TOGETHER AT LAST

BY DANIEL GREAR PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

We’ve done a fair bit of reporting on the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts renovation from afar, sifting through pictures and sneaking glances as we walked or drove by MacArthur Park, but — as you might expect — getting to step inside this mammoth is another experience entirely. If you were one of the lucky ones who snagged a ticket to the grand opening before reservations filled up, you know firsthand that there’s simply too much dazzling stimuli to absorb (much less write about) in a single visit, but here are a few highlights you’ve gotta see in person:

Despite the entire facility being something of a work of art, the most arresting feature might be the ceiling. Above the grand staircases of the massive atrium — which now intuitively unites a previously Frankensteinian facility — over 6,000 slats of differently sized plywood have been individually strung, no two pieces being parallel as they follow the elegantly undulating shape of the roof, the space between each board creating geometric patterns. According to Juliane Wolf — one of the design principals at Studio Gang, the acclaimed firm responsible for envisioning the new AMFA — the installation process involved placing a projection on the floor, which was then used to shoot lasers onto the ceiling in order to mark the hangpoints. It’s a detail like this that tempts me to say that the AMFA might be as, if not more, architecturally interesting as Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Also under this stunningly intricate vaulting, the Cultural Living Room is where I found myself most drawn to. A furniture-filled, glass-enclosed semicircle suspended over the front entrance of the building, the only stated purpose for this space is relaxation, a spot for the liminal time before or after whatever officially brought you to the museum. The Cultural Living Room perhaps errs on the sleek and bougie side at this point, prioritizing magazine-worthy vibes over maximum seating and hominess, but in time it’ll likely be broken in and feel more inviting. Through its gigantic slanted windows, you’ll find a panoramic view of Little Rock that you’ve definitely never seen before and a new appreciation for downtown structures that you’ve long grown numb to.

It’s hard not to focus on the flashiness of the building, but the art inside is just as worthy of exalting. Much like the overall design’s thrust toward giving the AMFA more cohesion, the galleries — all of which were endowed and named by Harriet and Warren Stephens in recognition of individuals and groups who were critical players in the museum’s history — have been relocated to reside in conjunction, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all the work on display and making the wandering experience that much more instinctive. My favorite part of the layout is the fact that you’re forced to walk underneath a colorful and constellatory installation by Anne Lindberg in order to find your way to “Together,” the premiere exhibition. Once inside “Together,” I rushed to the pieces I’d encountered so many times online — like “Carving Out Time, Scene 1: Morning” by LaToya M. Hobbs, “Triptych (3.20.15, 5.21.15, 6.8.15)” by Oliver Lee Jackson and "Meet You There” by Alison Elizabeth Taylor — and learned that they are far more impressively vast and far more accessibly human than I could have imagined from a distance.

Victoria Ramirez (pictured at right) became the executive director at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in October 2019. A lifelong player in the world of museums, especially in moments of growth, she previously served as the director of both the El Paso Museum of Art and the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin as well as the education director at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

You started working at the AMFA during a pretty transitional time, when plans for the construction of a new building were already significantly underway. How was the project pitched to you? What challenges did the museum have that the improvements were designed to meet? The building really needed to do two things. It needed to be state-of-the-art. It needed to function like a 21st century art museum. It needed to be able to store, preserve and display its collection. It needed to be able to function like a 21st century art school. That’s part of who we are. We needed to have a state-of-the-art theater, lecture hall and educational spaces. The second thing is that it needed to be able to serve people and be a place that people wanted to go to. And I think we’ve achieved that with the design. It’s a beautiful building, inside and out. It’s an inspiring place to be. I think people will really feel that specialness when they come to the museum. That’s what we want museums to be, to be these unique, really nurturing places. It can’t just function; it’s got to be a magnet that draws people. And a place that people want to come back to.

Now that you’re on the other side, what’s really special about this facility? What are some unique features that you love? Oh my gosh, there’s so many. I love the fact that we’re located in a park. I love the fact that landscape architecture and the natural world is a part of the museum experience, not only when you come to the museum, but when you’re inside. With all of our windows and glass, it really creates this sort of seamless relationship between the interior and the exterior. I love the fact that you could be driving down Ninth Street or on the south side of the park and you can peer into the museum and see what’s happening. To me, it’s almost like there are no secrets. I love the fact that when you come in, it’s very intuitive, the way that you navigate the museum. You can stand at certain points in the atrium and you can see clear through north to south. What you can also see are all the amenities of the museum: the restaurant, the store, the school, the lecture hall, the theater, the galleries and even the bathrooms. It’s not a maze.

Also, in this new building, there are a lot of open social spaces. There’s a great signature space called the Cultural Living Room, which is really going to be Little Rock’s living room. It’s a place where anyone can come in and bring their laptop, make friends or grab a drink or a coffee, before or after walking through the galleries or going to see a performance.

The last thing I think is so special about this building is that it’s really, really stunning. Every material for the floor and the walls and the ceilings and the lights was so carefully selected. We want people to realize that they’re in this kind of gift to the community when they come to the museum. When you’re in a special space where people have taken a lot of thought and care into crafting, I think people feel that.

How has programming been expanded in light of the renovations? Well, one of the strengths of this museum is our legacy programs. I’m really pleased to say that we will continue to have an art school, but we’ve also modernized it a bit. In addition to classes, we’re offering workshops, and offering expanded programs for children. We’re continuing the Children’s Theatre legacy of offering performances for young people and for families, but again it’s been modernized. One of our very first performances will be “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” which we know is near and dear to a lot of people and will just be fun and familiar. But it’s a performance that involves over 70 puppets, and puppetry has been one of our relatively new offshoots of the Children’s Theatre program. For us, theater has always been about main stage, but now it’s about playwriting and puppetry and costuming.

We’ll also have a range of programs for both children and adults. We’ll have a whole mobile audio tour that people can access through their phones. We’ll have regular tours with one of our fabulous volunteer docents, where visitors can learn more about the building and the art on view. And we’re branching out into more performing artists. In addition to some of the artist talks, we have concerts coming up. We have films that we’ll be adding to the schedule. We have a performance with Ballet Arkansas coming up. Coming to MacArthur Park will really be an opportunity to see a broad spectrum of the arts.

In January, the AMFA announced that it would be partnering with the Arkansas Cinema Society and Ballet Arkansas. Could you speak to those alliances as well as any other collaborations that are on the horizon? What was really interesting about both of them is that they, like us, have a statewide commitment. All three of us as organizations have Arkansas in our names and we are committed to serving the people in this state. In talking with them, we learned that Ballet Arkansas was really interested in performances in nontraditional spaces. While we have a formal theater, they’re interested in some experimentation. Given our brand-new building, we could be that venue and backdrop for them. They certainly have gotten to know our collection a bit, and they’re looking at some works and thinking about the intersection of dance and visual arts. There’s so much overlap there. The Arkansas Cinema Society was the same way. They’re interested in expanding their programming, they’re interested in exploring multidisciplinary programming, and what the intersection of art and film looks like.

We are talking to some other organizations right now. Some of them are smaller organizations, too, because one of the things we can offer is our space. So more partnerships to come. They may not all be formal partnerships per se. Sometimes, a great collaboration for an evening can really be something very interesting. In fact, we have in July a partnership that we’re doing with a handful of other museums in our region, bringing curators and artists from throughout our Delta/Mid-South region. We’re working with Crystal Bridges, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. I think a lot of cultural organizations across the country realize there’s so much value in working together. When you do that, you really can oftentimes create a more lasting or impactful program than when it’s just one organization going at it on their own.

Let’s start by talking about “Together,” the lead exhibition accompanying the reopening of the AMFA. How was it dreamed up? “Together” is really about celebrating the fact that we can finally be back together with all of our guests after the museum has been closed to the public for so many years. It’s this joyous reflection on themes of togetherness. We’re dividing it up between ideas of together with friends and family (and we mean family in the broadest sense), together with community (however you want to see that word) and also together with nature.

And the works in the exhibition, some of them fall into more than one category. When you walk through the door, you’ll see some photographs by an artist named Sarah Sense. She lives in California, but she has Choctaw and Chitmacha Native American heritage. The Chitimacha reservation is in this very bayou-esque land in Louisiana and she traveled through with a boat and took a lot of photographs. Afterwards, she talked to people on the land about what their idea of this place was and she took the words and stenciled them on top of the photographs that she created. She also cut the photographs into strips and wove them using basket techniques that were handed down throughout the generations. So that work is both about nature, because she’s showing photographs of her ancestral homeland, and also about community, because she made it with the help of other people.

Another one of the new exhibitions, “Drawn to Paper,” is an assembly of pieces that exist in the AMFA’s permanent collection. Tell me about that. The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is known for its drawing collection. We had a former director, Townsend Wolfe, who led the museum for decades. He decided in the early ’70s that he really wanted to focus the institution’s collecting activities on drawing. He thought the institution could make its mark by collecting drawings because they’re unique works of art and they’re relatively affordable compared to paintings and sculpture.

With “Drawn to Paper,” we wanted to highlight some of the best works in the collection. We have the largest collection of works by an artist named John Marin outside of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He’s known for his watercolors. They kind of hover in between abstraction and realistic depiction of things. To me, watercolor is one of the most difficult mediums because if you mess up, it’s hard to fix it. He just has this magical touch with the brush. He’ll make a mark and it just seems perfectly predetermined.

“Tears of Chiwen” by Sun Xun is the first-ever exhibition in the AMFA’s New Media Gallery. What makes it special? The New Media Gallery is what they call a black box space in the art world. It’s basically a really slender room. The walls are painted black. You go in through curtains, there’s benches and the work is projected on the wall. Picking Sun Xun’s work, which is animation based off of his incredible drawings, I thought it would create a bridge, like a way for people to approach new media that would feel somewhat comfortable and familiar. It’s also really fast-paced, and visually exciting animation. It’s a series of vignettes loosely based on the story of the chiwen dragon.

Conceptually, Sun Xun is really interested in history and culture and the ways in which information about those two things are dispersed. He was born shortly after the Cultural Revolution in China. He realized that the stories he learned in school about the Cultural Revolution in his history book were very different from what he was told by his parents. And so he grew up with this suspicion of the official, government-sanctioned story of history vs. what the oral history version of things are. “Tears of Chiwen” is from

2017, so it’s a little older, but it’s the first time it’s been exhibited in a museum in the United States and I think it’s really relevant to so many of the cultural conversations we’re having right now. If you think about all these debates that are happening in our state legislatures around the country about how we can and cannot talk about the history of our nation, I think Sun Xun’s work is really applicable to those conversations.

The AMFA is also debuting two installations. How is your thinking different when it comes to an installation rather than an exhibition? They’re different in that they will be up longer. Anne Lindberg’s installation will be up for three years and Natasha Bowden’s installation will be up for two years. Also, they’re site-specific in the sense that each artist traveled here and made the work specifically in response to the architecture of the building.

Natasha was here for pretty much the entire month of December. Her installation is called “Spring Song.” She makes these things that she calls blooms out of a plywood type of board. She has them CNC routed and she paints on top of them. They become these sort of flower garden scapes. They’re flat, but they’re sculptures. She layers them almost like stage scenery. She also paints the walls. If you’ve driven down or walked down Ninth Street recently, you might have noticed that on the north side of the building, there’s a really big window. It’s like the size of a billboard. Once all the curtains and the signs come down and we open up, you will be able to look through that window and see Natasha’s installation.

Anne Lindberg was here for a week in March. She works with miles of a really thick cotton string and she pulls it from wall to wall and staples it in place. Her work is installed above you so you’ll be able to walk underneath it. When light goes through it, it creates this really ethereal soft glow of the colors above you. It’s mostly this really pretty blue and green and yellow with a little bit of sherbet orange and lavender coming through. She’s really inspired by the colors of the landscape around the building.

What do we have to look forward to in the coming months and years? What I can say is that we will be showing more international artists and a more diverse roster of artists. Also, since so much of our collection is paper drawings, those all have to be switched out, because if they’re on display for too long, they’ll be damaged by the light. We will be rotating works in our permanent collection about every six months. When we use the word “permanent,” that doesn’t mean that every work is permanently going to be on display; it just means that the museum owns the work. So if you come back in six months, you’re going to see new things on the wall. I can promise that for sure.