy to open the dialogue and critically interrogate a John Ford-esque Hollywood paradigm of the West, one in which all Native people were antagonists and all heroes looked like John Wayne.
Mel Chin, “Rough Rider,” 2002, barbed wire and steel, 38 x 29 x 23 inches.
Photo: John Lucas
The exhibition did so by incorporating an elegiac film about one of the oldest continually running Black rodeos in Oklahoma, an installation featuring Latino cattlemen locked in embrace or dancing together, a film recounting the contributions of Asian Americans in the building of the West and a questioning of the perceived components of masculinity that is a tender ode to cattle, and a series of photographs that bring to light the often-voyeuristic way in which images of cowgirls are consumed. I am not privy to which of these exhibition components aroused a visitor critique, but a mere handful of days after the exhibition opened, it shuttered without fanfare, to ultimately reopen with prohibitive content warning placards, the billboards and signs removed, and the organization’s reticence to acknowledge the exhibition.
Was Fort Worth not ready to critically examine the nature of cowboys? Apparently not. My assumption is that conservatism of vocal people in power could not handle the tenderness of homosexual love. Maybe they could if the subject matter of cowboys were not sacrosanct — an expansion of who counts as one threatens a fragile, narrow conceit. Would a lovers’ embrace cause ire if the people involved had been dressed as ballet dancers?
People keep asking me questions about the “how” of this situation, even though I chose to depart the museum. How involved is the Board in curatorial oversight? How do exhibitions get approved? Canceled? I have heard tales that people think this is a unique problem of a museum that built its foundation on historical cowboy pictures. But I do not think those are the questions that need to be answered. Instead, might we focus on the “why” of this reaction?
It is tempting to chalk up the closure and the distress as a particular problem of one museum, yet I do not think what it signals is at all particular — to the museum, to the city, to this country. Shortly after I began writing this, another headline emerged like a canary in a coal mine. When Cowboy met with complaint, colleagues at other Texas museums implied their museums were not privy to the same maladies, but then Fort Worth’s Modern fell prey to a Sally Mann child pornography scandal and police intervention that left us art world people wondering, “Wasn’t this adjudicated a million years ago?” I will refrain from schadenfreude. Thinking this is one museum’s problem is too simplistic of an argument and a relief to those who want to believe it could not happen in their backyard.
In case it is not immediately obvious, art and culture nationwide are under threat. I started writing this essay before the current administration made this fact abundantly clear by overtly attacking arts and culture, the things that are sacred and make life worth living. Arts professionals are caught in the crosshairs. In fact, many of the best of us have chosen to leave institutions for now to do the hard work as independent agents amplifying artists’ voices.
There are audiences among us who would rather see their painted water lilies — the mac-n-cheese or chicken nuggets of the art world, delicious but safe — than visit a museum only to be confronted by uncertainty or to have their assumptions questioned. Museums and libraries are supposed to be places of expansion, of contemplation, incubators of dialogue. But, in case you have not noticed, they are at an inflection point in which it’s easier not to poke and prod, whether that prodding is mild or deeply probative. They are under scrutiny, and in order to do what they do best, they often have to do it silently.
I, too, like to escape to places of beauty, but can we not find beauty in works that are difficult or that display something outside of the realm of some individual’s limited experience? What threat is it really for museum visitors to see a tender expression of love between men? To think of this as a Texas problem, a Southern problem, an imagined idiosyncratic bigoted enemy problem, is to be surprised by the presidential machinations.
So, another reckoning comes to mind when I think beyond Texas to consider the cultural sphere in this country. Maybe what feels Texan to me about the art world right now is open expression of intolerance; if nothing else, Texans speak their minds. But that seems to simply be a bellwether of a larger cultural shift — Texas as harbinger of a society in which the cracks in the veneer of civility are showing.
Perhaps those well-meaning Texas ambassadors should have waited to ask me how I was “settling in” until year 11. After the novelty of Dr Pepper fades, after the 20th rodeo, I feel less at home here than when I arrived to open arms and seemingly open hearts. For what is a welcome when all are not welcome? But to assume this has something to do with a stranger immersed in a strange land is to ignore the wider problem; we’re not alone here, we’re just at the frontier.
