By Edward Brown // Jun 30, 2026
To honor the pioneering and visionary men and women shaping culture and quality of life in Cowtown, PaperCity Fort Worth launched a monthly series called “Fort Worth’s Finest.”
In May, we sat down with Anette Soto Landeros, Chief Strategy Officer at Trinity Metro, to discuss the future of transit in our city.
Now, we turn our attention to Wesley Gentle, whose leadership and advocacy for the arts, as the executive director and president of Arts Fort Worth, have helped the nonprofit weather challenging periods and emerge more resilient than ever.
Life was filled with homespun music long before he became one of Fort Worth’s leading cultural advocates. His childhood home in Central Florida nurtured generations of musicians, from his grandmother, who played the organ at church, to relatives who sang or played instruments.
“I had a family that knew how to share culture through music and other forms of art,” Gentle tells PaperCity Fort Worth. “I eventually attended TCU as a vocal performance major. After performing in the 2015 Fort Worth Opera festival, I realized my gifts could be better used supporting the arts community as an arts administrator.”
Today, he leads Arts Fort Worth during one of the most transformative periods in the organization’s history. Since becoming executive director in 2022, he has guided the nonprofit through the loss of the Community Arts Center, championed new initiatives like the annual Arts Summit, and worked to expand opportunities for artists — all while remaining focused on building a stronger arts ecosystem for Fort Worth.
Leading Arts Fort Worth Through Major Changes
The 2024 decision to hand management of the Community Arts Center at 1300 Gendy Street back to the City of Fort Worth, Gentle says, was “extremely hard.”
“The Community Arts Center had been the long-time home for our organization and for so many organizations,” he says. “In the years leading up to that decision, the Arts Center had deepened its commitment to emerging artists in ways that I was proud of. Ultimately, the decision was a financial one.”
Gentle and his team also rebranded the nonprofit from the Arts Council of Fort Worth to Arts Fort Worth to better communicate its role as an independent nonprofit that supports artists and arts organizations across Fort Worth, rather than a city department.
“The organization had been around since the 1960s, but there was still confusion with the previous title. Fort Worth does not have a department of arts and culture, and they had outsourced many of those responsibilities to the Arts Council. That confusion made it hard to raise money, so we removed those barriers.”
Freed from the financial demands of maintaining a historic building, Arts Fort Worth has doubled down on its core mission — distributing hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants each year while launching initiatives like ARTSforward and reimagining the Heart of Gold Awards.