Fort Worth recognized for support to arts community

Fort Worth recognized for support to arts community

Published on October 12, 2026

Fort Worth has received the Community Impact Through Arts Advocacy Legacy Award, honoring a community that takes transformational steps to support the arts.

The Texas Arts Advocacy Awards are presented every two years during interim legislative sessions. They honor the people and organizations who keep arts policy moving forward between session years.

"Your work at the city to raise the visibility and profile of arts and culture in Fort Worth City Hall - which we understand has never had a department or division of arts and culture - has not gone unnoticed by your colleagues in the arts sector," said Christopher Kiley, executive director of Texans for the Arts.

Arts and culture colleagues in Fort Worth highlighted these recent activities:

• Moving community arts contract services out of the Planning & Data Analytics Department and under the supervision of the Library Department, aligning the mission and purpose of community art programming with a department that also directly serves residents with cultural and educational resources.
• Efforts to ensure arts leaders are appointed to important advisory committees, like the 2050 Comprehensive Plan Technical Advisory Committee and the Library Strategic Plan Committee.
• Committing over 800 linear feet of public wall space across the city to be activated as professional-caliber gallery spaces to lift up local and regional artists.
• When plans for a downtown library shifted, rather than allowing the City to offload a historic property it had purchased for a downtown library branch, Fort Worth built a case to convert the building into an arts incubator (artist studios, gallery, potential retail, presentation/performance space) and ensured that the money from the sale of the previous central library property would stay with the building to support a successful rehabilitation and adaptation for its new purpose. Importantly, this project included a robust public input process and a strong working group of local arts professionals - a level of intentionality that cities sometimes bypass.

"Your impact can be felt in both the arts community and the city at large, and we are thrilled to honor your many contributions to Fort Worth," Kiley said.

Photo: A downtown property is being studied as a possible arts incubator space.

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