CRYSTAL BRIDGES MEMBER MAGAZINE
APRIL 2018
1 VOL VII ISSUE I
We Thank You For Your Support FOUNDING ENDOWMENTS FOR COLLECTIONS, OPER ATION, AND BUILDING
N E X T G E N E R AT I O N F U N D SPONSORED ADMISSION ENDOWMENT
EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE T HROUGH THE ARTS
Windgate Charitable Foundation
SCHOOL VISIT ENDOWMENT
CL ASSROOM LEARNING ENDOWMENT
T YSON SCHOL ARS OF AMERICAN ART ENDOWMENT & DON T YSON PRIZE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF AMERICAN ART
PROGR AM ENDOWMENT
EDUCATION STUDIOS ENDOWMENT
Jack and Melba Shewmaker Family
Doug and Shelley McMillon
A D D ITI O N A L CO N T RI B U TO R S TO THE NEX T GENER ATION FUND
EDUCATION AND PROGR AMMING
Pamela and Wayne Garrison
Reed and Mary Ann Greenwood
TR AILS & GROUNDS
The J.M. Smucker Company
Paul and June Carter Family
VA N CLI B U RN S E RIE S E N D O W M E N T Kelly and Marti Sudduth
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Reed and Mary Ann Greenwood
Kay and Ellis Melton
Chip and Susan Chambers
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MEMBER MAGAZINE
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CHIEF DIVERSITY + INCLUSION OFFICER
Rod Bigelow DEPUTY DIRECTOR
It is with mixed feelings that I pen my last letter to you. I am
Sandy Edwards
embarking on a new chapter in my career, leaving Crystal Bridges to embrace the writer’s life. It’s an exciting and, yes, a slightly terrifying move. I suppose any new endeavor feels that way in the beginning.
CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER
Jill Wagar DIRECTOROFCURATORIALAFFAIRS +STRATEGICARTINITIATIVES
Margi Conrads
However, I’ve done it before—I came to Crystal Bridges with only a very basic understanding of American art. Most of the artists in the museum’s collection were completely new to me; and some of them were, frankly, baffling. Nevertheless, over time I learned about the artists, their work, and what motivated it, and gradually the stories unfolded, giving me new perspectives on American history and experience. I have also had the privilege of interviewing dozens of artists—some famous, some relatively unknown. From them I have come to understand the impulses to create and communicate that drive them, and to recognize the same needs in myself and in others.
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS
Diane Carroll SENIOR EDITOR
Linda DeBerry CREATIVE SERVICES MANAGER
Anna Vernon SENIOR DESIGNER
Laura Hicklin CONTRIBUTORS
As we all live in this world, we all encounter similar stuff. We love certain people and places. We struggle with change. We dream of the future and remember the past. We all experience moments of transcendence and moments of despair. In that respect, the artists in Crystal Bridges’ collection are no different from me or you. Their stuff is the same as ours, it is their means of grappling with that stuff and translating it into a sharable, visual form that is unique. And sharing—communicating—is key. Every artist I interviewed spoke of their desire to share their experience, through their artwork, with others. Every one of them was striving to facilitate a connection that would elicit a corresponding human impulse in the viewer. Every single one. For me, that realization has opened doors to greater understanding and appreciation of the artists, the artwork, and on some level, the human condition itself. No matter where my future path may lead, I will carry that with me. And isn’t that what Crystal Bridges is supposed to do? Change is hard. Change is good. I go forward holding this place, its lessons, and all the people associated with it, in my heart. LINDA DEBERRY SENIOR EDITOR
Alejo Benedetti Mindy Besaw Linda DeBerry Lauren Haynes Megan Martin Rachel Tucker Dylan Turk EDITORIAL ASSISTANT
Alison Nation PHOTOGRAPHY
Marc Henning Stephen Ironside Dero Sanford MEMBERSHIP + DEVELOPMENT
Ana Aguayo Robyn Alley Jodi Burks Brandi Cline Angela Hodges Emily Ironside Amanda Magoffin Megan Martin Kaylin Mason MacKenzie Stuart Will Watson Ashley Wardlow
Do we have your email address? If you’re not getting special announcements, event reminders, and our eNewsletter, then the answer is no.
Don’t miss a thing. Send your email address to embership@crystalbridges.org Environmentally friendly 100% Recycled (post-consumer waste) Made with renewable energy Acid Free
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CRYSTAL BRIDGES MEMBER MAGAZINE APRIL 2018 VOL VII ISSUE I
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ACQUISITIONS + NEW ON VIEW
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MUSEUM STORE
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A CLOSER LOOK
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WHAT’S NEW
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COMING SOON
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MUSEUM NEWS
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THE O’KEEFFE MYSTIQUE
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MEMBERSHIP
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DISCOVERING A NEW GENERATION OF ARTISTS
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HOW DO YOU FIGURE + THE GARDEN
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TRAILS + GROUNDS
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COLLECTION SPOTLIGHT
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BACK STORY
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PHILANTHROPY
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C MAGAZINE IS THE MEMBERSHIP PUBLICATION FOR CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART.
CELEBRATIONS
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LAST WORD
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Member Priority Line: 479.418.5728 MON • TUE • 8 am to 5 pm WED • THU • FRI 8 am to 9 pm SAT • SUN 10 am to 4 pm Purchase gift memberships with a 10% discount at CrystalBridges.org/ Membership. 32
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MUSEUM STORE
NOW IN THE MUSEUM STORE
2018 STUDIO EDITIONS BY DALE CHIHULY Each year, Chihuly Workshop collaborates with Dale Chihuly to create four Studio Editions. Each handblown piece is inspired by one of the distinctive series of artworks Chihuly has created throughout his career.
Pictured is the Laguna Persian.
Please call for pricing: 479.657.2310. Come in soon and add one of these remarkable new works to your collection.
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David Emery
Additional 2018 Studio Editions are Ivory Luster Basket, Capri Blue Seaform, and Tuscan Red Seaform.
WHAT’S NEW?
Early American Art Galleries Reopen! Loans Enrich the Experience
In the reinstallation of the Early American Art Galleries, the artwork on view is primarily from the Crystal Bridges collection, but to better represent the rich diversity of people and experiences that reflect American stories, the galleries also include artwork borrowed from other museums.
LAKOTA PARFLECHE ENVELOPES On loan from Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City Women typically made parfleche containers from rawhide to be used for storage and transport of belongings. The most common type was an envelope made from a flat, rectangular, folded piece that could expand when filled. Typically painted with colorful geometric designs, this particular pair is unusual because the face of each flap is decorated with beadwork. Due to their fragility, these
envelopes were likely never used to hold objects. The artist disregarded functionality, transforming her parfleches into works of art intended for display.
JOSÉ DE ALCIBAR, DE ESPAÑOL Y NEGRA, MULATO (FROM SPANIARD AND BLACK, MULATTO) On loan from Denver Art Museum Exhibited alongside Crystal Bridges’ American colonial portraiture, De Español y Negra, Mulato (From Spaniard and Black, Mulatto) is an example of a casta painting, a genre developed in the early eighteenth-century in Mexico. Depicting the intermarriage and mixing of three main racial groups (Spaniards, Africans, and Indians), casta paintings were a construction of Mexican national identity, but also functioned to reinforce social hierarchies. Typically, families with a Spanish male were privileged and portrayed as wealthy.
This intimate scene of a family provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of eighteenth-century Mexico. The African mother prepares hot chocolate in a copper pitcher while the young son holds a silver pot with coals for his father to light his cigarette. Both chocolate and tobacco were products of the New World. The clothing reflects the international trade that was part of colonial culture in Mexico: the father’s coat is Asian, the child’s is European, and the mother wears a striped rebozo, or shawl, common among Mexican women of the lower and middle classes. Don’t miss these artworks and more on view in the newly reimagined Early American Art Galleries. MINDY BESAW CURATOR
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“The Niche:” A Place for Innovation As a part of renovating the Early American Art Galleries, Crystal Bridges has integrated a space for experimentation. Affectionately referred to as The Niche due to its small size and location at the end of a hallway, this space will host a variety of mini-exhibitions that relate to projects at the museum. For instance, it currently holds an exploration of color theory—showing how we decided on the
Haynes Receives Leadership Fellowship
Benjamin Moore Egyptian Green
paint colors used in renovating the galleries. Later this year, you’ll have the opportunity to look closely at a single work of art—while putting together a puzzle of the artwork. From artist demonstrations to a behind the scenes look at museum departments, this wide variety of mini-exhibitions helps test out new ideas. Be sure to visit regularly to be part of this think-tank in miniature.
Benjamin Moore Clearest Ocean Blue
Benjamin Moore Scandanavian Blue
Benjamin Moore Cement Gray
Benjamin Moore Stormy Monday
Congratulations to Lauren Haynes, Curator of Contemporary Art, for being selected as a 2018 Fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership. The CCL trains curators to become visionary leaders of art museums, providing essential tools to guide today’s museums and anticipate future challenges. The CCL model encompasses mentorships with innovators and museum directors, rigorous coursework in strategic management, and professional networks for support and growth. Haynes is one of only 12 curators selected for the program, each of whom “exemplifies a commitment to scholarly excellence, collaborative thinking, and inclusive practices within museums and the visual arts.”
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MUSEUM NEWS
Crystal Bridges Welcomes New Curator In February, Allison Glenn joined the Crystal Bridges curatorial team as Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. Glenn comes to Crystal Bridges from Prospect New Orleans, a city-wide triennial of contemporary art, where she served as manager of publications and curatorial associate. In this new role, Glenn will contribute to the growing contemporary art program with exhibition development, publications, and planning. She will be contributing to ongoing projects and collaborations, including the further development of the North Forest and collection focus shows. “I am excited to be joining Crystal Bridges and look forward to getting to know the Northwest Arkansas community,” said Glenn. “I have dedicated my career to the cultivation of inclusive art histories, and am eager to bring my passion to a dynamic museum with a celebrated mission of welcoming all.”
Have you listened to the Crystal Bridges podcast, Museum Way? This new podcast series shares all the ins-and-outs of the museum directly from our staff members. From the galleries to the trails, the architecture and more—you’ll learn the museum way of Crystal Bridges. The podcast is available now on iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher.
C Magazine Wins Award Crystal Bridges’ own C magazine was honored with second place in the American Alliance of Museums’ magazines category of the 2017 Museum Publications Design Competition. Winners are chosen for their overall design excellence, creativity, and ability to express an institution’s personality, mission, or special features. The panel of judges includes graphic designers, museum professionals and/or publishers. Congratulations to museum designer Laura Hicklin on being recognized with this prestigious award.
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FOREST CONCERT SERIES FREE for Members! JUNE 16 – AUGUST 11 Bring your own lawn chair or blanket for music and art presented on the Coca-Cola stage in the museum’s North Forest every Saturday night from June 16 to August 11. A cash bar and Eleven’s food truck, High South on a Roll, will be available throughout the evening. Concerts begin at 7 p.m. $10 (FREE for Members and youth ages 18 and under)
JUNE 16 | Digging Roots First Nations duo, Digging Roots, offers a blend of folk-rock, pop, and hip-hop, plus additional guests Brooke Simpson, featured on The Voice, Bunky Echo-Hawk who will entertain with live painting, and hip-hop artist Samsoche Sampson.
JUNE 23 | Cuñao Groove to the multi-ethnic flavors of the Los Angeles band, Cuñao—mixing the Nueva Cancion style of Latin America. Cuñao puts a global twist on their Latin sound by exploring African rhythms, Eastern European melodies, and American Rock.
JUNE 30 | Crescent City Combo Celebrate the Great American Picnic Day with outdoor games, art experiences, and a jazzy blend of New Orleans funk, groove, and brass by one of Fayetteville’s favorite bands.
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MEMBER NEWS
JULY 7 | Dom Flemons
JULY 28 | Soul Night with Funk Factory Award-winning musician Dom Flemons, co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, performs ragtime, spirituals, and southern string and jug band music. The night will feature our annual Lightning Bug Hunt!
JULY 14 | Beatles Tribute with The Liverpool Legends Enjoy an evening of tie dying in the Forest alongside music of the acclaimed Beatles tribute band, The Liverpool Legends. The group performs songs spanning the band’s entire career, handpicked by Louise Harrison—sister of the late George Harrison.
JULY 21 | Amasa Hines Band Join us for the cool Afrobeats of the Amasa Hines Band from Little Rock. The five piece band brings a lively show with a fresh blend of American rock mixed with blues.
Funk Factory offers Motown soul, rock & roll, smooth Sinatra jazz, and a good ole’ boot scoot.
AUGUST 4 | Rochelle Bradshaw & Hypnotion Bring your island wear for an evening in the forest with Fayetteville’s favorite reggae group, Rochelle Bradshaw & Hypnotion, and a local lineup of Marshallese musicians, island artist demos, and artmaking.
AUGUST 11 | 1 oz. Jig Summer Finale Dance and let loose in the forest with the charismatic Fayettevilleband, 1 oz Jig. Led by singer/ songwriter. Jeff Kearney, the group is a self-described “backwoods funk” band presenting music that “puts the ‘fun’ back in ‘funk.’”
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Out in the Woods New Sculptures Grace the North Forest Trail
DYLAN TURK CURATORIAL ASSISTANT
In the spring, Crystal Bridges will unveil five newly acquired outdoor sculptures in the North Forest. These works explore people’s relationship to the natural world, artistic expression on new scales and with new materials, and the experience of viewing art that encourages us to walk around it to notice how the setting influences our understanding.
MELVIN EDWARDS, DANCING IN NIGERIA In the 1970s, Edwards began to experiment with choreographic drawings and diagrams on paper inspired by a dance he saw during a trip to Nigeria. He extended the ideas of dance to explore visual and sculptural movement through static forms. Dancing in Nigeria’s movement and open structure also relates to Edwards’s interest in music, particularly jazz and its focus on improvisation. Dancing in Nigeria invites us to look at it from all angles—each vista enhancing our perspective of the object and its natural setting. Edwards’s colored sculptures, which he made into the 1980s, are painted with bright and primary tones.
ALYSON SHOTZ, SCATTERING SCREEN Much like Dancing in Nigeria, Shotz’s Scattering Screen, composed of 18,000 mirrored circles, explores movement. Shotz works with a variety of materials, including mirror, glass beads, steel, plastic lenses, and thread to investigate concepts of space, light, and perception. The work reflects its surroundings and, most dazzlingly, the ambient light. Scattering Screen, like many of Shotz’s sculptures, requires the viewer to slow down and truly consider what it means to look at art in nature. Its setting at Crystal Bridges will imbue the work with the light and colors of the Ozarks.
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YAYOI KUSAMA, FLOWERS THAT BLOOM NOW Kusama’s work has transcended both Pop art and Minimalism. Polka dots are a hallmark of her style and help to make her work distinctive and recognizable across the globe. Flowers that Bloom Now incorporates Kusama’s polka dots onto enormous flower forms that will playfully and dramatically interact with the natural landscape.
ACQUISITIONS + NEW ON VIEW
NANCY RUBINS, MONOCHROME II The largest new work installed in the forest is composed of recycled aluminum canoes and small boats, branching off a central column. Rubins’s work primarily consists of found objects delicately bound or suspended into large-scale formations. In the 1980s, the scale of her work dramatically increased, as she used objects like trailer homes and airplane fuselages. Here, her use of canoes and boats resonates with the Ozarks.
BRIAN TOLLE, TEMPEST Illuminated with blue LED lights embedded in the tops of the walls, Tolle’s Tempest brings the experience of dynamic ocean water into the North Forest. While Nancy Rubins’s work may look as though the canoes have been tossed by a hurricane, Tempest takes on the simplified form of the weather phenomena itself, inviting visitors to wander through the rippled, maze-like formation. In experiencing this artwork, your body follows the movement of circulating winds as it pulls you in close to the center and then releases you back out the other side.
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New Acquisition Fritz Scholder, Native American, 1937 - 2005 Indian Land #4, 1980, acrylic on canvas
Visit our contemporary art galleries and discover this recent addition featuring a Native American warrior. Placed against a shocking lime-green backdrop, the silhouette of the warrior mounted on horseback with his back to the viewer dominates the lower part of the canvas. Along the top of the composition a red-and-blue band divides the space, creating a horizon line and resolving the image as a landscape populated only by the figure and his horse. The work is gestural and abstract, a far cry from the stereotypical images of the so-called “noble savage� popularized by non-native artists throughout history. Fritz Scholder was a quarter Native American, though he did not grow up within that culture. When he eventually incorporated American Indian subjects into his paintings, he did so as both insider and outsider. His works resist the romanticized imagery casting Native Americans as pure and uncorrupted by civilization in order to focus attention on the reality of a people who have traditions and specific identities, but also very much exist within contemporary society.
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Scholder gained notoriety in the 1970s for Pop-inspired images of Native Americans. This painting shifts toward abstraction, placing him directly in conversation with non-native artists like Richard Diebenkorn and Jean-Michel Basquiat (works by both artists are currently on view nearby), and helps put contemporary Native American Art in conversation with contemporary art at large. Indian Land #4 will move from our contemporary galleries to the special exhibition space this fall to become part of the upcoming exhibition, Native North America (working title), October 6, 2018, through January 7, 2019. As always, temporary exhibitions are free for museum members. ALEJO BENEDETTI ASSISTANT CURATOR
ACQUISITIONS + NEW ON VIEW
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CLOSER LOOK
A Closer Look in the Contemporary Gallery Nancy Grossman, Car Horn, 1965
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: we’re looking at junk. It’s well composed and surprisingly pleasing to look at, but we can all agree that this is (and I say this affectionately) “trash art.” This heap of well-organized detritus mounted onto a canvas-covered board consists of defunct bicycle parts, industrial bobbles, and general clutter from a culture of consumption. Following the economic boom of the 1950s and an explosion of material culture during the “decade of prosperity,” the art world responded in turn. Some, like Andy Warhol and other Pop artists, reacted by turning their focus onto the reproducibility of icons from popular culture like Campbell’s soup cans and celebrities. Others however—including Nancy Grossman, who early in her career adopted an Abstract Expressionist approach— responded by reframing American excess and its resulting waste with the seeming chaos of total abstraction. Abstract Expressionism is often associated purely with painting. Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko— these are all titans of Ab-Ex art. However, artists like David Smith, Nancy Grossman’s mentor, ventured into free-standing Abstract Expressionist sculpture, using welding to quickly build
abstract forms, a process often described as “drawing in space.” Grossman gathered many of the objects used during her brief period of abstract assemblage during a 1964 visit to Smith’s offthe-grid retreat in upstate New York, called Bolton Landing. Created the same year David Smith died in a car accident (reportedly while driving to see Grossman’s new works), many read Car Horn and later works from this series as Grossman’s memorial to her mentor before she switched to a decidedly different working style in 1968. Assembled from waste, including twisted car parts taken from Smith’s retreat, this work also becomes a cautionary reflection on the dangers and chaos of modern life, realized using those same discarded elements of American excess. ALEJO BENEDETTI ASSISTANT CURATOR
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COMING SOON
May 26 – Sep 3
THE BEYOND GEORGIA O’KEEFFE + CONTEMPORARY ART
This exhibition takes its name from a 1972 oil on canvas painting by O’Keeffe. The Beyond is a 30 × 40 inch depiction of the horizon completed at a moment when O’Keeffe’s eyesight was failing. This work would become one of the last canvases she was able to complete unassisted. Read on to learn more about O’Keeffe and this exhibition, including interviews with four of the contemporary artists featured.
MEMBERS SEE IT FIRST! MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THE MEMBER PREVIEW OF THE BEYOND: FRIDAY, MAY 25, 10 A.M. TO 9 P.M.
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Enormous flowers, luscious colors, feminine forms & still lifes.
The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art is organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and was curated by Lauren Haynes, Curator of Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges; and Chad Alligood, Chief Curator of American Art, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. SPONSORED AT CRYSTAL BRIDGES BY
Helen Porter Terri & Chuck Erwin Harriet & Warren Stephens, Stephens Inc. David & Cathy Evans Blakeman’s Fine Jewelry The Harrison & Rhonda French Family Morris Foundation, Inc. JT & Imelda Rose Jim & Susan von Gremp
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COMING SOON
landscapes,
FINDING THE FIGURE
“I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.” CITIES AND DESERTS Organized by Crystal Bridges, The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art brings together more than 30 of O’Keeffe’s artworks from Crystal Bridges’ collection and other institutions. Alongside these iconic works, the exhibition also features works by 20 contemporary artists from around the country, selected for their distinctive explorations of some of O’Keeffe’s most powerful themes. In O’Keeffe’s own words, you’ll discover:
FLOWERS AND OTHER STILL LIFES
“I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.”
“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.” THE INTANGIBLE THING
“The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.” LAUREN HAYNES CURATOR, CONTEMPORARY ART
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LINDA DEBERRY SENIOR EDITOR CHAD ALLIGOOD EXHIBITION CO-CURATOR
THE O’KEEFFE MYST IQUE The story of Georgia O’Keeffe’s career has become an American legend: from her appearance on the New York City art scene in 1917 in the gallery of photographer and later husband, Alfred Stieglitz, to her retreat to the desert of Abiquiu, New Mexico, where she spent the last 37 years of her life. Likewise her distinctive style has become iconic. Even the lesser-known works are instantly recognizable as O’Keeffe’s, her style and color palette identifying the paintings as surely as a signature. Although the critical evaluation of O’Keeffe’s work has waxed and waned over the past century, her paintings have remained popular. The work has been reproduced as notecards, posters, t-shirts, and sketchbooks. One of her red poppy paintings was recreated as a 32-cent stamp in 1996. What is it about Georgia O’Keeffe that captured the interest of the American public and has held it for so long? Editor Linda DeBerry talked with curator Chad Alligood about the O’Keeffe mystique.
O’Keeffe was, of course, part of Alfred Steiglitz’s “circle” of Modernist painters. But her work was different from theirs. Unlike many of the American modernists, O’Keeffe didn’t come to Modernism through the influence of European styles like Cubism, is that correct? You’re right, she didn’t have to come to abstraction through a European model. She found another path. She was certainly aware of European traditions, but if you look at her earliest watercolors, which will be in the exhibition, you can see how she’s breaking down representation into its basic elements. She’s exploring what you can communicate with only color and line. And that’s not what’s happening with Cubism, which is something else entirely. It’s a very academic approach to the picture plane, breaking it down into what appears to be a series of multifaceted forms. She didn’t do that. She did away with a lot of those fussy European tendencies. And she does it in a beautiful way. Despite her obvious innovations and undeniable skill, early reviews of O’Keeffe’s work, though complimentary, nevertheless found ways to explain her “otherness” in terms of her gender. Even Alfred Stieglitz, who admired, championed, and promoted O’Keeffe’s work all his life, made his first assessment of her drawings with the exclamation: “Finally! A woman on paper!” O’Keeffe adamantly rejected the idea of her work as being uniquely feminine. She famously said once, “The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.” Yet she also resisted being labeled a great feminist artist, though many tried to do so, including Judy Chicago, who included a plate for O’Keeffe in her famous feminist artwork The Dinner Party (1974-79).
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The other side of the gender issue regarding O’Keeffe’s works, of course, is the sexual issue, which has plagued O’Keeffe’s career almost from the beginning by viewers who saw parallels between her large, organic flower and landscape forms and female genitalia. But O’Keeffe denied it throughout her career, claiming those interpretations were in the eye of the beholder. In 1943, she wrote: “...when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower, and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don’t.” But later in her career, she said less and less about the issue, simply choosing to let the paintings speak for themselves. What was O’Keeffe’s relationship to the feminist movement? In the 1970s, during the first wave of the feminist movement, O’Keeffe didn’t want to have anything to do with it—even though that could have been her moment. In the ‘70s she was already well established, well understood, and well known throughout the United States. She could easily have taken up the mantle
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of being the feminist artist par excellence. Many feminist art historians wanted to place her there, and she wasn’t into it. I think she probably felt that it pigeon-holed her work too much to be only understood in terms of her gender. And in truth, it speaks with a much broader voice than that. You don’t have to be a woman to connect with her painting. There’s something intangible in her work that keeps the public coming back to it. And yet art historians have not always agreed regarding the value of her work. Why is that? The assessment of her career has varied widely. There have been times when she has been embraced by critics, and then there have been times when the art historical establishment really dismissed her as overly facile or too beautiful. And so her career has gone through a number of reassessments. Part of it is that she painted for so long. She continued to innovate. It’s a long career, and so over the course of that career, art historians have found different ways to try to explain who she was and to make sense of it all.
DREAM TEAM The Beyond is co-curated by Lauren Haynes, Curator of Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges; and Chad Alligood, Chief Curator of American Art, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Members may remember Alligood from his tenure at Crystal Bridges, where he was curator of contemporary art from 2013 to 2017.
In some ways, you can see an interesting parallel in some of the great American illustrators, like Norman Rockwell for instance, whose work was so technically accomplished, intrinsically beautiful, and spoke with a broad vocabulary that it easily reached the public. Art historians and critics are famously suspicious of anything that directly communicates to a public like that because it endangers their perspective. It’s also true that, by the mid-1950s, the juggernaut that was Abstract Expressionism had taken the American art world by storm. The energy and often aggressive gestures of this work, created nearly exclusively by male artists, “...could not have been more antithetical, in its intentions, its methods, or its pictorial vocabulary, to O’Keeffe’s smooth, simplified images and invisible brush strokes,” according to her unofficial biographer, Roxana Robinson. Nevertheless, O’Keeffe, not one to follow trends or to curry favor from the art world, carried on along her own path, and the work has certainly stood the test of time.
Why do we keep coming back to O’Keeffe? There’s a kind of universal element to her painting, a timeless quality. Standing and looking at an O’Keeffe—it stops you in your tracks. It’s meant to. It’s a flat image painted on canvas and somehow it has the power to move you, to be resonant with the natural world and yet somehow not a part of it: that power, I think, is something she commands really beautifully. What’s her impact on artists living and working today? O’Keeffe was the first female artist superstar of the twentieth century, and because of that she will remain a touchstone for contemporary artists today, whatever the subject matter. Lately, there’s a lot of chatter in the art world about the return of figuration to contemporary painting. Why is that? I think people turn to art because they’re looking for something. They’re seeking some connection, and figuration can often be the conduit for that. O’Keeffe always stands on that knife edge between figuration and abstraction. Painters and artists of every stripe can look to O’Keeffe as an inspiration because she does straddle that line so beautifully. O’Keeffe said she was searching for the ineffable. She said that she was trying to create an “equivalent” for what she felt, and that her line and color was able to express what words could not. What was that intangible thing? Her work is all about the effort of reaching. She paints hundreds and hundreds of paintings over the course of her life, all in pursuit of some essence, some ineffable end she’s trying to reach. That’s the goal—and continually striving for the beautiful thing.
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V O C S I D W E N A R E N E G I T R A OF 22
G N I R E N O I T A S T S
For the upcoming exhibition The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, curators Lauren Haynes and Chad Alligood chose the work of 20 contemporary artists to feature alongside works by Georgia O’Keeffe. Linda DeBerry interviewed four of the artists, each of whom has a distinctive style that illustrates one or more of the themes explored in the exhibition. Anna Valdez focuses on still lifes of plants and everyday objects; Monica Kim Garza works with the nude female form in bold color; Matthew Ronay is interested in sculptural abstraction based on natural forms; and Sharona Eliassaf’s paintings feature rich color and flattened spaces. These interviews offer insights into the thought processes and practices of some of the artists featured in this rich and diverse exhibition.
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A N O R SHA ELIASSAF
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Sharona Eliassaf is half Israeli and half American, and divides her time between Tel Aviv and New York. Her paintings feature bright-colored geometric forms that hint at imagined landscapes. The works in our exhibition also include a grid of boxes at the bottom, sometimes with letters in them, like the cryptic, half-completed puzzles in Wheel of Fortune. There’s such intensity to the color in your work: what inspires you and what’s your process in producing those colors? Honestly, I never really plan for them like that, because I mix the colors on the canvas and not before I paint. I feel like a lot of the colors come out because I’m influenced by what many people in my generation are influenced by: I look at landscape not as Georgia O’Keeffe used to look at a landscape—she was actually in the landscape—I just look at it online or through a screen on TV. It changes perspective of light and that’s probably why a lot of the paintings are flat. But also, I just love to experiment with color. There’s a strong sense of geometry, where’s this influence coming from? I used to work in Manhattan, and I used to walk around a lot and take pictures of architecture, or I’d be in the subway and I’d see an interesting light or something, and I’d take a picture of it. I would go back to my studio and try to figure out how you compose a painting out of these ideas. I realized that in most of them, everything seems very artificial. There’s something about a stage set that I was always attracted to. And that’s how I got interested in video games and then game shows. I look at the paintings like making a landscape inside of this place that doesn’t look like a landscape. If you watch Wheel of Fortune, every day you’re in a different place. If it’s snowing in New York, they want you to feel like you’re in Hawaii. So they put all these props out. I like that whole artificial scenery. I thought about the geometric form and the color palette and the text and I thought “how do I put all of
this together in one?” Then I decided, as a joke, to paint a Wheel of Fortune painting, and it was actually really fun! There’s a sense of something frightening or cataclysmic off the canvas. Being in Tel Aviv, where violence is always so nearby, does that add to your work, or was that sense of danger there before? Between 2000 and 2004, I went for undergrad in Jerusalem. And then the Intifada erupted, and it was really scary, to the point where people said we should just stop going to school. I said no, I think I’m going to try to live this and try to figure this out. If something happens to me it’ll happen. Then I went to New York, and I was there at 9-11. It influenced my paintings, that whole thought of tomorrow could change completely. That was then. But now, these days, either we’ve gotten older or we’ve gotten used to it. I feel like I just don’t speak directly about the problems in my painting, I mostly speak around them or hint at them. What keeps you working through something that intense? It was hard when I was younger and all these things happened. It didn’t seem right, or it seemed weird to paint. But I always went back. That’s how I communicate. I’m not a good writer, but I can translate my thoughts and feelings into paint and I always feel better. I always felt painting was like a form of poetry. There’s this romanticism of the situation. Even if it’s a dark situation, it’s very romantic and beautiful.
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W E H T T A M Y A N O R
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Matthew Ronay creates sculptures from wood that look as if they were modeled from clay or some other, less rigid, material. Organic in form and candy colored, they are both playful and disturbing, mildly reminiscent of internal organs or colorful fungus. The work is so colorful, rounded, and playful, but there’s something a little unsettling about it as well. A lot of my work starts from an automatic place, meaning that when I sit down to draw I’m not trying to illustrate a certain kind of emotion or feeling or even concepts. I think that in that sense I’m just mining what’s in my own subconscious. I think there’s always a disturbing side to every kind of concept, even in nature. Part of having harmony is having disharmony. It’s always a balance. What’s your process? Almost everything starts with drawing and I draw in a couple of different ways. I draw sometimes very, very quickly, like maybe 30 to 90 seconds in a tiny book, or up to an hour or an hour and a half on a large piece of paper with charcoal. Over the years I’ve gravitated to drawing as an initial process because it opens me up to doing things that would be foolish if I had started by sculpting. You said you’re inspired by the natural world. Are there particular elements that inspire you? I think that, like most artists, I’m obsessed with information, so I’m constantly researching and putting myself into a position to accidentally discover something. At times that I’ve been in places where I’m around nature, I’d definitely say that walking through the forest and looking for mushrooms or insects or other kinds of things always leads you to discover something that maybe you couldn’t believe was made by nature. I didn’t realize how important nature was to my work until I spent about six weeks in the south of Germany.
What was it about that experience? Just a sense of wonder. I’ve always loved hiking and walking. And walking through the forest, I got obsessed with looking for mushrooms. It informed my sense of shape. Also just looking, that sense of searching, I think there’s a quality of drawing that’s also like that. I think maybe that’s why I draw so often, you never know when you’re going to find that great drawing. You may make 100 drawings and not make one that really responds to you, but every now and then, on accident, you make one that’s really great. Walking in the forest was similar to that, you may spend all day looking in areas that there might be great fungus and all of a sudden on accident you find something great in an area you never realized was there. I find it centering and harmonious. But also I like the part of nature that’s decrepit, that’s decaying, that has death as well. I find it balanced in a way that I think is healthy and balancing. Talk to me about color. I’ve read that you’re color blind. But the color is so powerful, where did it come from? There are a lot of different kinds of color blindness. My particular deficiency is with the colors red and green, so any color that has red or green in it is difficult for me to match with a word that somebody who wasn’t deficient would call it. My way of experiencing color in a serious way is through working with my wife on color. I have a lot of help from her and kind of making color desires happen.
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ANNA VALDEZ
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Anna Valdez began her educational career in anthropology, but realized how much she loved painting and chose art for her graduate studies. She specializes in big, colorful still lifes featuring lush house plants, books, fabrics, and other objects she assembles from among her personal possessions. You have a background in anthropology. Has that influenced your work? Yes. When I studied archaeology we would reconstruct stories about people based off their material remains. I mean it was mostly garbage, but that’s what was left behind. So in a way I felt like everything that I have around me tells a story. You go through life looking for these narratives and you ask questions and I feel painting is a way of asking a lot of questions. A lot of these things, they remind you who you are and what your interests are and how you think of things. Your paintings are an interesting blend between realistic and unrealistic. How do you decide that balance? It’s a very intuitive thing that ends up happening. Sometimes I love my underpainting and I can’t quite say goodbye to it, so I think a lot of those come through and that’s a graphic aspect. Sometimes I love an object and I probably get a little too obsessive about it and I’ll want that to be very much seen. It also has to do with formal decisions of how does your eye move around a painting. Like how you want to vary your mark, I vary the language in my paintings. I didn’t realize I was doing that until people would give me feedback about it, that’s why I think it’s an intuitive thing. It doesn’t have to be the same rhythm. I get excited about those different elements or different languages existing in the same space. Do you begin to see different personalities or moods in the different still lifes? (Laughs.) Thank you for pointing that out, I think everybody always simplifies it and says “They’re just very joyful.” I am a very sensitive person, so there are definitely various moods happening in these paintings. I’m not working on them for only one day, I work on them for months sometimes. You get different mindsets every session in the painting. Also, I‘ll learn something from one painting and it gets explored in another painting as well. Painting is so much fun. It’s really hard, but it’s a great way to look at things and think about them and feel them. I notice that textiles are a common feature in your work. I have a very nostalgic association with textiles because my mom is a quilter. She always had a studio or a sewing room. She had stacks of fabrics. Textiles were my first real play with color relationships. She’s very good at precision and craft, but when it comes to putting these color relationships together, she seems to struggle in that. But she noticed that I had a knack for it and she would come ask me, basically, to assemble a palette for her through fabric. I had a lot of fun doing that. And I love putting that in as pops of color for my paintings.
“... [O’Keeffe] painted whatever the hell she wanted and she commanded it... her sincerity in her painting is something I strive for in my own work.”
What’s your relationship to Georgia O’Keeffe? I find that most of my favorite painters are based on what I’m interested in relative to my painting. She was one of those people and her story is interesting. She painted whatever the hell she wanted and she commanded it. Also her sincerity in her painting is something I strive for in my own work. I think you could say she’s been an influence in a ton of different ways. I remember seeing Georgia O’Keeffe images and thinking, “Wow, that’s really beautiful.” That’s what a painting is in my early imagery. She’s literally one of my earliest memories of what a painting is.
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MONICA KIM GARZA
Monica Kim Garza is half Mexican, half Korean, and 100% American. Her paintings feature a recurring voluptuous brownskinned nude female figure engaged in a variety of everyday tasks—setting a table, painting, or playing ping-pong with another version of herself. Whatever she is doing, she’s always perfectly at ease, unashamed, and staring directly back at the viewer. What made you decide to give your subject that Rubenesque body shape? This figure, this kind of character, I’ve been working with since I was in college. Before then I would do a lot of animals, and they always had this boxy, geometric shape. When I started to make the character she also had that kind of shape that I just took from my interest in geometry and my own culture. I used to really love Mayan art, anything old, like ancient art. And I always love renaissance art, so I think, subconsciously, I took those interests and created my own character, which was a reflection of myself. Not a direct self-portrait, but kind of inspired by me. I’ve read that you’ve traveled all over? Yes, I’m a little nomad. What happened was, I majored in painting and drawing, but when I finished school, for some reason I felt a little disheartened. I just didn’t really want to paint anymore. The dream of being an artist seemed impossible and I just didn’t know how to do it. So when I left college I decided to move to Korea. I didn’t think about art at all, I lived there for two years and just worked. And then when I came back, I had always wanted to go back to Peru {where she spent three months while in college}, and so I took my friend, and we went together for three months. Then I came back and moved to New York. It took me a long time to even get to the point where I wanted to go for it. What made you come back to painting? I never liked any of the jobs I was doing. I knew I was a creative person. There was something inside of me that was waiting to explode. I started to just paint and once I started, it didn’t stop. I decided to go for it, which meant that I left New York and moved into my parents’ basement to commit to painting. I was there for a little bit over a year. It was definitely a sacrifice. But I’m glad I did it because I made a lot of paintings in that time and if I wouldn’t have made those I wouldn’t be making the paintings I am now. In your art, the figures are always staring at us. What made you decide to confront the viewer so directly in every image? You know I never realized it until later on when other people pointed it out. But now that I think about it, I guess it comes back to portraiture. I enjoy portraits, and there’s something funny about posing but not posing. We don’t see the faces of the male figures when they appear, is that deliberate? To be honest, there’s no male that has inspired me deep enough to want to put in a painting. Recently I have done two or three paintings with a male face in there, except that he has sunglasses on. (laughs) You’ve gotten two thumbs up from feminists critics because the character is so frankly sensual, so unapologetic about her body. Do you think of your work as feminist? To be honest, no, not specifically. I’m not painting for a specific cause. For me the interest is about color and composition and material. I think the character, the figure, is an afterthought. I want to make really great paintings based on color and other aspects.
“I’m not painting for a specific cause. For me, the interest is about color and composition and material. I think the character, the figure, is an afterthought.”
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COLLECTION FOCUS
How Do You Figure? March 15 – August 20
When the Early American Art galleries reopened, a focus exhibition, How Do You Figure?, opened alongside them. On view March 15 through August 20, artworks in the exhibition range from quick sketches to highly polished paintings. They span three centuries and showcase a variety of techniques, but each reveals a bit of history about the artist who made it. The messy lines in a gestural drawing are a trail of breadcrumbs through an artist’s process. The studies of disembodied hands and feet are akin to practicing your signature in your school notebook. Woven among the graphite and paper on the walls of this exhibition is insight into the minds of these artists from across history and how they contend with the task of depicting the human figure. For eons, the ability to accurately recreate the human physique has been viewed as a high-water mark in an aspiring artist’s career. To this end, it makes perfect sense that our institutions and art schools incorporate figure drawing into course requirements, and develop tools and processes for understanding and accurately rendering the human body. Using the grid to portion out the body, studying the skeletal structure and musculature, simplifying body parts into plaster casts that students can observe and sketch— these are all techniques humans developed to help understand and record our physical selves. Within the gallery, our focus for this exhibition remains trained on the process of making art based on the figure. But here, in the pages of our magazine, I would like to direct attention away from what we see in the works in order to focus on what, or rather who, is missing. We can take this opportunity to realize that the close inspection of process— something largely developed and taught in art schools—also enables us to read between the lines of this exhibition and consider which artists are not included, and why. Specifically, as we look into the history of art institutions, we see a widespread absence of opportunity for women and artists of color. In the US, these artists remained largely excluded from most established art institutions well into the twentieth century. Their absence points to a history of withholding knowledge and access to resources like the very ones highlighted in this exhibition.
This doesn’t mean women and artists of color did not create, or rise above a system stacked against them, but it does mean that theirs was a more difficult climb. It also means that there are fewer historical works available by these artists, and therefore our work in uncovering and collecting those objects must continue to produce a more complete story of art in America. The notion of exclusion vs. opportunity is something we often discuss in the context of our galleries, but it seems particularly significant in a show that narrows in on depictions of the body. When we juxtapose the past with the present, we reveal an evolution in art not only of style and concept, but also of inclusivity. Our history is a resource for us and future generations. The very concept of a collecting museum is built on the notion that studying our past—flawed though it may be—allows us to build something stronger and better. This way, if in a hundred years some excited assistant curator decides to again ask of Crystal Bridges’ collection, “How do you figure?” the resulting exhibition will be more thoroughly representative, in part, because of the history we’re writing now. ALEJO BENEDETTI ASSISTANT CURATOR How Do You Figure? is sponsored by Gelmart International.
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COLLECTION FOCUS
The Garden The Art of Mother Nature April 21 – October 8
This spring, Crystal Bridges opens The Garden, a focus exhibition that sets out to recreate and interpret the experience of the garden through the creations of artists from our collection. The blooms from the forest will be metaphorically extended into the museum’s galleries, which will be stacked with colorful layers of flowers for spring—inviting us to slow down and appreciate the beauty that nature provides for us. The opening line of Flowers of the Field and Forest, an 1882 publication in Crystal Bridges’ library collection reads, “Nature also is an artist and an author. She paints the flowers before we copy them, and writes their simple story for us to tell again.” Humanity’s reverence for the natural world has led us to try to understand it, surround ourselves with it, and to conquer it. Artists employed different techniques, from abstraction to scientific realism, to communicate their perceptions of the art of Mother Nature. The Garden will explore various ways of relating to flowers: from artists who place the flower in relationship to the human figure, to those who remove the flower from all context for scientific analysis, to moments when the floral form becomes ornamentation for human creations. The Garden will be on view April 21 through October 8.
FROM GARDEN TO GALLERY: A CURATOR’S PROCESS Over the summer I became enamored by the honest beauty of the gardens that surround the museum. The forest, heavy with life, filled every void left by winter, making it clear that beauty persists. Walking to work became an experience much like going through an exhibition. Each day I saw elements of the composition of the landscape that I’d overlooked previously or had not yet fully blossomed. As I walked through the galleries, I began to see the interconnectedness of art and nature as more than just artist and subject.
My senses, awakened by the surrounding gardens, collided the realities of the objects I was viewing with the experience of the outdoors. The willow trees in John Singer Sargent’s 1887 painting Under the Willows danced in the wind, and the sound of their rustle, mixed with the serenity of still water, filled my head. I began to look at the works as depictions of infinite life—an artist’s memory of the living world held in eternal reverence on a canvas. My mind interpreted the galleries as a garden in a state between the manmade and the natural worlds. A fantasy world developed in my mind; reimagining the artworks integrated into a picturesque landscape. The interior spaces of our buildings were intended to reflect the circuitous path and leisurely pace of the outdoors, while juxtaposing works in the collection with views of nature. This exhibition transforms the gallery into a virtual garden of luscious floral images, offering up art and nature in one delectable experience. Crystal Bridges has a deep collection of works by artist Martin Johnson Heade—46 to be exact. Heade prolifically painted the flowers, insects, and landscapes of the Americas in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Known for the illuminative qualities of the paint, Heade’s work juxtaposes realism in form with idealization in color and quality of light. A large majority of his detailed floral studies will be on display in this focus show in April, alongside this work by Vik Muniz, who pays homage to Heade by reproducing one of his iconic orchid paintings in collage and photography. DYLAN TURK CURATORIAL ASSISTANT
The Garden is sponsored by Rebel Walls and Shindig Paperie.
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Wheatscaping The Skyspace Meadow Gets a Makeover
“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain….” Thus begins “America the Beautiful,” a song familiar to every American. In fact, grain has become nearly synonymous with our idea of the vastness and bounty of the American landscape. This spring, Crystal Bridges’ horticulturalist, Cody George, will be installing our own “wheatscape” on the museum grounds. The idea came from suburban garden pioneer, Brie Arthur, author of the book Foodscape Revolution. “Brie talked to me about a new book project she was working on, Gardening with Grains, and asked if Crystal Bridges would be interested in becoming a test site,” George explained. “Our Skyspace Meadow was planted six years ago as an attractive meadow featuring a diverse, native herbaceous species. But a few years of little-to-no maintenance inevitably led to the resurgence of invasive, non-native species that simply became too prevalent to control. The space needed a change.” Arthur has long been a proponent of “foodscaping,” making use of suburban yard spaces to grow a mix of ornamental and edible foods. The movement has taken hold in areas like Northwest Arkansas, where the interest in local food sourcing has risen dramatically in recent years.
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“Wheatscaping” takes the movement a step further, and involves planting grains such as wheat, oats, sorghum, barley, and others in the home landscape, both as ornamental plants and sources of food for people and wildlife. Crystal Bridges’ new Skyspace Wheatscape will involve all of these grain plants and other edibles, such as peanuts, sweet potatoes, and pawpaws, in a test garden that will supply data for Arthur’s project and has the potential to be featured in the upcoming book. “This project is really a response, in part, to our community’s interest in local food production,” George explained. “And partly our desire to try something new in the Skyspace area. Maybe something like this that combines food, flowers, and grains in an attractive and engaging way will inspire people to grow more of their own food.” The Skypsace area will also be home to two hives of pollinating honeybees. In recent years, pollinators, including bees, butterflies, and others, have suffered a steep decline due to the widespread use of pesticides and other chemicals, as well as the fragmenting of their environments. The new garden will draw attention to the important correlation between pollinators and the food we eat. LINDA DEBERRY SENIOR EDITOR
TRAILS + GROUNDS
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Visiting Artists Transform Crystal Bridges Spaces Over the course of 10 days last December, two locations in Crystal Bridges were transformed in completely new ways. Artists Leonardo Drew and Nina Chanel Abney each created a site-specific project at the museum that will be on view through January, 2019. These installations are one of the ways Crystal Bridges is working with today’s artists to create engaging experiences for visitors.
LEONARDO DREW (B. 1961, TALLAHASSEE, FL; LIVES AND WORKS IN BROOKLYN, NY) Drew’s site-specific work, Number 184T, is located in the museum’s bridge gallery. Drew’s project developed after a successful site visit to Crystal Bridges in the spring. Using an intuitive process, Drew works with everyday off-the-shelf materials—including wood, cotton, iron, and paper, which he alters by burning, premature aging, painting, and rusting—to create his one-of-a-kind sculptures. He worked with one studio assistant and two staff members from the museum’s prep team to create this work over the course of several days at the museum. Drew is often asked what his works are about and what significance the individual pieces hold. His response is that there is no one correct answer; each of his works is meant to be interpreted by the viewer. Drew first exhibited his work at the age of 13. He went on to attend the Parsons School of Design and received his BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1985. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at notable institutions across the world, and is included in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and Tate, London.
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NINA CHANEL ABNEY (B. 1982, CHICAGO, IL; LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK) Abney is a figurative painter who creates artworks that deal with issues of contemporary urban life. She created a site-specific mural using spray paint in the stairwell that leads from our contemporary galleries to the restaurant, Eleven. Abney’s work is influenced by many aspects of popular culture, including the news, animated cartoons, video games, hip-hop culture, celebrity websites, and tabloid magazines. Her works do not shy away from asking us to contemplate and deal with difficult subjects, and the paintings and murals are full of symbols, figures, and words that viewers are meant to decode. This collection of symbols form a visual language that shows Abney’s knowledge and understanding of art-historical references, in addition to popular culture. The artist recently had a solo exhibition, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, which originated at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and is currently on view at the Chicago Cultural Center. Later in 2018, the exhibition will travel to Los Angeles, where it will be jointly presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the California African American Museum. It will travel to the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York in 2019. Abney was one of the youngest artists in 30 Americans, an intergenerational traveling exhibition that looked at works by African American artists in 2008. LAUREN HAYNES CURATOR, CONTEMPORARY ART
COLLECTION SPOTLIGHT
ARTIST LEONARDO DREW (TOP, ON THE LEFT) AND NINA CHANEL ABNEY (RIGHT) INSTALL SITESPECIFIC WORK AT CRYSTAL BRIDGES.
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BACK STORY
America’s Artistic Jane Austen Florine Stettheimer Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Florine Stettheimer is best known for her animated, often colorful paintings of American society life. She and her two sisters, Carrie and Ettie—known affectionately as “the Stetties”—hosted salons in their New York homes with artists and other luminaries of the art world. Though privileged, Stettheimer was well aware of the sometimes absurd machinations of society, and her paintings, with their pointed female perspective and tongue-in-cheek portrayals of the upper-crust, would have made Jane Austen smile. She drew on Symbolist ideas to create personal metaphors and objects that stood in for people. You can see this in her portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, which is included in the Stieglitz Collection, jointly owned by Crystal Bridges and Fisk University. In Stettheimer’s portrait, Stieglitz is surrounded by representations of members of the New York art scene. John Marin’s watercolors hang on the left wall, and plaques spell out the names of artists Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, as
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well as photographer Paul Strand. A large, ghostly outline of Georgia O’Keeffe’s face appears behind Stieglitz. Artist Charles Demuth enters with his cane from the left. The seated figure in the foreground appears to be French artist Francis Picabia. Standing behind him is probably art critic Henry McBride. The figure entering the gallery at the right is very likely Baron Adolph de Meyer, the first staff photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Stettheimer was not a prolific painter, and never sold a painting, claiming that, “letting people have your paintings is like letting them wear your clothes.” She did show her work in occasional group exhibitions, but after a single one-person show in 1916, she refused all other solo exhibitions. Her work would have been lost to history if her sister, Ettie, had fulfilled Stettheimer’s wish to destroy the paintings after she died. Instead, Ettie Stettheimer thoughtfully donated many of them to museums and other institutions. LINDA DEBERRY SENIOR EDITOR
PHILANTHROPY
Membership Matters Your Membership Dollars Help Welcome All
Welcoming is a term heard often when describing Crystal Bridges. The museum’s mission to welcome all is lived out each day by museum staff and volunteers who welcome more than 600,000 visitors to the museum each year. But the true welcoming spirit of Crystal Bridges comes from you, our members. Membership is about more than free exhibition tickets and discounts (although we love those too!). Members are the heart of Crystal Bridges. You are loyal friends who welcome others to experience wonder and inspiration at their museum. What started as a group of 5,000 members when the museum opened in 2011 has tripled to nearly 15,000 members today. And your group of loyal friends makes a major impact. You contributed toward a collective membership gift of more than $1 million last year! You have allowed us to offer engaging programs, at low or no cost, that bring the museum to life. These programs inspire creativity, spur important conversations, illuminate the art and history of our country, and provide opportunities to connect and reflect. In short, your membership helps to make Crystal Bridges a welcoming place with something for everyone. The next time you see children in the galleries scavengerhunting for artwork with their families, know that your membership helped make that bonding opportunity happen. When you see the smiles of a couple enjoying an evening concert under the stars, know that your membership helped make that moment happen. When you hear friends and strangers in discussion after a lecture, know that your membership helped spur that conversation. Your membership impacts lives beyond your household; it transforms lives for thousands! Thank you. MEGAN MARTIN DIRECTOR OF ADVANCEMENT OPERATIONS
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MEMBER FAMILY PHOTOS 10.08.17 Join us for Summer Member Family Photos, May 19, 1 – 4 p.m. Register online or call 479.418.5728.
ART NIGHT OUT 11.18.17 Sponsored by AMP Sign & Banner, Blue Moon Brewing Company, JTH Productions, iHeartMedia, and Simply Measured.
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CELEBRATIONS
NEW 365 12.31.17 Sponsored by Premier Dermatology.
NOON YEAR’S EVE 12.31.17 Sponsored by Coca-Cola, Mark and Diane Simmons, and Arvest Bank.
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CREDITS FRONT COVER: Anna Valdez, Deer Skull with Blue Vase (detail), 2017, oil on canvas, 42 × 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco. Photo: Hashimoto Contemporary. TABLE OF CONTENTS CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT: Nancy Rubins, Monochrome II (detail), 2010-2018, stainless steel, stainless steel wire, and aluminum, 40 × 33 × 35 ft. Installation view, Big Art, Navy Pier, Gateway Park, Chicago, May 2012–October 2013. Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe (detail), 1932, gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 x 9 3/8 in. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Bridges. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. John Vanderlyn, The Figure of Painting (detail), ca. 1815, charcoal and chalk on paper, 21 5/8 x 12 3/4 in. Photo: Dwight Primiano. P5 FROM TOP: José de Alcíbar (attributed to), De español y negra, mulato (From Spaniard and Black, Mulatto), ca. 1760, oil on canvas, 30 5/8 × 38 3/4 in. Denver Art Museum: Gift of the Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer, 2014.217. Photo: Denver Art Museum. Lakota (Sioux), Parfleche Envelope, ca. 19001910, rawhide, native leather, glass beads, porcupine quills, metal cones, and horsehair, 28 × 13 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Gift of Frank Paxton) 2010.60.1. Lakota (Sioux), Parfleche Envelope, ca. 1820-1830, rawhide, native leather, glass beads, porcupine quills, metal cones, and horsehair, 28 × 13 1/4 × 3 1/4 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Gift of Frank Paxton) 2010.60.2. P6 Lauren Haynes photo by Beth Hall. P7 Photos: Stephen Ironside. P9 Dom Flemons photo: Tim Duffy. P10-11 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Alyson Shotz, Scattering Screen, 2016, stainless steel and stainless steel wire. 108 in. × 18ft. × 28 in. Installation view, Art in the Garden, San Antonio Botanical Garden, June 2016–May 2017. Melvin Edwards, Dancing in Nigeria, 1974-1978, paint on welded steel, in two parts, part 1: 69 × 86 × 66 in., part 2: 92 × 71 × 44 in. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. © 2017 Melvin Edwards / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Yayoi Kusama, Flowers that Bloom Now, 2017, stainless steel and urethane paint, 41 × 103 × 39 3/8 in. Nancy Rubins, Monochrome II, 2010-2018, stainless steel, stainless steel wire, and aluminum, 40 × 33 × 35ft. Installation view, Big Art, Navy Pier, Gateway Park, Chicago, May 2012–October 2013. Brian Tolle, Tempest, 2010, powder-coated aluminum, fiberglass, and LED lights, 60 in. × 33ft. × 29ft. Gift of Ruth and William S. Ehrlich. P13 Fritz Scholder, Indian Land #4, 1980, acrylic on canvas, 80 × 68 in. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. P14 Nancy Grossman, Car Horn, 1965, leather, metal, rubber, wood, and paint assemblage on canvas mounted on plywood, 73 5/8 × 49 5/8 × 11 7/8 in. with artist’s frame. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. P15 Georgia O’Keeffe, The Beyond, 1972, oil on canvas, 30 × 40 in. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (2006.05.460). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. P16 FROM TOP: Georgia O’Keeffe, Yellow Jonquils #3, 1936, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 × 40 1/4 in. Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation and the R.C. Kemper Charitable Trust, 2005.12. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art / James Allison Photography, 2013. Georgia O’Keeffe, Petunias, 1925, oil on hardboard, 18 × 30 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, gift of the M. H. de Young Family, 1990.55. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. P17 CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Tschabalala Self, Boca, 2017, fabric, Flashe, oil, and acrylic on canvas. 68 × 50 in. Private Collection. Photo: Pilar Corrias Gallery / Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Caroline Larsen, Skinny Dip, 2017, oil on canvas, 27 × 31 in. The Hole NYC and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica. Photo: Courtesy the Artist. Georgia O’Keeffe, Flying Backbone, 1944, oil on canvas, 11 x 25 1/4 in. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Bridges. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. P18 Todd Webb, Georgia O’Keeffe (detail), ca. 1962, gelatin silver print. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (2006.6.1031). © Todd Webb Archive, Portland, Maine USA. P19 Alfred Stieglitz, Self-Portrait, 1907, printed 1931, platinum print, 9 x 7 3/16 in. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Bridges. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. P20 Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1932, gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 x 9 3/8 in. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Bridges. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. P21 FROM TOP: Georgia O’Keeffe, Small Purple Hills, 1934, oil on panel, 16 × 19 3/4 in. © Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932, oil on canvas, 48 × 40 in. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. Todd Webb, Georgia O’Keeffe
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with Footprints and Camera, n.d., gelatin silver print. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (2006.6.851). P23 Sharona Eliassaf, Feel for You (detail), 2017, oil and acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in. Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Courtesy the Artist. P24 Photo courtesy the artist. P25 Sharona Eliassaf, Stars to Dust Dust to Stars, 2016, oil and spray on canvas, 63 × 79 in. Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Courtesy the Artist. P26 Photo courtesy the artist. P27 Matthew Ronay, Sprout Capsule Implantation, 2017, basswood, dye, cotton string, shellac-based primer, steel, plastic, flocking, and gouache, 23 1/2 × 22 × 13 in. Image courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York. P28 Photo courtesy the artist. P29 Anna Valdez, Deer Skull with Blue Vase, 2017, oil on canvas, 42 × 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco. Photo: Hashimoto Contemporary. P30 Photo courtesy the artist. P31 Monica Kim Garza, Ping Pong (detail), 2016/2017, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 36 in. Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Courtesy the Artist. P32 John Koch, Studio—End of Day (detail), 1961, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in. Photo: Dwight Primiano. P33 John Trumbull, Male Nude from Behind, ca. 1798, chalk, charcoal, and graphite on blue paper, 22 x 14 1/2 in. Gift of John Driscoll. P34 John Singer Sargent, Under the Willows (detail), 1887, oil on canvas, 27 × 22 in. Photo: Robert LaPrelle. P35 Vik Muniz, White Brazilian Orchid after Martin Johnson Heade, 2010, chromogenic color print from digital file. Photo: Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA. P39 FROM TOP: Photos: Daniel Moody and Stephen Ironside. P40 FROM LEFT: Florine Stettheimer, ca. 1910 / Peter A. Juley & Son, photographer. Miscellaneous photographs collection. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Florine Stettheimer, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1928, oil on canvas, 38 x 26 1/4 in. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Co-owned by Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Crystal Bridges. Photo: Edward C. Robison III. P41 FROM TOP: Photos by Daniel Moody, Stephen Ironside, and Marc Henning. P42 FROM TOP: Photos: Stephen Ironside and Marc Henning. P43 FROM TOP: Photos by Daniel Moody and Marc Henning. THIS PAGE Roxy Paine, Yield (detail), 2011, stainless steel, 47ft. 6 in. x 45ft. Yield, 2011 © Roxy Paine. Photo: Stephen Ironside. BACK COVER: Loie Hollowell, Yellow Mountains, 2016, oil paint, acrylic medium, sawdust, and high-density foam on linen mounted on panel, 48 × 36 × 3 in. © Loie Hollowell, courtesy Pace Gallery. Photo courtesy the artist and Feuer Mesler Gallery.
LAST WORD
Though we’ve been referred to as a disruptor, I like to think of our museum more as a catalyst: something that sparks change, but remains constant.
This spring, when we reopened the Early American Art
ROD BIGELOW
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CHIEF DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION OFFICER
galleries, it felt like we were turning an important page in the history of Crystal Bridges. Growth always involves change. One of the wonderful things about art is the enormous variety of stories it can tell. Crystal Bridges’ galleries opened with a particular story to present about the American spirit. Now it’s time to shuffle the pieces and discover new stories, new revelations, and new ways of approaching the works in our collection. The new arrangement juxtaposes works from our nation’s past with works by contemporary artists to help us make connections between historical ideas, issues, and aspirations and those of today. By experiencing Nari Ward’s powerful work We the People, for example, the many colors and textures of the shoelaces used in the work helps to remind us of the many diverse voices and experiences that have contributed to the story of American art. Crystal Bridges is committed to expanding our understanding of that story by seeking out those artists whose work has been under-recognized due to social or historical conditions beyond their control. We recognize that their work is every bit as important to the history of art in America as the work of well-known and celebrated artists, and we will continue to add their voices to our collection. Since our opening in 2011, Crystal Bridges has developed into a vibrant force—in our community, our nation, and in the museum world at large. Though we’ve been referred to as a disruptor, I like to think of our museum as a catalyst: something that sparks change, but remains constant. Our mission: to make great works of art accessible to everyone, to offer a welcoming environment in which to experience them, and to endeavor to tell the full story of American art, remains the same. Change comes as we continually strive to implement new ways of reaching for that goal. Our striving is the spark that inspires understanding, conversation, and, yes, change—making our world a little warmer, a little brighter, a little more joyful.
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600 Museum Way • Bentonville, AR 72712
CrystalBridges.org
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