The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has opened the first public showing of the art collection assembled by Charles Butt, the Texas philanthropist best known as chairman of the H-E-B supermarket chain. American Modernism from the Charles Butt Collection, on view from October 25, 2026 through January 18, 2027, brings together more than 90 works by some of the defining American artists of the twentieth century, many of them never before seen in public.

The exhibition ranges from Winslow Homer and Thomas Hart Benton to Stuart Davis, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell and Andrew Wyeth, alongside Texas artists Mary Bonner and Everett Gee Jackson. Organised by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth and curated by Shirley Reece-Hughes, it is arranged in five thematic sections that follow Butt's own passions: intimate perspectives, the language of the sea, landscape, geometric utopias and new directions.

Butt's appetite for collecting began in his college years, when he discovered the work of Winslow Homer, and he later acquired one of Homer's great Bermuda watercolours from 1885. The Houston presentation includes that watercolour, Along the Road, Bahamas, as well as O'Keeffe's My Backyard of 1945, Wyeth's Sea Legs of 1984 and Davis's Gas Pump of 1932. A suite of lithographs and a monoprint by Jasper Johns, added exclusively to the Houston venue, closes the show with a look at American art's turn toward the nonobjective.

Museum director Gary Tinterow said Butt is widely known in Texas for his philanthropy and commitment to education, and less known for the discernment he brought to American art. The exhibition, part of a statewide tour, is co-coordinated at the MFAH by curators Alison de Lima Greene and Kaylin H. Weber.