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Fort Worth Arts Patron Ruth Carter Stevenson Dies


by Jerome Weeks 7 Jan 2013 1:22 PM

Her father built the heart or the Amon Carter Museum’s collection, but it was Ruth Carter Stevenson who built the museum — and then proceeded to expand its reach to national levels. She was 89.

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She was born the same year her father took over as publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram — a man who would go one to build a formidable collection of Western art by Frederick Remington and Charles Russell. It was left to his two children — as specified in his 1955 will — to build a museum for it. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (as it’s now called), designed by Philip Johnson, opened in 1961.

Stevenson herself, as head of the museum board, would help lead the Amon Carter far outside her father’s original focus on the art of the West – becoming, in the process, a major cultural figure in Fort Worth, a friend of Georgia O’Keeffe and a player on the national art scene as well. She married Jack Stevenson, the president of the board of the National Gallery of Art, which she would eventually lead as chair.

She was 89.

The Star-Telegram has her obit, the Amon Carter has a timeline of her life

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