(top left to right) Christopher Blay; Lauren Cross; (bottom left to right) Diane Durant; Arnoldo Hurtado

(ARTFIXdaily.com) The Amon Carter Museum of American Art is pleased to announce Carter Community Artists, a new program dedicated to working with and supporting local artists with the goal to create opportunities for the North Texas community to connect with the museum’s renowned collection and artists in the region. Each year, the Amon Carter will select four local artists to assist with planning and leading programs on-site, off-site, and digitally. Now through September 2019, the museum will be working with artists Christopher Blay, Lauren Cross, Diane Durant, and Arnoldo Hurtado as part of the inaugural year for this new initiative. Throughout the year-long commitment, participating artists will be involved in a variety of projects and programs for children and adult audiences, with the flexibility to adapt to each artists’ particular areas of practice and expertise. The Carter Community Artists’ work with students is especially important as it has the potential to create a pathway for students to discover the many facets of and careers in the art world. Working in partnership with Amon Carter museum education staff, each artist will have the opportunity to be involved in developing and leading afterschool, homeschool, and summer programs; teacher workshops; and recording sessions for the museum’s distance learning program, which reaches students of all ages around the globe. As the museum continues to expand experiences for adult visitors over the coming year, the artists will have the chance to share their thoughts, ideas, and talents with staff to help develop original and fresh program formats and content.

Creating unique points of entries to the Amon Carter collection for visitors through the Carter Community Artists’ own responses to the works of art will provide innovative access for diverse audiences to not only learn about the museum’s renowned collection, but to connect with art in new and unexpected ways. The content produced through this project may be used on school tours, in digital assets, or in interactive materials such as gallery exploration kits designed for a visitor to engage in a self-guided experience.

The Carter Community Artists program also strives to build relationships between artists working in Fort Worth and the surrounding areas who may know of each other, but have not previously worked together. Over the course of the program’s commitment—each October through the following September—the artists will come together for six scheduled meetings to discuss and develop concepts and programs. Applications will be available each May and will be reviewed by a committee of Amon Carter education and curatorial staff with selections announced in August of each year.

The Carter Community Artists program is supported in part by grants from the Arts Council of Fort Worth and The William Randolph Hearst Foundation Carter Community Artists: 2018/2019 Class Christopher Blay Christopher Blay is an artist, writer and curator with a BFA from Texas Christian University (2003). He curates the Art Corridor Gallery at Tarrant County College Southeast and is an art critic for Glasstire. His work incorporates photography, video, sculpture, and performance, and his most recent work, Portraits With Strangers, is Blay’s return to photography, focusing on the mechanical and mediated process that creates an image. Two other recent projects, KWTXR, exhibited at UNT on the Square gallery, and The Seven Deadly Things at 500X Gallery are based on the fictional character Kara Walker Texas Ranger, and responds to historical violence against African-Americans. Blay’s ongoing public art project on East Rosedale Avenue in Fort Worth and his Coombs Creek Park sculpture Dindi (for Annibel) are two projects that connect the artist’s work to public spaces. In 2013, Blay received the SMU Meadows Museum’s Moss/Chumley award for his “proven track record as an active community advocate for the visual arts,” and the Nasher Sculpture Center’s Artist Microgrant in 2015. Blay was also the Spring 2017 Visiting Artist at the Dallas Museum of Art’s Center for Creative Connections, and is the first guest curator at Fort Worth Contemporary Art.



Lauren Cross

Lauren Cross is an artist, curator, and scholar, whose interdisciplinary artistic practice and scholarly work addresses gender and critical multicultural approaches in arts practice, arts entrepreneurship, curatorial studies, museum studies, and art history. Cross holds a BA in Art, Design and Media from Richmond, The American International University in London, England (2006); a MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA (2010); and a PhD in Multicultural Women's and Gender Studies from Texas Woman's University (2017). She is currently Program Coordinator & Senior Lecturer for the Department of Art Education + Art History's Interdisciplinary Art and Design Studies (IADS) program, and the founder of the arts non-profit WoCA Projects in Fort Worth, Texas.

Diane Durant

Photographer Diane Durant earned her BFA from Baylor University (2001); MA/BC from Dallas Theological Seminary (2004); and MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas (2007, 2013), where she currently serves as Senior Lecturer in Photography and Assistant Director of the Photography Program. She is the former president of 500X Gallery and past editor of The Grassburr, The Rope, Sojourn, and Reunion: The Dallas Review. In 2017, she edited and wrote the introduction for Rozafa's Milk, an anthology of poems from the Albanian-American Society of Writers published by Mundus Artium Press. Durant’s photographs have been included in Sun Magazine and featured online with Don't Smile, AINT-BAD, and Lenscratch. She is a member of both the Leadership Team for the Society for Photographic Education's LGBTQ Caucus and the Board of Directors for the Cedars Union, a non-profit arts incubator in North Texas. She currently lives in Fort Worth with her daughter, their four dogs, and a multitude of penniless cats.