On 7 November 2026 the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth opens “Lava Thomas: In Our Own Regard”, a site-specific installation in the museum’s sloping gallery that will remain on view into November 2027. Based in Berkeley, California, Lava Thomas is known for meticulous large-scale drawings and portraiture that insist on visibility, memory and embodied presence.
Looking Back II and a personal archive
At the centre of the installation is Looking Back II (2015), a six-by-six-foot work in graphite, charcoal, watercolor and Conté on paper that the Carter recently acquired. Thomas surrounds it with seven further large-scale portraits drawn from her personal family-photograph archive — images that become both source and subject as she asks how portraiture can hold individual and collective histories.
Wallpaper from the Exoduster archive
A newly commissioned, artist-designed wallpaper incorporates historic negatives from the Carter’s Mary Everhard Collection, which documents Black “Exoduster” communities in early twentieth-century Kansas. Personal and institutional archives meet on the wall: Thomas’s relatives and the museum’s photographic holdings share a room, asserting the dignity of people often left out of American art history.
Why Fort Worth
Supported in part by the William E. Scott Foundation, the project continues the Carter’s series of contemporary interventions in the sloping gallery. For visitors, “In Our Own Regard” is less a temporary hang than a year-long argument about who gets remembered — and about how a Texas museum’s collection can speak with an artist’s family album without erasing either voice.