The Walton Family Foundation has awarded an unprecedented $20 million gift to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth in honor of the museum’s longtime board president, Ruth Carter Stevenson, who died in 2013.
The museum will receive the gift over a five-year period, it said in a news release. It is the largest gift in the history of the museum and establishes an endowment supporting future exhibition and education initiatives, the museum said.
Fort Worth billionaire Alice Walton is on the board of the Walton Family Foundation and is the daughter of Wal-Mart Inc. founder, the late Sam Walton. Her net worth of $33.2 billion puts Walton among the 50 richest people in the world, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
Stevenson’s daughter, Karen Hixon, Amon Carter board of trustees president, said her mother and Walton were longtime friends.
“Mother and Alice were great friends and shared an extraordinary love and knowledge of art — visionaries both.”
Karen Hixon
“Mother and Alice were great friends and shared an extraordinary love and knowledge of art — visionaries both. Alice has been an important part of the Amon Carter and its board for many years I am thankful for all she has taught me, and words cannot express my gratitude for this gift from the Walton Family Foundation in Mother’s name,” Hixon said in a release.
Walton served on the Amon Carter board from 2004 to 2015, and currently, she is chairman of the board of directors of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Stevenson was the daughter of the late Fort Worth Star-Telegram founder and publisher Amon G. Carter, the museum’s namesake, and his wife, Nenetta Carter.
It’s just the latest news from the museum, which, in December, announced that it had acquired The Fisherman, a 1917 oil painting by painter George Bellows. The museum already had a collection of 230 lithographs by Bellows, but The Fisherman is the first Bellows painting it has acquired.
The Amon Carter Museum was designed by renowned architect Philip Johnson and opened in 1961. It is home to one the nation’s preeminent collections of American art including paintings, photographs, sculpture and works on paper, according to the museum’s website.
The Fisherman, 1917, by George Fellows was recently acquired by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. [Photo Courtesy the Amon Carter Museum of American Art]
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