Walton Ford

Ford’s mid-career survey, Tigers of Wrath, opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006, and traveled to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas through 2008. The exhibition included over fifty watercolors drawing from a wide range of sources, including writings by the painter and naturalist John James Audubon. Ford’s first institutional exhibition in Europe opened at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart in 2010, and traveled to the Albertina in Vienna and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, through 2011. In 2015-16, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris staged an exhibition of works by Ford, highlighting a series inspired by the Beast of Gévaudan—a wolflike creature who, according to legend, attacked rural villagers in eighteenth-century France. In 2024, Ford unveiled a major site-specific exhibition of new paintings conceived in response to the collection of the historic Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, Italy, which opened during the 60th Venice Biennale. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York concurrently mounted a solo exhibition of Ford’s studies and sketches, displayed alongside drawings from The Morgan’s renowned permanent collection.

In 2007, Taschen published the most comprehensive survey of Ford’s oeuvre to date, Pancha Tantra, titled after the ancient Indian collection of animal fables; the revised, fifth edition was released in 2024. Ford’s work is included in a number of private and public collections, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.