Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
— concrete pavilions standing in still water.
Not only on a wall.
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Five long pavilions set in a reflecting pond on the west side of Fort Worth, designed by Tadao Ando and opened at the end of 2002. The building is the second home for a museum that started in 1892, which makes it one of the oldest art institutions in the western United States and the newest important building in town. The Y-shaped concrete columns hold up flat roofs that float above the water. The collection inside is postwar, but the room people come back for is the room with the pond. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, known locally as The Modern, sits at 3200 Darnell Street in the Fort Worth Cultural District. The institution was founded in 1892 as the Fort Worth Public Library and Art Gallery, the first museum in Texas. The present building, by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, opened in December 2002 and covers about 153,000 square feet across five pavilions arranged along a 1.5-acre reflecting pond. The permanent collection holds roughly 3,000 postwar and contemporary works, with anchor pieces by Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol.
Ando's design is built from cast-in-place concrete poured to the standard he uses in his Japanese work, with form-tie holes left as a deliberate pattern across the walls. Each of the five pavilions is sheathed in a glass curtain wall and then ringed by an outer concrete shell, so the interior galleries face the pond through a layer of light-filtered ambulatory. The roofs are held up by 40-foot Y-shaped columns that emerge from the water itself. The building cost roughly $65 million and was Ando's first project in the United States.
The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays. General admission has historically been free on Sundays and discounted on Fridays. The reflecting pond and the lawn surrounding it are open to the public outside museum hours and have become a regular stop for joggers from the Trinity Trails and families walking up from the Cultural District. Café Modern, the in-house restaurant by chef Denise Shavandy, looks straight out across the water and is open for lunch and Friday-evening dinner. The Kimbell Art Museum, designed by Louis Kahn, is directly across Arch Adams Street.
