Fort Works Art Enters its next decade with a new leadership team and a bold new model for fort worth

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 7, 2026

After ten years of building an independent cultural force, Fort Works Art expands its leadership, national programming and partnership with Gallery of Dreams.

FORT WORTH, TEXAS (August 11, 2026) - Fort Works Art was never built to behave like a conventional gallery. Over the last decade, the independent Fort Worth space has moved freely between the commercial and the cultural: mounting ambitious exhibitions, developing artists, creating public programs and bringing together collectors, institutions and communities that do not ordinarily meet in the same room. Founder Lauren Saba built the gallery largely outside the conventions of the traditional gallery world, and that independence has increasingly become one of its greatest assets. Ten years in, she is using it.

Fort Works Art is now undertaking the most significant expansion in its history, introducing a new leadership team and developing a national program of exhibitions, visiting galleries, artists and cultural collaborations designed not simply to broaden the gallery’s reach, but to change the role an independent arts organization can play in Fort Worth. The idea is both ambitious and surprisingly simple: create cultural experiences important enough that people travel to Fort Worth specifically to see them. For this, Saba has recruited one of the most consequential museum leaders in the city’s recent history to help build it.

Andrew J. Walker, Ph.D., who served for fourteen years as Executive Director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, joins Fort Works Art as Chief Curatorial and Strategic Executive, helping shape the gallery’s direction, national programming and long-term strategy. Walker’s move represents an unusual convergence of two very different corners of the art world. His arrival brings an extraordinary level of curatorial authority and institutional credibility to Fort Works Art at precisely the moment the gallery is expanding its national ambitions. Over the course of his museum career, he built deep relationships with artists, collectors, museums and galleries across the country. 

Working with Saba, Walker will draw on that network to build a new kind of exhibition program. A program centered on partnerships with nationally respected galleries, artists and curators and designed specifically for Fort Worth. ACA Galleries in New York, founded in 1935, is among the first of those relationships being developed, offering a glimpse of how Fort Works Art can bring significant exhibitions and new voices into the city without relying on the conventional gallery or art-fair model.

The same expanded network will also create opportunities to bring major established artists into the Fort Works Art program, including artists of the caliber of James Surls and Faith Ringgold. For Fort Worth collectors, that means access not only to emerging and mid-career voices, but to museum-caliber work and significant pieces for serious collection-building, without having to leave the city to find them. The exhibitions may be more focused and shorter in duration, but broader in reach, surrounded by collector events, conversations, dinners, film, fashion, music and other programming that can turn an individual show into a larger cultural moment.

That is where Gallery of Dreams becomes central. Through its nonprofit partner, Fort Works Art can extend exhibitions into free public programming, artist conversations, education, student engagement and interdisciplinary collaborations across the city, pairing the entrepreneurial reach of a commercial gallery with the public impact of a nonprofit. The implications reach far beyond the art market.

Fort Worth already possesses museums and collections that rival those of much larger cities. What Fort Works Art and Gallery of Dreams can add is another layer of cultural infrastructure: flexible, changing programming capable of bringing artists, galleries, collectors and culturally curious travelers into the city, and connecting them to everything already here. The timing is significant. As Fort Worth’s film and production industry rapidly expands alongside its established museum and hospitality communities, the city is becoming unusually fertile ground for programming that move across all the arts.

The expanded leadership team also includes Amy Rasor, Director of Growth and Impact. With over 30 years of experience in the non-profit sector and a deep understanding and involvement in the arts in Fort Worth, Rasor will lead sponsorships, grants, strategic partnerships and civic and philanthropic relationships across Fort Works Art and Gallery of Dreams, building the support and reach behind the organizations’ expanding programs. Her investment is in the people of our city and leading with purpose. It is at the foundation of her work, and will ensure that as the organizations expand, their impact on our community grows with them. 

For Saba, that is the larger opportunity. “Fort Worth doesn’t need us to recreate another museum or another New York gallery,” she said. “Those already exist, and they do what they do exceptionally well. What we can build is the space between them. We can move quickly, take risks, invite people in and create something around an exhibition that can spread across and help define what culture means in our city.”

Jordyn Garca will continue to bring the exceptional level of skill and care that has made her integral to Fort Works Art, overseeing the artists, exhibitions, clients and day-to-day gallery operations that underpin its continued growth.

What emerges is not quite a gallery, not quite an institution and certainly not an art fair. That may be its advantage. For years, Fort Worth collectors have traveled elsewhere to encounter the broader art world. Fort Works Art is betting that some of the traffic can run the other direction.

If you require additional information, please email info@galleryofdreams.org.