house his art collection and "be operated as a nonprofit artistic enterprise for the benefit of the public and to aid in the promotion of the cultural spirit in the city of Fort Worth and vicinity, to stimulate the artistic imagination among young people residing there." A chance meeting between Amon Carter’s daughter and New Yorker Philip C. Johnson (1906–2005) at a Houston dinner party led to the commissioning of Johnson as the future museum’s lead architect. Ruth Carter Stevenson (who was Ruth Carter Johnson at the time and no relation to the architect) had assumed the role of project manager for the new museum and was in a position to offer Philip Johnson the job. In February 1959, the City of Fort Worth and the Amon G. Carter Foundation entered into a contract for the creation of a museum of western art, with the city providing the remainder of the land needed to build the museum. Construction began in 1960, and the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art opened to the public on January 21, 1961 (see building history below). Raymond T. Entenmann, director of the Fort Worth Art Center, served as the Amon Carter’s acting administrator during the museum’s early months. Mitchell A. Wilder (1913–1979), a seasoned museum director working in Los Angeles, arrived in August 1961 to begin work as the museum’s director. The museum’s articles of incorporation and bylaws were adopted in the fall of 1961, and a Board of Trustees was appointed. In their early discussions, Wilder and the board decided that the museum’s programs and permanent collection should reflect many aspects of American culture, both historic and contemporary. This decision paved the way for an expansion of the permanent collection that first focused on acquiring American art from the nineteenth-century and, later, the twentieth. Under Wilder’s guidance, the museum collected heavily in the areas of nineteenth-century American art and photography. Wilder also established an academic publishing presence and built a record of organizing groundbreaking exhibitions. The museum published Paper Talk: The Illustrated Letters of Charles M. Russell in 1962, the first of many books on the art of the American West to originate from the Amon Carter. In 1966, Wilder reintroduced the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) to the nation by organizing a ninety-five piece retrospective of her work. The following year, 1967, American Art–20th Century: Image to Abstraction brought more than one hundred