Let’s Go Inside and Outside Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum
Next up from our visit to Bentonville is Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a museum Hi-Fructose has been eager to visit for many years. It should be, if not already, a destination for anyone interested in contemporary art for its permanent collection as well as its roster of exciting temporary exhibitions. It is a thoroughly immersive art experience both inside and outside the museum walls which are set on a lush green landscape. The nature trails that weave through its grounds are peppered with unexpected outdoor sculptures by artists such as Dale Chihuly (see middle image below), Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, James Turrell, and (a special favorite of mine) Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian house. It’s hard not to feel like a kid in a candy store inside the Crystal Bridges museum.
An overarching theme throughout the museum’s collection is the thoughtful attention to the placement of contemporary art next to classical. Also notable, the museum’s recognition of their own role as settlers and guests in the Northwest Arkansas region is evident throughout. An example are the didactics for the works in their Early American Art gallery, part of their permanent collection. The gallery is filled with incredible works frequently noted for their romanticized, spiritual, and nostalgic depictions of American landscapes. Crystal Bridges’ informative interpretations do not shy away from truth, privilege, and unacknowledged colonialism.
Crystal Bridges’ informative interpretations do not shy away from truth, privilege, and unacknowledged colonialism.
A half-hour walk from the museum is The Momentary, an extension of Crystal Bridges, which is housed within a decommissioned cheese factory and currently features two immersive exhibitions: Mystic Parallax by multidisciplinary artist Awol Erizku and Dark Waters by photographer Kristine Potter.
Mystic Parallax’s rich and exciting imagery blends Erikzu’s studio practice with the artists’ work, which was made as an in-demand editorial photographer. It features his conceptual portraits of leading Black cultural figures, such as Amanda Gorman, Michael B. Jordan, Pharrell Williams, and Solange. As Erizku has said, “It’s important for me to create confident, powerful, downright regal images of Black people.”
Kristine Potter’s haunting Dark Waters series reflects on the “’Southern Gothic’ landscape as evoked in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”
Aside from certain special exhibitions, Crystal Bridges entry is always free and their walking and biking trails and grounds are open from sunup to sunset which means that you can visit James Turrell’s Skyspace as it was meant to be viewed, either at dawn or sunset.
Below: Image gallery from Awol Erikzu’s ‘Mystic Parallax’ exhibition at The Momentary, followed by works found inside the Crystal Bridges Museum.
Fans of Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama need no introduction to the Kusama pumpkin- her dotted signature motif and yes, alter ego. Her pumpkins have been famously recreated from hotel rooms to textiles and designer hand bags by Louis Vuitton. She's even taken us inside of their surreal, organic structure, as in her Selfridges London pop-up store this time last year. So the story goes, Kusama's family once owned a storehouse full of pumpkins during World War II, and she developed a fondness for them. Ever since, she has continually used them throughout her career as a symbol of growth and fertility. Just in time for Halloween, Victoria Miro in London is showing a new body of bronze sculptures and paintings 2 years in the making, simply titled "Pumpkins".
Italian artist and designer Andrea Minini makes a living creating brand logos and graphics, but as a personal project the artist recently created the "Animals in Moire" series. A collection of black-and-white digital illustrations, the works take inspiration from the animal kingdom. But the shapes in these portraits of peacocks and pumas are anything but organic. Uniform curves outline the contours of he animals' faces. The creatures become abstracted and almost architectural, defined by mathematically-plotted shapes. The high-contrast, monochromatic patterns create the illusion of depth and dimension, yet the forms appear hollow and mask-like. Take a look at the fun series after the jump.
German-born collage artist Thomas Spieler creates intriguing multimedia works that play with the dualism that exists between the human and natural worlds. Spieler juxtaposes vintage black-and-white photographs of human figures with brightly colored photographs of more abstract forms. Many of the black-and-white photos look like they could be ads or pictures of movie stars lifted from old magazines, while others appear to be photographs of classical sculptures from antiquity. Meanwhile, the colorful photos are of objects found in nature, such as minerals, geological formations, butterfly wings and flower petals.
Drawing and performance art are rarely seen as complementary media, but Ethan Murrow's large-scale graphite drawings begin as performance collaborations with his wife, Vita Weinstein Murrow. The two began working together in 2004 and the source imagery they gather for their videos often inspires Murrow's detail-oriented works on paper. His drawings come with the heavy feeling of the aftermath of disaster.