Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (“The Modern”)

A group of women founded the museum in 1892 under the name of the Fort Worth Public Library and Art Gallery; it is one of the oldest museums in Texas. Its first permanent building, by the Bauhaus-trained architect Herbert Bayer, opened in 1954; the Cultural District then grew up around it, with the arrival of the Amon Carter Museum and the Kimbell Art Museum, and the museum refocused on international art from the Second World War to today. The word “modern” only became part of its name in 1987.

By the mid-1990s the Gendy Street building could no longer hold the collections, programs and staff. In 1996 the museum bought an eleven-acre site in the Cultural District, directly across from the Kimbell, and began an international search for an architect. Tadao Ando (安藤忠雄) was commissioned in 1997 and construction began in 1999. Michael Auping, the museum's chief curator from 1993 to 2017, collaborated closely with Ando throughout the five years of design, so that the interior spaces would also serve the exhibition needs of curators and artists.

The new building, Ando's “arbor for art”, opened to the public on Saturday, 14 December 2002. The building's tenth anniversary was marked in 2012 with a public lecture by Ando himself, and its twentieth in 2022.

The building is made of five long, flat-roofed pavilions on a 1.5-acre (about 0.6-hectare) pond, set in eleven landscaped acres with a sculpture garden and terrace. The pavilions are five parallel volumes, three shorter and two longer: the galleries occupy the three shorter ones, on two levels; the entrance, a 250-seat auditorium and the shop sit in the two longer ones; and an elliptical mass projecting from the rectangular grid houses the restaurant and café.

Massive planar walls of architectural concrete express the structure and protect the collection. Around them, transparent glass walls forty feet high (about 12 m), framed in metal, form circulation spaces from which to see the building, the pond, the sculpture and the grounds. Immense cantilevered cast-concrete roofs shade the exterior and carry continuous linear skylights and clerestory windows; they rest on five Y-shaped concrete columns, forty feet tall, that stand in the pond and have become the museum's icon.

The wish to use diffused and reflected natural light in the galleries was a major influence on the design. The two levels and the modularity of the plan allow the galleries to vary, with three double-height volumes for sculpture; one floor can show the permanent collection while another hosts a major traveling exhibition. By day the pond mirrors the building; at night the concrete walls are bathed in an even glow, and the galleries of glass and steel look like large lanterns floating on the water and reflected in it.

In the grounds, Richard Serra's sculpture Vortex (2002) was commissioned for the museum. Inside, Jenny Holzer's Kind of Blue (2012), commissioned for the building's tenth anniversary, fills a double-height gallery that opens to water and sky on three sides: blue LED strips on the granite floor scroll her texts, which seem to flow into the pond and are reflected in it.

The Modern collects, shows and interprets art from the 1940s to the present. Its collection holds nearly 3,000 works of international modern and contemporary art, with works by Mark Rothko and Joan Mitchell, but also by Andy Warhol, Martin Puryear, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Cindy Sherman, Agnes Martin, Anselm Kiefer, Donald Judd and others. It also presents temporary and traveling exhibitions.

It offers tours, lectures, classes and workshops, first-run films, and music, dance and theater with local arts partners. The building also houses an auditorium, an education center, The Modern Shop and Café Modern, which has an outdoor patio.

The museum is at 3200 Darnell Street, in the Cultural District, about 2 miles west of downtown Fort Worth. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm (until 8 pm on Fridays), and closed on Mondays and on holidays, including New Year's Day, Juneteenth and Independence Day, as well as Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas. Tickets can be bought online or, on the day, at the admission desk; admission is free on Fridays, half-price on Sundays, and free under 18.

Parking is free in the museum lots. All public areas are accessible to wheelchair users. Personal photography is encouraged in most exhibitions, without flash or tripods; portrait photography, even personal, is not allowed in the galleries.