More than 90 paintings, watercolors and prints that have spent decades hanging in private, largely unseen spaces are about to greet the public at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection opens Sunday and runs through January 18, 2027, marking the first time the San Antonio supermarket chain's longtime chairman has let the public into his personal art world.
A Private Collector Steps Into View
The exhibition is on view on Level 1 of the Beck Building, according to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which organized the Houston stop in partnership with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Charles Butt is CEO and chairman of H-E-B, the San Antonio-based grocery chain named for his father, Howard Edward Butt, and the museum describes this show as presenting selections from his collection to the public for the first time. As the Houston Chronicle reports, Butt has guarded his privacy closely, a trait that was on display even during the exhibition's preview, and the origin, influences and methods behind his collecting have largely stayed out of public view.
Alison de Lima Greene, the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at MFAH, told the Chronicle that Butt's love affair with seascapes began with Winslow Homer, and that early on, before his means caught up with his taste, he could only afford a reproduction of a Homer work. Greene added that people simply reach out to art collectors, a glimpse into how a man known for guarding his privacy nonetheless built relationships across the art world. That Homer connection pays off directly in the show: Along the Road, Bahamas, a watercolor on paper Homer painted in 1885 while traveling in Jamaica, is part of the collection on view.
From Stieglitz's Circle to Maine's Coastline
Butt's holdings include numerous artists originally selected by Alfred Stieglitz for his Intimate Gallery in New York, per the Chronicle's reporting, tying the collection to one of American modernism's most influential early tastemakers. The exhibition's themes stretch across seascapes, urban life, American landscapes, geometry, abstraction and jazz. Butt's particular fondness for the sea carries through in his holdings of at least two dozen works by John Marin, most of which depict the Maine coastline, a pattern Texas Monthly ties to his own emphasis on marine scenes that echo his interest in sailing.
Joan Wyatt, who has managed and curated Butt's collection since 2022, worked alongside him to shape what ultimately reached museum walls. The collection also includes a dedicated section of watercolors by Charles Burchfield, with the Houston presentation devoting a special display to seven of them, according to CultureMap Houston. Greene noted that watercolor can be an unforgiving medium, since a single mistake can force an artist to throw out the entire canvas.
Works Spanning Jazz, Migration and Identity
Among the pieces on view, per the Chronicle, is Summer at Its Best, a 1968 painting by Alma Thomas, who became the first Black woman to join the White House's permanent collection. Jacob Lawrence's 1941 work The Wall depicts the artist's shock at encountering legally sanctioned segregation in the Jim Crow South. Rufino Tamayo's La Familia, from 1925, anchors a wall of familial scenes depicting Indigenous heritage in Mexican culture, while works by Alice Neel and Guy Pène du Bois round out the show's portrayal of New York City life.
Romare Bearden's 1971 collage Mama's Knee recasts the Madonna and Child with a jazzy twang, the Chronicle reports, and the show's final New Directions gallery brings together work by Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell. Georgia O'Keeffe's My Backyard, painted in 1945, was a work she was reportedly particularly proud of, having proven to herself that a small painting could be just as strong as a large one. The exhibition closes with a suite of six Jasper Johns lithographs on paper, concluding with a pair of his flag images that Greene said provide a kind of coda for America's 250th anniversary.
Conflicting Counts on a Texas-Wide Tour
The exhibition debuted at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth before stopping at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin on its way to Houston, part of what the Carter Museum calls a multicity tour of American modernism confined entirely to Texas institutions, according to the Amon Carter Museum. KUT reported the tour has remained within the state, and curator Carter Foster described Butt's collecting philosophy to the station by saying it wasn't like a trophy collection, suggesting Butt favored unusual or revealing works over the most famous available examples. The Fort Worth presentation ran from September 2025 through January 2026, and the Blanton's version, titled From Edward Hopper to Alma Thomas, continued through August 2026.
Exactly how many works make up the show depends on which venue's materials one reads. MFAH states its presentation features more than 90 works, while the Amon Carter's own materials describe the circulating exhibition as featuring over 80 artworks. The Chronicle reports the Houston stop reflects additional loans shown only in this city, with earlier iterations of the tour having had up to 10 fewer works than the roughly 93 now on view here. The thematic organization has similarly shifted between stops, with MFAH describing five sections while the Carter's version listed four, including Intimate Perspective, The Language of the Sea, Land Progressions and Geometric Utopias/Dystopias.
Butt's recent collecting has also leaned toward greater diversity, according to the Fort Worth Report, which noted he has focused on adding more works by Black artists to his acquisitions. After Houston, the tour is expected to make its final planned Texas stop at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, closing out a run that began in Fort Worth and has slowly opened a private collection to public view one gallery at a time.
