H-E-B honcho’s private art collection headed to San Antonio’s McNay
September 16, 2025 | In the PressFrom CultureMap San Antonio (https://sanantonio.culturemap.com/news/arts/charles-butt-art-exhibit-mcnay/)
A new traveling exhibit will soon give San Antonians a chance to peek at H-E-B Chairman Charles Butt’s private collection of 20th-century American art. The show, featuring more than 80 works, premiered at Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art in September and will hit Austin and Houston before making its final stop at the McNay Art Museum in spring 2027.
And, no, the collection does not include any of Andy Warhol’s famous soup cans.
The exhibit, "American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection," focuses on paintings and works on paper from the turn of the century through the ‘70s. This is the first time the portfolio will be available to the public; many of the pieces have never been publicly shown.
Butt, recently named the richest San Antonian by Forbes, has built an enviable catalog of important pieces from acclaimed artists like Romare Bearden, Edward Hopper, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alma Thomas, and Andrew Wyeth. The Carter Museum says the collection “embodies a distinctly American commitment to technical, conceptual, and aesthetic innovation.”
Carter Museum curators organized the show into four “thoughtlines,” including:
- Intimate Perspectives: A look at the role that intimacy and trust play in artmaking, pairing works by artists who had close relationships.
- The Language of the Sea: A section concentrating on artists’ connections to and associations with America’s coastlines.
- Land Progressions: An exploration of the significance of land to the creation of American Modernism, and how artists subverted landscape art to respond to changing urban environments.
- Geometric Utopias/Dystopias: A series of geometric abstractions presented in conversation with paintings depicting urban and rural post-industrial scenes: factories, farms, and machinery.
“The work in Charles Butt’s collection demonstrates the complexity and breadth of American visual culture in the twentieth century,” said Shirley Reece-Hughes, Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper at the Carter, in an earlier release. “The American modernist narrative is crucial to the Carter’s own collection, and this exhibition will both reveal new perspectives on some of America’s most well-known artists and introduce lesser-known artistic voices to our visitors, offering an expanded understanding of twentieth-century American art.”
The exhibit will be accompanied by bilingual interpretation and a free takeaway brochure featuring an interview between Butt and the Carter Executive Director Andrew Walker, a nod to Butt’s educational altruism. Guests can also purchase a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring essays by Reece-Hughes and University of Dallas historian Erika Doss.
Locals who can’t wait for the San Antonio stop can view the collection in Fort Worth through January 25, 2026. The exhibition will then travel to Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art in spring 2026 and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts in fall 2026 before landing at the McNay in spring 2027.
