The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announced three new exhibitions opening this December and January drawn from the museum’s renowned collection.

Looking In: Photography from the Outside, on view December 21, 2019, through May 10, 2020, features over 60 works by twentieth-century artists Richard Avedon, Morris Engel, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, Danny Lyon, and Paul Strand. Looking In examines the way artists have photographed groups they are not part of, exploring how they navigate their identity as “outsider” to an insular community. Twentieth-century books and magazines often employed artists to photograph unfamiliar communities and cultures for photo-essays, offering readers an opportunity to learn more about people they may never meet, but sometimes creating an implied dichotomy between the audience and the subject. These images walk the line between privacy and ethics, raising complicated questions about perception, representation and power. Looking In provides an opportunity for visitors to encounter these questions through the presentation of six different series by artists who each approached their project in a different way.

Tracing the Past: Scott and Stuart Gentling’s Birds of Texas, on view December 7, 2019, through March 8, 2020, is the second of two exhibitions dedicated to the Gentling brothers’ watercolors of birds that were featured in their 1986 portfolio of prints, Of Birds and Texas. Consisting of 21 original watercolors and drawings by the Gentlings, as well a comparative selection of books and works on paper by prominent artist-naturalists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this exhibition explores how the brothers looked to historical imagery by prior generations of artists to create their own works of Texas birds.

Eliot Porter’s Birds, an exhibition highlighting rarely seen color photographs of birds by the esteemed photographer that Ansel Adams described as the “master of nature’s color.” While Porter is widely celebrated for his color photographs of nature, his career-long focus on photographing birds is less known. This exhibition features these avian photographs drawn from the Carter’s extensive holdings of Porter’s work that is part of the museum’s renowned collection of American photography. On view January 4 through May 10, 2020, Eliot Porter’s Birds features over 30 photographs and archival objects presented alongside excerpts from the artist’s extensive writings about his activities, giving visitors an opportunity to feel a direct connection with the artist.