Highlights from a fun few days in Fort Worth, TX (Cowtown)

Fort Worth is a very enjoyable city for tourists since most of its sights are located next to each other in the Cultural District - the zoo, the art museums, the botanical garden and the Will Rogers Coliseum complex

Founded in 1892, The Modern (the common name for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) is located in the city's Cultural District in a building designed by architect Tadao Ando which opened to the public in 2002

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art has a permanent collection that features paintings, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by leading artists working in the US and its North American territories in the 19th and 20th centuries

Plexus no. 34, Gabriel Dawes, 2018; this site-specific, commissioned work was created out of more than 80 miles of multicolored thread; it beautifully adorns the Philip Johnson-designed atrium of the Amon Carter

Series I, No. 1, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918; the artist taught for 18 months before returning to New York City where she painted this piece; O'Keeffe always asserted herself at a time when it was not considered proper for women to work outside the home

View of downtown from the Amon Carter Museum; the museum's original collection of 300+ works of art by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell was assembled by Fort Worth newspaper publisher and philanthropist Amon G. Carter, Sr.

The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (closed when I visited) houses a children's museum, planetarium and IMAX theater; I really appreciated the city putting all of the main museums in one area where you could easily walk to each one

Established in 1975, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame was closed when I visited; 200+ women are already in the hall of fame including Georgia O'Keeffe, Sacagawea, Annie Oakley, Dale Evans, Enid Justin, Temple Grandin and Sandra Day O’Connor

Dickie's Arena, opened in 2019, blends in perfectly with the other buildings of the Will Rogers Memorial Center; the 14,000 seat arena hosts concerts, sporting events, and family entertainment, and serves as the home of the Fort Worth Stock Show Rodeo

One of the most romantic gardens and on the National Register of Historic Places, the Rose Garden at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden was built with 4,000 tons of Palo Pinto County sandstone and completed in 1933

Spring Ballet, Andre Harvey, 1981; this delightful sculpture graces the entrance to the Fort Worth Botanic Garden; it is just one example of the many pieces purchased by the Fort Worth Art Commission to beautify the city

The gorgeous Art Deco Will Rogers Memorial Center was built in 1936 and functions mainly as an equestrian center; the complex will host early round games for the 2022 NCAA men's basketball tournament

The rose gardens at the Botanic Garden were outlined with slow-growing boxwoods creating gorgeous parterres (even with the roses not in bloom); this garden was just jaw-dropping and looked like a formal European garden dropped onto the prairie

I can just imagine Claude Monet painting here; Fort Worth contains 1,000+ natural-gas wells tapping the Barnett Shale within city limits with no restrictions on where they can be placed

Budgerigars (these are at the Fort Worth Zoo) are found wild throughout the drier parts of Australia, where they have survived harsh inland conditions for over 5 million years; its success can be attributed to a nomadic lifestyle and its ability to breed while on the move

Martha Washington (1856) and George Washington (1846), Rembrandt Peale; Peale boasted that, as the last living artist to have met the Washingtons, his paintings were the most reliable representations

Two Hummingbirds above a White Orchid; Martin Johnson Heade, ca. 1875-90; Heade's intricately detailed paintings transported the viewer from the everyday to faraway lands

Charlie Himself, Charles M. Russell, ca. 1915; his mural Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians hangs in the Montana state capitol building in Helena, and his 1918 painting Piegans sold for $5.6 million at a 2005 auction

A Bronc Twister, Frederic Remington, 1911; in 1887, Remington received a commission to do 83 illustrations for a book by Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail to be serialized in The Century Magazine before publication

Red Cannas, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1927; the artist explained her take on still-life paintings by saying - I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I see.

The Torment of St. Anthony, Michelangelo, c. 1487-88; this is the first known painting of Michelangelo completed when he was 12 or 13 and is the only painting by the artist on display in the Americas

The Kitchen Garden (Le Potager), Alfred Sisley, 1872; Sisley befriended Monet and Renoir in the early 1860s and spent most of his working life not in Paris but along the rivers Seine and Loing; he often painted with Monet and Pissarro in the 1870s

Weeping Willow, Claude Monet, 1918-19; this work belongs to a series of 10 paintings Monet completed as the fighting from WWI threatened his home in Giverny and as his eyesight worsened

Colonel Platoff on his Charger, Kehinde Wiley, 2007-8; Wiley is perhaps best known for his commission in 2017 to paint a portrait of former President Barack Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery