C Magazine Issue lll Vol ll

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William and Donna Acquavella Annenberg Foundation Lee and Ramona Bass Alberto Chang-Rajii Mica Ertegun Jackye and Curtis Finch

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Gallery. Photo: Stewart Clemens Photography. Monica Aissa Martinez, Male Torso – Anterior View (detail), 2012–2013, casein, gouache, gesso, and micaceous iron oxide on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. Catalog cards photo: Stephen Ironside. Installation detail of Jeila Gueramian’s IT’S YOU at Crystal Bridges. Photo: Stephen Ironside. Andy DuCett’s Mom Booth installed and staffed at Crystal Bridges. Photo: Marc Henning.

Crystal Bridges Global Initiative Fund

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: Artists Jimmy Baker and Terence Hammonds at the opening of State of the Art. Sheila Gallagher, Plastic LIla (detail), 2013, melted plastic on armature. Courtesy of the Artist and DODGE

S TAT E O F T H E A R T S P O N S O R E D B Y

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8 38 CONTENTS 2 Letter from the Editor 5 Exploring State of the Art 6 Making Connections How artists reach out to viewers

8 Artists in the Studio Inventing new processes

10 Artists in Community Demonstrating the connecting power of art

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12 Material Matters A whole new take on art supplies

16 Connecting the Dots

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Themes and issues in State of the Art

28 State of the Art Artists .A who’s-who of the artists in the exhibition

32 Collection Connections C magazine is the membership publication for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

If you have questions about your membership, or wish to reserve tickets to exhibitions or events, you may call our Member Priority Line: 479.418.5728, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Tickets may also be purchased online.

Not a Member yet? You may become a Member, or purchase gift memberships, at: CrystalBridges.org/get-involved/Membership.

State of the Art in conversation with historical works from Crystal Bridges’ collection

34 Tales from the Road 36 Tales From the Home Front 38 Museum Store Bring home State of the Art

39 Membership 40 Last Word

MEMBER MAGAZINE

President

Don Bacigalupi EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Rod Bigelow DEPUTY DIRECTOR

Sandy Edwards DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS

Diane Carroll EDITOR

Linda DeBerry CREATIVE SERVICES MANAGER

Anna Vernon DESIGNERs

Erick Dominguez Laura Hicklin CONTRIBUTORS

Chad Alligood Don Bacigalupi Rod Bigelow Diane Carroll Emily Ironside Aaron Jones EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Alison Nation photography

Chad Alligood Marc Henning Stephen Ironside Dero Sanford Jessica Whalen MEMBERSHIP & DEVELOPMENT

Robyn Alley Emily Ironside Anne Jackson Jamey McGaugh Jo-Ann Murcho Judy Plum Carly Scheibmeir Jill Wagar

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Creating this special issue of C magazine has been a writer’s and editor’s dream!

With 102 artists and 227 fascinating artworks to consider, the number and depth of possible connections to draw upon for subject matter was rich. For every topic we decided to explore, we could easily have chosen many more.

The topics we did choose were only the very tip of the iceberg, of course. Part of the enormous fun of this exhibition is discovering those connections, themes, and conversations for yourself. One of the games we devised for the artist cards in our (rather unusual) catalog SEE PAGE 38 for State of the Art was something we named “Seven Degrees of Crystal Bridges.” In this game, players try to connect two randomly selected artists from the exhibition through an associative string of five other artists: finding connections from one to the next to the next through shared themes, form, materials, colors, geographic regions, or a host of other possible associations. It’s a game you can play informally in the galleries as well. As you view the works,

learn what the artists say about them, and experience the thoughts and associations each artwork sparks within you, you will begin to sense the conversations taking place between them.

One thing that struck me as I was learning about these artists was how much thought, planning, and passion every single one of them poured into their process, at every level from concept to completion. Each artist in this exhibition has something very important he or she wishes to communicate, think about, look at, or grapple with. My personal epiphany occurred when I realized that while I, as a writer, might write down those thoughts or feelings to work out their meanings, artists are driven to make art. We all have a very human need to come to terms with the world around us. We talk, we connect, we reach out to others to somehow get a grip on all this… stuff…we’re experiencing. And some of us, thank goodness, make art.

We hope you enjoy this special State of the Art issue of C magazine, and that it helps you to make more of those important connections.

EDITOR

LINDA DEBERRY

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Constant Contact

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Explore!

E x p Lo r i n g

State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now is an exhibition of the work of 102 American artists who live and work in communities large and small around the United States.

SEP 13 2014 – JAN 19 2015 The motivating idea behind State of the Art was that artists live and work all across the US, not just in the art centers of Los Angeles and New York. And while many of these artists may be very well known in their regions, very few of us ever get to see their work because of the way the national art scene tends to be concentrated in urban areas.

The exhibition curators decided that the best way to discover the true “state of the art” in America today was to travel around the country to meet some of the artists. This is what they set out to do when they began their 100,000-milejourney in 2013. Over ten months, President Don Bacigalupi and Curator Chad Alligood visited nearly 1,000 artists in their studios. From those visits, they selected 102 to be included in State of the Art. The faces and voices of the artists are an integral part of the exhibition, and we encourage Members to delve into this collection of resources. Discover for yourselves the fascinating and diverse world of American art now.

Tak e a Tour A drop-in tour highlighting six works of art in the exhibition is held every Thursday at 1 p.m. The tour travels to both galleries of the exhibition and lasts approximately one hour.

Loo k and L i s t en Download the free State of the Art app to your own Android or Apple device and let it guide you through the galleries, or check one out at Guest Services. Each of the numbered stops on the tour includes a high-resolution image, curators’ remarks, and audio or video clips featuring the exhibition artists.

B e h i nd -t h e - S cenes Visit an exhibition kiosk for a look at the ultimate road trip, the visits to artists’ studios, and more.

R ead t h e B log The Crystal Bridges Blog includes many artist interviews, guest posts, and behind-the-scenes stories about State of the Art. At t end a P rogram Check out the Museum calendar for a full list of exhibition programs: including art talks, classes, and workshops with the artists.

A nd More …

Visit our Library to learn more about exhibition artists and contemporary art today.

Check out the Museum Store and the Exhibition Store for unique State of the Art items.

Snap a photo of a favorite artwork and share it on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram tagging #StateoftheArt.

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The numbers convey how the development of State of the Art was, by any measure, a Herculean task. For ten months, Crystal Bridges President Don Bacigalupi and Curator Chad Alligood traveled around the country, visiting studios, meeting artists, looking at artwork, driving, talking, sleeping in hotels; only to get up early and do it all again. Why?

Stephen Ironside

“The prehistory of this idea was a conversation I had with Alice Walton and the board when we first met,” said Bacigalupi. “I talked about what I perceived as a great opportunity for a new museum in this part of the country to recapture the leading role in presenting what American art is at this moment.”

“Contemporary art hasn’t always resonated with people who are not in the art world,” Bacigalupi continued, “so increasingly people say things like ‘I don’t understand it.’ or ‘A child could do it.’ Wouldn’t it be great if we could change the discourse? We could provide access to the real meaning of art made in our own time and its connections to relevant issues. It’s just the way art has always been— artists making work about the times they live in.”

Late in 2012, one year after the Museum opened the board and Museum leadership began talking about what would be next for Crystal Bridges. What they sought was an ambitious, even audacious project—one that would capitalize on the momentum of the Museum’s successful opening and underscore the importance of being a major museum in the center of the country. State of the Art was born.

Ge t t ing Started Step one, of course, was finding the artists. Bacigalupi began contacting colleagues around the country, asking for their knowledge of artists from their city or region.

“I started with colleagues I knew well in Texas and Ohio, where I spent the majority of my career,” Bacigalupi said. “I honestly didn’t know what to expect. What I found really amazed me. Not only did colleagues willingly provide us with the names of artists in their area—they overwhelmingly offered additional names of other art contacts. The level of enthusiasm and generosity was mindboggling.”

In a very short time, Bacigalupi had corresponded with some 800 arts professionals across the country, many of whom he had never met. The recommendations poured in—nearly 10,000 of them in all.

The Museum hired Curator Chad Alligood to help with the research. Alligood is a Georgia native with a Harvard education who was finishing up his PhD from City University of New York.

He was serving as the Jeanne and Ralph Graham Collections Fellow at Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan before he joined Crystal Bridges.

If Alligood and Bacigalupi barely knew one another when they started their travels back in 2013, they were certainly well acquainted by the time they finished in 2014. During that time, they visited more than 900 artist studios all across the country.

Monday through Friday they were generally on the road. The days were spent traveling from one artist’s studio to another.

The evenings were taken up in reviewing recommendations, conducting research, and choosing the artists they would visit the next week, in the next city.

W hat T he y W e re Lo o k in g Fo r In prioritizing the list of 10,000 recommended artists into a list of some 1,000 artists for potential studio visits, Bacigalupi and Alligood had to establish some criteria. In simple language, they were seeking highly engaging artwork created by emerging artists from all over the country. They soon learned, however, that their initial parameters would need to be adapted.

“Our goals were ever-evolving,” Bacigalupi explained. “At one time we said we were looking for ‘emerging’ artists. But that didn’t describe who we were looking at. Many of the artists have local or regional careers. They might be the most respected artist in their

town or city, but they’re not being discussed in the centers of art in New York or LA. It’s as if the art world has not acknowledged that art can be local. It can be resonant with local populations that embrace and understand it.”

TH E FIRST ST E P Even with the massive commitment of time and energy that went into creating State of the Art, the process was by no means comprehensive. For every artist visited there was at least one the team couldn’t get to. In the interests of time and logistics, hard choices had to be made.

“This is a starting point,” said Bacigalupi. “It’s also a call to action— for ourselves and our colleagues—to begin looking more deeply into places that are unexpected and to pay more attention to our local artists. This was an effort to begin that process. We’ve taken the first step, and there are many more steps to come.”

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aking Connections

In selecting artists for State of the Art, Crystal Bridges President Don Bacigalupi and Curator Chad Alligood evaluated the work on three criteria: engagement, virtuosity, and appeal. Notably, the first criteria was engagement. The driving force behind the State of the Art project was to discover artists who engage with their community and their times, exploding the idea that contemporary art is inaccessible or irrelevant.

“People say that they feel distant from contemporary art: they don’t get it,” said Bacigalupi. “They don’t find ample communication coming their way from a contemporary work of art. One of our responsibilities is to offer viewers a way in, to understand that there is indeed rich communication in contemporary works.

Artists in our own day have much to share about our situation, about the world we live in, about the issues that we all deal with and face together.”

Many of the artists selected for the exhibition make conscious efforts to get viewers’ attention and connect with them. Boston artist Sheila Gallagher said: “I think one of the hardest things for artists in the twenty-first century is to compete for people’s attention.”

It’s a theme that is repeated by many artists: the need to get people to look and to keep them looking long enough for the work to make the connection. If there is any kind of “trend” in contemporary American art, this may be it.

The artists in State of the Art put an enormous amount of time and energy into the conceptual bases for their works. But it is also important to them that the work 06

Susie J. Lee, Johnny (left), Young Trucker (right), from the series Fracking Fields, 2013, high-definition video portrait. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

be accessible on many levels and for viewers of different ages and backgrounds. The works are fascinating, intriguing, beautiful—and layered to the brim with intention, meaning, and association.

A Long Look Seattle-based artist Susie J. Lee has taken portraiture to new levels of engagement. Her video portraits of workers in the oil and natural gas “fracking” industry strive to make human connections across and beyond a very contentious and divisive issue. Lee places a video camera in front of each of her subjects and asks that the sitter simply be silent, reflect upon some memory or aspect of their lives, and sit there for a time. The result is a portrait that looks back at us in a very real way. Over time, viewers move from feelings of curiosity to vague discomfort, to a sense of perhaps having gained some genuine connection with the subject.

Through Lee’s portraits we’re able to see beyond our first

I’m always looking at memory as a source of inspiration in terms of how you communicate with people on a very intimate level, particularly one-to-one. How do you capture that and create a public moment from that?

SUSIE J. LEE

impressions and look into the humanness of her subjects. She also strives to reach out to people who might not otherwise feel a natural connection to art.

“What is it that contemporary art can do for people—especially people who don’t have a voice or might not necessarily walk into a museum?” she asks herself. “How do you create a practice that actually has a dialogue with them? I don’t really have an answer for that. I just think that’s always in the back of my mind.”

Ge ttin g in to th e Ac t Minneapolis artist Andy DuCett’s work is highly interactive. He creates playful environments that trigger common associations in viewers (they could more accurately be called “participants”) and bring them together through a shared experience.

“I think some kinds of contemporary art might be a bit cold or exclusive,” explained DuCett. “If you don’t have six years of art school under your belt, you might be out of luck. I like the inclusiveness of this work. There’s a democracy of everyday objects that I like.”

DuCett started out creating mixed media installations using found objects. Over time his installations became gradually larger, and then he began looking for a way to get his audience involved on a more personal level.

“I wanted to find a way that people could interact and think more about what I was using these objects to suggest.” he explained.

“Something in my work that I’ve been thinking about for a while is nostalgia. It’s a way of thinking about the space that you’ve traveled. I think it’s a nice reminder of home and conversations about what that can mean.”

DuCett’s Mom Booth is a good example of the artist’s use of nostalgia—along with a healthy dose of humor—to create connection. The work was inspired by the idea of the museum “information booth.”

“It’s a place where you get information, you ask questions, they make sure you’re okay,” DuCett explained. “That’s what you call Mom for!” The Mom Booth is stocked with everything from Kleenex to clean underwear and chicken soup, and as visitors pass by, the Moms on staff (DuCett’s own mom has been one of them) chat them up.

“They may ask: ‘Are you doing okay? Are you having a good time?’” DuCett said. “They’ll say ‘You haven’t called your father in a while, he’s worried about you’—all these things associated with a Midwestern mom.”

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“To fully understand the power of contemporary artists’ work, we needed to get out and see them in their studios and in the communities in which they work,” said Crystal Bridges President Don Bacigalupi.

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An artist’s studio is where the “work” in “artwork” gets done. Some of the more traditional studio practices are familiar: an artist sets up an easel, prepares to paint, and begins. Some practices, however, are not so traditional. In order to realize their vision, sometimes artists are obliged to create personal adaptations of standard techniques, or even to invent new processes altogether.

DO N OT TRY THI S AT HOME Boston artist Sheila Gallagher has invented a specialized technique for working with her unusual choice of materials.

“I was trained traditionally as a painter, but I find paint to be an incredibly burdensome tradition,” Gallagher said. “So for a long time I’ve been essentially painting with things that aren’t paint.”

Artist Sheila Gallagher creates an artwork with smoke.

RTISTS IN THE STUDIO

SEE A VIDEO OF GALLAGHER PAINTING WITH SMOKE AT STATEOFTHEART.CRYSTALBRIDGES.ORG

FROM TOP LEFT: Sheila Gallagher, Black Cow, 2014, smoke on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist and DODGE Gallery. Sheila Gallagher, Plastic LIla, 2013, melted plastic on armature. Courtesy of the Artist and DODGE Gallery. Photo: Stewart Clemens Photography. Flora C. Mace, Tazetta Narcissus, 2014, botanical, glass, composite, and steel stand. Courtesy of the Artist Photo: Ann Welch.

Sheila Gallagher has developed her own techniques and tools to create artworks using smoke on canvas. Once she begins, she cannot correct or erase any marks.

One of the things she uses instead is plastic recyclables—cut up, artfully arranged, and melted into large compositions.

“I’m looking using the most discarded, gross, toxic materials,” she said. “For me it’s not that it’s a beautiful image but it’s made of plastic, it’s that it’s a beautiful image and it’s made of plastic.”

Her remarkable composition Plastic Lila was inspired by a

My big artistic theme is the mingling of the sacred and the profane, the really trashy and the really beautiful.

SHEILA GALLAGHER

nineteenth-century image of a Hindu garden, which the artist sketched and divided into a grid pattern. Each section of grid was equivalent to the size of the cookie sheet on which Gallagher composed the individual segments of the work.

“I love working with the plastic, I never know what it’s going to do,” she said. “I cut up the plastic, and I put the plastic on the cookie tray, I put on my gas mask, I go to my grill outside, and I cook them on the grill.” That’s right, the grill. Using a standard backyard gas grill, Gallagher heats the composed tray of plastics to the melting point. As the plastic melts, she uses tools to gently move it around to fill in gaps and finesse the composition. Then she allows the tray to cool and ultimately melds the sections together with a heat gun.

“I like making processes up. To me, that’s the alchemy,” Gallagher said. “It’s hard to make something work at six inches, at six feet, and at 20 feet—and the plastic is really great at that.”

REDEFIN ING THE POSSIBLE Seattle-based glass artist Flora Mace and her partner, Joey Kirkpatrick, envisioned creating a botanical collection in glass, and began thinking of possible ways to create it.

“As we researched the plants, we realized that the only really substantial collections of plants are in herbariums—flattened, dried, and brown,” Mace explained. “I said to myself: ‘There’s got to be a way to figure this out three-dimensionally.’ I wanted to see if we could do it, holding the plant in its three-dimensional form and keeping the color.”

So Mace began to experiment ... and experiment … and experiment. After six years of failures and near misses, she ultimately arrived at a process that worked. It involves harvesting the plant at the peak of its beauty, then drying it and allowing its component parts (stems, leaves, petals) to come apart.

Each discrete element is then covered in a composite of Mace’s invention to seal it from the air. The artist must then reconstruct

the entire plant: root, stem, leaf, and petal by petal. The result is a stunningly preserved three-dimensional specimen that will retain its color and form for years, if not centuries.

The works are nearly as much about mastery of materials as they are about the plants. In time, Mace will begin to teach others the secrets of her technique, and she refuses to apply for a patent. “I hope that the techniques we have developed will help other artists realize that there is another way,” Mace said.

“Just keep looking.”

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When you think of an artist’s lifestyle, what comes to mind? Someone sequestered in a studio, avoiding human contact, making art in solitude?

That’s how they’ve often been portrayed, but the truth is actually a lot more interesting.

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“Artists are among us every day,” said Curator Chad Alligood. “They’re the people you meet on the street and at parent-teacher conferences and in the grocery store. The truth is that artists are totally engaged in the world around them.”

Not only are they engaged in their world, often artists are working to make a difference. They may be organizers, bringing artists together in shared studio spaces or galleries. Often they are community leaders: teachers, business owners, or activists.

“Artists are often at the vanguard of change,” Alligood said. “And many of the artists in State of the Art instigate change not only through their presence in the fabric of the community, but also through their work.”

Artist Vanessa German working with young artists in her Art House in Pittsburgh, PA.

RTISTS IN COMMUNITY

FROM TOP: A few of the young artists who frequent Vanessa German’s Art House. John Riepenhoff, The John Riepenhoff Experience, 2014, ladder, MDF, wood, and light. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Dero Sanford.

A Home for Art One place where a single artist is having a remarkable impact on a community is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a neighborhood called Homewood. In 2011, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show referred to Homewood as “the most dangerous neighborhood in America” for its history of violence, poverty, and drugs. It’s where artist Vanessa German lives. She often creates her sculptures on the front porch of her house where she can spread out with her tools and materials and work. Her activity drew the attention of neighborhood kids, who wanted to join in.

“So I pulled out all this old paint and paintbrushes,” German said, “and I would work and they would work too.”

As the word spread and more and more children came to make art, German began to refer to her porch as the “Love Front Porch,” a place where everyone was safe and valued.

I realized that all I was doing was sharing the thing that I loved and that by sharing what I loved I was sharing love.

VA N E S S A G E R M A N

When a house down the street became empty, German asked the head of the housing authority if she and the children could use the house for art-making. During the two women’s meeting— which took place on German’s front porch—the neighborhood kids gathered around, eager to make art. Although German’s proposal was initially turned down, the young artists who congregated on her porch made an impression on the housing authority leader. She called German back a few days later.

“She said she couldn’t stop thinking about how just because we were sitting on the porch, all this activity happened, and she said she would work out a way to let us use the house,” German said.

Over the next two years, the Art House, as it came to be known, drew an increasing number of kids and their parents who came to make art, or just to sit and socialize. Neighbors regularly provide snacks for the kids, many of whose parents can’t always afford to feed them. The Art House has become a social center for the neighborhood, and folks contribute what they can to keep it stocked with supplies and to assure that it’s a safe haven.

“I live in a neighborhood where they tear down a lot of houses,” German said. “So to have a house that is being used and taken care of—with vision and with hope and with purpose—is really something that makes people proud.”

In May, using crowd-sourced funds along with a chunk of her own money earned through the sale of her art, German purchased a house on her block to provide the Art House a permanent home.

“It’s hard to put into words what it means for each and every

person,” German continued. “But I know how much it means to the kids when they come. The kids know what they want to create: so that means they have taken this space home with them, and they’re thinking about it and imagining and dreaming. And I live in a place where there’s not a lot of dreaming going on.“ A Catalyst fo r A rt Artist John Riepenhoff operates the Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He started the gallery when he was an art student, as a venue where the art and artists he enjoyed could exhibit and share their work.

“I wasn’t finding a place that was showing the art I was interested in,” he explained.

“These people were making really fresh work—it hadn’t been canonized yet. There was no home for them in a more formal public space where people could come together to observe and talk about it.”

“I slowly started making these projects that framed work in a way, or they created a platform of support for somebody else to create within,” Riepenhoff explained. One of these is The John Riepenhoff Experience: a doll-house sized gallery with a hole in the bottom through which viewers put their heads in order to view a diminutive exhibition inside.

The miniature galleries became a popular collaborative opportunity for other artists with small budgets and big ideas.

The John Riepenhoff Experience has now toured to more than 50 national and international locations, showcasing different artists each time. Over the past 11 years, Riepenhoff and his galleries—both full-scale and miniature—have helped to support a community of artists in Milwaukee. Five years ago, he took on a partner and added a second location for the Green Gallery.

Some people break themselves by trying to be part of the art world.

And we just invite the art world to our world.

JOHN RIEPENHOFF

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A short list of the materials used to create the works in State of the Art includes eggs, stickers, pill bottles, dollar bills, plastic containers, books, lottery tickets, found photographs, old movie posters, yarn, thread, grass, drywall, tar paper, combs, pillowcases, furniture, porcelain, silk, recycled baby dolls, and household appliance parts. Oh yes, and paint, stone, wood, ink, clay, and glass.

The variety and ingenuity of media reflects the remarkably open world of art making in America today.

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“The divide between traditional craft media—ceramics, fiber, glass—and traditional fine art media—painting and sculpture—has completely collapsed,” said Crystal Bridges Curator Chad Alligood. “Now people coming through art school may have no interest in what supposed ‘fine art’ materials are, they just attack.”

Beau ty Be yo n d the E y e o f the Be h o l d e r Consider the tar-paper flowers of Omaha, Nebraska artist Angela Drakeford, for whom this homely material serves as a metaphor for blackness and society’s outdated negative associations: ugliness, sin, hopelessness. Half African American, the artist has grappled all her life with issues of racial identity. As a female artist, she has also had to deal with those who would trivialize her work as “pretty” but without substance. Her Self Portrait of massed tar paper flowers serves as a defiant statement of self-worth.

“I thought: I’m going to make this work that’s in your face, but it’s time-intensive and beautiful,” Drakeford said. “I have this obsession where you will not be able to question my craft. It empowers me to be like ‘Yes, I’m good at what I do.’”

Images of artist materials taken from studio videos included in the State of the Art app.

FROM TOP LEFT: John Douglas Powers, Nathalie Miebach, Gabriel Dawe, Jeila Gueramian.

ATERIAL MATTERS

BOTTOM LEFT: Angela Drakeford, Self-Portrait II (detail), 2014, tar paper, crepe paper, wire, glue, insulation foam board, and poplar. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Ryan Carroll. BOTTOM RIGHT: Chris Sauter, The Whole World (detail), 2010/2014, installation. Courtesy of the aArtist. Photo: Marc Henning.

Angela Drakeford wants to embed so much beauty and craftsmanship in her work that no one can deny that it’s beautiful.

“Her work bypasses the question of whether beauty is rigorous,” said Crystal Bridges President Don Baciglupi. “She’s already past that debate; she’s engaging it as a part of the conceptual underpinning of that work.”

Beauty became taboo during the latter part of the Modernist period. To make something traditionally beautiful was completely suspect and couldn’t possibly coexist with intellectual rigor. That has gone away. Today some artists show a powerful engagement with beauty, and craft is a big part of that. It is now fair game to engage beauty as a strategy.

DON BACIGALUPI

A H o le N ew Pe rspec tive San Antonio artist Chris Sauter creates art within the language and framework of architecture.

For his installation The Whole World, Sauter’s physical medium is ordinary drywall. He cuts shapes in the walls of the gallery and uses the cut-outs to build corresponding objects to complete the installation. In his installation for State of the Art, one of those objects is a telescope, and the holes made in the wall during the process of building it stand in for stars in the night sky. The work references the “heretical” history of the science of astronomy as well as the empty spaces that still remain in our scientific knowledge of the universe. Sauter often uses his material to bring forth points of connection between issues and ideas from seemingly opposite points of view.

“Many artists that we visited talked about not wanting to be dogmatic in their work, but rather to open a conversation,” said Alligood. “They want to create a space for a more nuanced discussion of something that we might otherwise only encounter in the media, where it’s reduced to a binary that you’re either for or against. They’re interested in offering a conversation, opening a space for a debate.”

“Setting these works up, you find parallels between the scientific approach and the religious approach to the big questions,” Sauter said. “It’s not clear-cut. I have certain opinions about science and religion, but I’m much more interested in setting up the dynamic so it becomes more complex and interesting and not so didactic.”

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Of course the animal is not a line, but it is a line. I think of this work

P i le i t On One thing that stands out regarding the materials used in the works in State of the Art is their sheer number: not only the number of different media used, but in some cases a literal mass accumulation of stuff. These cumulative works draw our attention, not only to the quantity of objects in them, but also to the repetitive, often laborious process required to make them.

“After Duchamp and the Modernist period, there was a disconnect between the idea of labor and craft and the physical object,” Bacigalupi explained. “It ceased to be an imperative that a work of art would evidence the craft that went into its making. That has changed in the last couple of decades.

Often with artists in the exhibition there is an accumulation of time, of labor, and of material stuff. Sometimes it’s literally an accumulation of things, sometimes it’s a layering process. It’s a return to a balance between that conceptual underpinning and this real making.”

Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based collage artist Mark Wagner found that viewers reacted more strongly to his works when they could readily recognize the paper he used. He completed an entire body of work using classic Camel cigarette packs for this reason before he moved on to an even more recognizable material.

as an allegory or metaphor for the creative process. The creative

process is something wild that we try to hone or control. But it’s

actually perhaps more beautiful than our intentions with it. So this

was a way to access the mysteries of making art.

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J E F F W H E T S TO N E

“I started looking at other very popular pieces of paper,” Wagner explained. “I hit upon the dollar bill as something everyone had in their hands every day.”

The time and effort that went into the making of these works leaps out at the viewer, demanding to be examined more closely. “I like the craft aspect of it,” Wagner said. “It’s a strong material to use and people have strong reactions. Some people approach it formally, some approach it economically, it’s

Jeff Whetstone, Drawing E. Obsoleta, 2011, 16mm film transferred to digital video.

Courtesy of the Artist and Julie Saul Gallery, New York. Photo: ©Jeff Whetstone, Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York.

A L i v i ng L ine Whether manipulating molten plastic, sawing holes in drywall, or folding and cutting stiff tar paper into a new shape, there’s an element of control in making art. By definition, an artist must have some measure of mastery over his or her material. When dealing with materials from the natural world, a certain amount of unpredictability is inherent in the medium … especially if the medium is a living, breathing creature, as in the case of Durham, North Carolina artist Jeff Whetstone’s video Drawing E. Obsoleta.

“I came to art through the study of biology, so when I deal with my subjects, I’m constantly looking at men as animals and landscapes as ecological systems,” Whetstone explained.

This interest in the study and classification of living things was part of what inspired Whetstone’s Zoolotry, a series of black-andwhite photographs of live animals the artist caught in the forest near his home. Each animal was placed inside a white container, photographed, and released.

“When I looked at the Zoolotry series, I realized it was a lot about drawing,” Whetstone said. “The white-formed vacant area where the animal kind of imprinted itself was almost like printmaking. I thought, obliquely, I’m kind of drawing in the landscape.”

This gave him the idea for using the dark body of a live rat snake as a “line” with which he would attempt to “draw” the North Carolina landscape.

FROM LEFT: Ghost of a Dream, Forever, Almost (detail), 2012, discarded lottery tickets with UV coat on panel.

Courtesy of Davidson Contemporary. Photo: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Edward C. Robison III. Mark Wagner, Overgrown Empire (detail), 2013, currency collage on panel. Courtesy of Michael Ladd. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist and Pavel Zoubok Gallery. Meg Hitchcock, Throne: The Book of Revelation (detail), 2012, letters from the Koran on paper. Courtesy of Lawrence Greenberg. Photo: Laumont Studio: New York City.

political. I really like that range, I like that I can have 12 different conversations with people.”

Recognizable materials and the associations they carry are also part of the work of the Brooklyn, New York artistic duo called Ghost of a Dream. Artists Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was use thousands of discarded lottery tickets to create elaborate and colorful patterns that speak to the perennial human desire for a quick and easy solution to their problems.

Everybody has a dream of something that they want better in life, and there are ways to go about it. The fastest ways are not always the best ways.

The complexity of the patterns in the work, emblematic of the time-consuming labor that went into creating them, gently suggest that more reliable resolutions to our problems could be achieved through hard work and persistence.

lauren was

Be Here N ow Accumulation of objects in a work can also be emblematic of the artist’s love of the process of creating: the repetition and organic development involved in turning a multiplicity of objects into a single object of a completely different appearance and meaning. Some of the artists in State of the Art speak of the process itself as being therapeutic, meditative, even spiritual.

In her Brooklyn studio, Meg Hitchcock painstakingly cuts letters out of sacred texts to construct shapes and designs built of phrases from other sacred texts. She never cuts more than one letter at a time.

“I know it sounds incredibly tedious, and I guess it is,” Hitchcock said. “But every letter is four cuts. I cut it and I stab it with a knife, and I brush a little bit of glue on the line where it’s going to go. I get into a really strong rhythm. It’s a form of devotion, a form of meditation.”

Painter Kelsey Brookes also calls up a meditative state in the act of making his complex and multi-colored canvases.

“I’ve gotten into this idea of meditation that is now directing a lot of the work,” he explained. “Instead of listening to music, I’ll have it completely silent and just focus on watching the brush. Every time my mind wanders, I bring my awareness back to the brush and just keep watching. And through the practice of constantly bringing my mind back to that focus on the brush, I’m learning to engage with my consciousness in a new way.”

To build their collage, Ghost of a Dream acquired three 50-gallon drums of losing lottery tickets, all scratched off by one man.

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Themes and Issues in State of the Art

CONNECTING THE DOTS When the curators set out to create State of the Art, they had no over-arching theme around which they planned to build the exhibition; rather, they went out with an open mind to see where the journey would lead them. As the exhibition came together, however, certain themes or connections began to arise. For the exhibition catalog, the curators came up with a set of 16 words or phrases they hoped would help audiences begin to think about ways in which the works could relate to one another.

However, the connections between the artworks in State of the Art are certainly not limited to these 16 themes. There are many more possible associations; and viewers will discover connections of their own as they bring their own experiences and ideas to the exhibition.

What do you see?

A New Look at Landscape The paintings of Brooklynbased artist Cobi Moules display a distinct connection to the Hudson River School— his sweeping landscapes capture and celebrate all the “purple mountain majesty” any landscape purist could desire. And yet, Moules’s landscapes, unlike those of his forefathers, are chock full of people. A closer look reveals that they are all self-portraits. The works refer to the tension the artist experiences between the traditional notion of landscape as a metaphor for the divine and Moules’s own identity as a transgendered person raised within a rigid Christian tradition.

“I was thinking about these ideas of the people being very tiny and having the landscape overwhelming the person,” Moules explained, “how they can’t enter the spaces because of that sense of sublime—that danger of the manifestation of God in these spaces.” To even up the deity-to-human ratio, Moules decided to “shift the landscape’s weight a bit” by filling up the scene with his own powerful presence. “I’m allowing for the landscape to become this sort of playground,” he said. “I’m exploring myself in it, becoming part of nature.”

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Cobi Moules, Untitled (Yellowstone, Swan Lake), 2014, oil on canvas. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist and Carroll and Sons, Boston.

Nature, and our relationship to it, is a recurring theme throughout the history of American art.

The first distinctively American art “style,” the Hudson River School, attempted to capture the grandeur and expansiveness of the vast American landscape in order to both celebrate its beauty and to frame it as a metaphor for the equally grand American vision. Since then, American artists have continued to explore nature and our place in it: from Georgia O’Keeffe’s odes to the Southwest to Roxy Paine’s trompe-l’oeil installation Bad Lawn. Artists today also engage with nature, perhaps with more urgency in the face of environmental changes. Their work asks us to stop, take notice of ourselves in the landscape, and think about what it means.

San Francisco artist Laurel Roth Hope is a former park ranger and avocational naturalist.

Her work is deeply rooted in ideas of conservation. Her Biodiversity Suits for Urban Pigeons are crocheted costumes for handcarved pigeon mannequins.

Each costume represents an extinct species: the Guadalupe caracara, the passenger pigeon, the dodo.

Despite the somber backstory of the suited models, their aspect is whimsical, even a bit ridiculous.

These bright-eyed imposters seem almost to be laughing under their absurd attire. But are they

FROM TOP: Laurel Roth Hope, Biodiversity Suits for Urban Pigeons: Guadalupe Caracara, 2013, yarn, basswood, pewter, glass, epoxy, and walnut stand. Courtesy of the Artist and Wendi Norris Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: Andy Hope. Isabella Kirkland, Emergent, 2011, oil and alkyd on polyester over panel. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.

THE WAY OF THE DODO

laughing with us, or at us? “I usually try to keep some humor in my work,” Hope said. “Whenever you are working with environmental things it’s really easy to be the person that kind of bludgeons people over the head with guilt. I don’t want to do that. I don’t think it helps people think about it.”

Hope’s work does give a viewer pause.

Though they may look different, all of the birds represented in her series are really only pigeons: a species that has adapted to survive within human-made environments. Hope’s costumed fowl gently warn us that these may be all we are left with if we fail to take action against extinction.

KNOWN UNKNOWNS Isabella Kirkland’s densely populated and lush painting Emergent represents the opposite end of the scientific timeline from the works of Laurel Roth Hope— rather than extinct species, each of the hundreds of animals in Kirkland’s Nova series represents a species that was discovered by science in the last 20 years. Her work lures viewers in with its beauty, and then surprises them with the fact that the animals are all “new,” leading them to the implication that there’s much more to be discovered.

“I’m after that ‘gee whiz’ moment where people are like: ‘That can’t be real!’” Kirkland said. “That always seems to be a learning moment, and not just about the science. It’s exciting and fun to learn about these creatures and try to share it with people who have never even heard of them. I want to celebrate this stuff and get people interested in it. You can’t protect something if you don’t value it.”

Kirkland also considers the works a kind of time capsule for future generations. As an observer in a world on the cusp of dramatic environmental change, she seeks to document this crucial moment in history. Whether humanity succeeds or fails at saving these and hundreds of other species from destruction, the animals in Kirkland’s paintings will have a story to tell viewers of the future about the world we live in today.

Theme Key Each of these colored triangles represents one of the 16 different themes our curators have identified to offer connections between works in the exhibition. Use this key to identify which themes have been associated with the works of each of the artists featured in this issue.

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One of the surprises Crystal Bridges President Don Bacigalupi and Curator Chad Alligood encountered was the degree to which artists were dealing with scientific matter in their work.

Recent discoveries such as the sequencing of the human genome open big questions, and artists are grappling with their implications. “For many years, there was this belief that science was going to lead us to the answers,” Bacigalupi said. “And increasingly science is called into question: has it really lead us there? Has technology advanced us or taken us back?”

A FORMULA FOR FUN Combining science and play is a specialty of San Diego artist Kelsey Brookes. Brookes was educated in chemistry and microbiology, but left his science career behind.

“I just felt like there was more to life,” Brookes explained. “I felt like I wanted to be free and to follow … fun, really. So I found art.

It’s been my passion since I found it.”

Despite Brookes’s dramatic career shift, science continues to be at the core of his practice. His psychedelic and densely patterned paintings are based on the molecular structure of various mindaltering compounds. ”My jumping-off point was serotonin,” Brookes explained. “Our brain makes it daily and it regulates a lot of things like happiness, spiritual states—which to me was really interesting—that a chemical could cause you to feel something spiritual. I found that hallucinogens are all related to the compound of serotonin.”

Brookes transcribes the structure of the molecule to the canvas and then begins building outward from the center point of each atom: adding layers of paint and allowing the resulting forms to develop organically. For each molecule, he selects colors that suggest to him the effects of that particular compound on the brain.

“I’m doing research into those drugs, using a color palette suggested by those molecules,” Brookes said. “I utilize all my knowledge from my previous career as a scientist [while] getting myself out there philosophically with what I think is going on with consciousness.” With a self-deprecating laugh he added: “so— really small questions.”

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I utilize all my knowledge from my previous career as a scientist [while] getting myself out there philosophically with what I think is going on with consciousness.

KELSEY BROOKES

Kelsey Brookes, One Pointed Attention 2, 2014, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Morgan McGivern, courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery and Quint Gallery.

From the invention of the steam engine to the moon landing, Science has historically provided a sense of pride in American ingenuity and optimism for the country’s future.

FROM TOP: Nathalie Miebach, O Fortuna, Sandy Spins, 2013, reed, wood, rope, bamboo, and weather data. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo courtesy of the Artist. Dornith Doherty, Millennium Seed Bank Research Seedlings and LochnerStuppy Test Garden No. 2 (detail), 2011, chromogenic lenticular photograph. Courtesy of the Artist, Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, Texas and McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, Texas. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist, Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, Texas, and McMurtrey Gallery, Houston, Texas.

LOOKING INSIDE For the past five years, Dornith Doherty has been working with scientists in the seed banks around the world, including the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—known to some as the “Doomsday” vault—where scientists are endeavoring to preserve seed samples of every important crop variety on Earth. Doherty uses an X-ray machine to capture images of the seeds and seedlings safeguarded there. Her work transports viewers deep into the heart of scientific strongholds where we would not otherwise be permitted.

“Because I’m an artist, I have this access,” Doherty explained. “That goes back to the notion of photography and its tie to expeditionary practice. Right from the getgo, the first thing explorers did was send people out with cameras to bring back pictures of things that are inaccessible.”

Despite their stark scientific nature, Doherty’s images are lyrical. She celebrates each seedling like a religious icon, reminding us how important these small, simple structures are to life on Earth.

“My work lies in the interstices between visual poetry and the cold, hard facts,” Doherty said. “It’s a wonderfully hopeful way of viewing art—that it can play that role in between—to translate, but also to intrigue in a way that cold, hard facts and science can’t always.”

Dealing with cold, hard facts is a creative specialty of Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach. She conceived her unusual method of creating art in an astronomy class at Harvard.

“I was frustrated by the fact that everything was so twodimensional,” Miebach said. “As someone who learns in a tactile manner, that was a problem. I had an openminded professor and I asked if, for my final project, I could weave a sculpture based on a diagram in the astronomy textbook.”

She now turns her analytical mind and deft hand to creating sculptures based on the hundreds of data points accumulated during major weather events such as Hurricane Sandy. The sculptures’ vertical spokes might represent hours in a day, while layers of horizontal reed could represent tide levels or wind speeds. The works are multi-layered and complex, yet playful.

“I’ve always tried to push the work into a realm that invites not just the art world into a conversation, but many others as well,” Miebach said. “I’m trying to lure the viewer into the information without immediately framing it as scientific. I don’t want to make a 3-D version of a science textbook; I want an eight-year-old kid who loves to play with Legos in there as well. It’s a mixture of trying to base the work on science but also bring in that element of play.”

VISUALIZING DATA

Nathalie Miebach’s educational background is in political science & Chinese.

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Dallas, Texas-based artist Kim Cadmus Owens became fascinated with computers in graduate school and embraced it as part of her artistic process. She described it this way: “It’s drawings, it’s photographs, it’s start the painting, do a digital study, work on the painting, take a picture of the painting, work on the computer….”

“Artists working in nearly every medium start out digitally or use digital tools along the way,” Curator Chad Alligood observed.

“It’s now a given,” agreed President Don Bacigalupi. “The computer is absolutely a normative tool. It’s like saying ‘I use a pencil when I sketch.’”

USING THE FORCE FOR GOOD One of the areas in which technology reigns supreme is video. Highpowered and user-friendly animation software makes it possible for skilled video artists such as Jonathan Monaghan to create a phantasmagorical world that at times seems as real as the one we live in.

Others, like Dave Greber, use the video platform to create impossible illusions that allow him to “paint” with movement, color, and sound.

Greber, who did a stint in the commercial video field, developed a love-hate relationship with the uses of the technology: love for its capabilities, but disdain for the way commercials could manipulate consumers. He left the commercial field and became an artist.

Greber thinks of his video abstractions as “an inoculation.”

“By making art, that’s how I reconcile my deepest beliefs and my way of dealing with the given reality and frustrations that I think everyone shares,” Greber said. “I like pleasing people to an extent...but pleasing people to bring them to a higher level of consciousness.”

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Visit the Crystal Bridges Blog to read AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVE GREBER, AS WELL AS a guest post by video artist Jonathan Monaghan and view clips from his work Rainbow Narcosis.

I resent that [advertising] can be used to manipulate people, but I think that it’s also powerful.

It’s fascinating and we have to learn from it.

D AV E G R E B E R

Dave Greber, Sinew-en-ciel, 2014, high-definition video projection, acrylic, and rhinestones. Courtesy of Arthur Roger Gallery. Photo: Dero Sanford.

Whereas 20 years ago, artists may have debated the validity of using computers in the service of art-making, digital imaging technology has now become a firmly established part of many artists’ processes.

FROM TOP: Aspen Mays, Ships that Pass in the Night, 2013, light sign and printer, maritime data supplied by PortVision. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Stephen Ironside and Timothy Smith. Jimmy Baker, Arrangements 1 (detail), from the series Arrangements, 2013, oil and UV ink on canvas over panel. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.

CHANCE ENCOUN TERS Columbus, Ohio-based artist Aspen Mays’s conceptual work Ships That Pass in the Night explores themes related to global positioning.

She learning that ships are equipped with an Automatic Identification System (AIS) device that continually reports their position, course, and speed, and that this data is publicly available in real time. Mays then developed a system that would trigger an array of lights each time two ships passed within sighting distance of one another anywhere on the open ocean. A dot-matrix printer records the names of the ships, their position, and the time of each encounter.

While the work definitely has an element of loneliness—the lights only come on a few times a day and remain on for only 30 seconds—there is a sense of hopefulness as well. Connections can be made. We are not as alone as we may feel. And the fact that the data is processed in real time offers a strange sense of connection to the ships and their sailors for viewers.

The light array for Aspen Mays’s Ships that Pass in the Night is located on the roof of Arvest Bank in Bentonville’s Downtown Square.

The printer that records the data of the ships when they pass within range is located in the exhibition gallery in Crystal Bridges.

PAINT, PRINT, REPEAT

Cincinnati, Ohio-based artist Jimmy Baker works in a combined digital/analog world. His painted canvases are run through a large industrial sign printer, which adds a new layer of color and imagery. Sections of the work may then be painted over again. The unusual combination of old-school painting and high-tech digital printing asks that viewers consider the role of painting in contemporary art-making.

“I am interested in furthering a discussion of what painting’s trying to do,” Baker said. “I think that’s why I’m staying with the convention of oil on canvas. It’s not about making something new. It’s about setting up problems for myself or situations I can explore and ask new questions of myself.”

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Everyday life is not all sunshine and roses.

How do artists deal with tough issues without putting off viewers?

One of the primary goals of State of the Art is to break down the perceived barriers between viewers and contemporary art.

Finding works of art that offer connection points for the viewer is important, but accessibility alone is not enough.

“We were not looking for simply accessible work. You can find simply accessible work in a whole host of places,” explained Don Bacigalupi, Crystal Bridges President.

“We were looking for work that was engaged with issues of contemporary life.”

How do artists reconcile difficult subject matter with their desire for accessibility and engagement?

Artist Vincent Valdez grappled with the challenge of drawing attention to the invisible history of persecution and lynching of Latino men in the Southwest in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

“In the late 1800s, the state of Texas alone lynched more Mexican-American males than most of the Southern states lynched black men. It’s just not known,” Valdez explained. To tell their story, he painted life-sized images of modernday Latino men floating against an empty background. The figures present the posture of hanged men—heads slumped forward, wrists and sometimes ankles together as if bound. However, Valdez has omitted the literal bindings.

No ropes or nooses are pictured.

“It is not evident in any way that these men are being hanged,” Bacigalupi said.

“They could be levitating or floating or even dancing. There is a historical 24

weight and association to them, but it’s not immediately evident in the work, and you can read them in many different ways.”

“There’s no need to show the rope that binds their hands and feet,” Valdez explained. “They are dangling in the wind as if they were hanged, but at the same time, it’s as if they’re rising above the 1,001 obstacles that have been placed before them since day one.”

The artist has used other strategies to pique viewers’ curiosity and cause them to engage with the work.

“They’re life-sized,” Bacigalupi said.

“They’re on unarticulated ground so there’s nothing to look at except these beautifully rendered figures.

You cannot not look at them. The context, the history, all the things you need to understand, they’re not there. And that’s Vincent’s point.”

Vincent Valdez, The Strangest Fruit, 2013, oil on canvas. Court esy of the Artist.

Photo: Mark Menjivar.

unseen history

Alison Ruttan, Homs (cascading), 2013, ceramic. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Tom Van Eynde.

all fall down

The finished works, unembellished with color or context, balance the craftsmanship of their construction with the senseless

Another artist bringing viewers’ attention to tough subjects is Chicago-based Alison Ruttan, who carefully recreates in clay scale models of buildings destroyed through acts of terrorism or war around the world. Once complete, Ruttan deliberately destroys the structures, smashing them with hammers or firing at them with a BB gun to replicate the destruction perpetrated on the original buildings. The finished works, unembellished with color or context, balance the craftsmanship of their construction with the senseless violence of their destruction. Yet that incongruity between creation and destruction is also a powerful draw for viewers.

“There’s an attraction to looking at this material,” Ruttan said. “I think that it triggers something biological in looking at things that feel dangerous—that maybe we’re checking it out to see how we can protect ourselves. It‘s the same way people gawk at highway accidents.”

“The idea of ‘making us look’ is interesting, because you don’t have to look at a work of art,” Bacigalupi said. “But if you choose to look, this is where engagement comes in. The artist is engaged in a topic, and if you engage with that work of art, you’re engaged in this bigger conversation than you’re normally accustomed to. I think that’s the power of art—that you’re not going to be passively receiving it as you do with media. You’re actually asked to have a conversation with it. The work of art may interrogate you as you’re questioning it, and I think that is the value of the work.

These big, weighty topics in our lives have importance, and there aren’t many places where we can have those conversations.”

Conversation, rather than any didactic or dogmatic message, is at the core of these works’ engagement.

“I don’t necessarily have a place I want you to land with this, I don’t have a solution to this,” Ruttan emphasized. “I think I could lose the integrity of the project if I get too interpretive with it. But I think that one of the things that artists do is be relentless about keeping it in your face.”

violence of their destruction.

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Elisheva Biernoff is a San Francisco-based artist who produces small trompel’oeil works that replicate old photographs she has collected from junk stores. Biernoff creates the suggestion of a connection between two unrelated and anonymous images by juxtaposing those with visual similarities.

“I have an interest in storytelling and the way stories are embedded in the very small, humble objects that we accrue around us like photos and letters,” Biernoff explained. “I’m also interested in accessing personal history through those objects, and playing with the stories that are told.”

In At Home, the diptych on view in State of the Art, we imagine a connection between the women in the paintings because of a similarity in their poses and the presence of greenery in both images. A narrative may begin to arise in the

parallel lives

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viewer’s mind regarding why these images were paired, how the women are related, what feelings or thoughts they may have. In fact, the stories implied in Biernoff’s work are as much of an illusion as the trompe-l’oeil paintings. We think we are seeing something “real,” when in fact we’re seeing something created for us by the artist.

On another level, however, there are stories embedded in the actual photographs on which the paintings are based. They’re just stories we will never hear.

“She’s borrowing images from real life,” said Don Bacigalupi, Crystal Bridges President. “These photos existed in somebody’s life. They each were a snapshot moment in a life that came before and after. So there is a story: there’s a story of why they were taken, why they were kept, why they were discarded.

She’s not going to tell us and the photographs aren’t going to tell us, but we can certainly investigate them and posit why. The juxtaposition of the two makes it that much richer.”

Elisheva Biernoff, At Home, 2014, acrylic on plywood, diptych. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.

In art, storytelling has gone in and out of fashion over the centuries.

Nineteenth-century genre painters were big on storytelling; twentieth-century Abstract Expressionists, not so much.

Narrative in art may be quite clear-cut, as in historical paintings, or it might be presented in fragments and symbols. In many contemporary works, the stories are partially generated by the viewers, triggered by their personal and cultural associations with the images in a work, and their own understanding and interpretation of the world. Artists can play with these associations, creating layers of potential meaning, sometimes contradictory in nature.

FROM TOP: Lauren Gallaspy, one need not be a house to be haunted, 2013, porcelain, glaze, underglaze, gouache, and varnish. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. Kristen Cliffel, We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat..., 2013, low-fire clay, glaze, and resin. Courtesy of the Artist and William Busta Gallery. Photo: Dan Fox.

myths of home

Whereas Biernoff’s hinted stories are impersonal tales imagined from real objects, Cleveland, Ohio-based artist Kristen Cliffel creates works hinting at stories that are highly personal, but uses shared imagery to forge connections for her viewers.

“I’m a storyteller who happens to make sculpture,” she said. “I like to think about my work as based on domestic mythologies.”

Cliffel works in clay, creating colorful sculptures that draw on shared associations and memes, charming Disney-esque imagery, and a strong sense of humor to tell stories that begin in the artist’s personal experience.

“I start from an experience, something that’s hurt me or made me joyful. Having kids, being in a relationship… that’s every day,” Cliffel said. “My work is a catharsis for me, and hopefully people can find a relationship to the things that are happening.”

In We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat, the artist uses associations from movies (the title is a famous and oft-quoted line from Jaws), books (Moby Dick), and common iconic images, like a cozy log cabin, to create a story of peril. The home looks unstable, it’s under attack by a huge and relentless presence, and water is lapping over the roofline. We don’t need to know that Cliffel created the work in response to the difficult times she and her husband went through when their house went into foreclosure. We get it. We make the story up for ourselves, and populate it with our own cast of characters and issues.

“I hope everyone brings their own story to it, because I don’t want to be didactic,” Cliffel said.

dream scape

I use easy cues just like

in a fairy tale. If there’s a road that splits: this is the crux of a plot twist, right? So creating plot

twists with recognizable imagery is my way in.

Each of the toys in Randy Regier’s Nupenny’s Last Stand, installed near downtown Bentonville, was inspired by a poem, song, or literary work.

Read an interview with Regier on the Crystal Bridges Blog.

KRISTEN CLIFFEL

As in literature, visual stories can be realistic or phantasmagoric. They might offer a linear interpretation or a wild, dreamlike jumble of experience and sensation. Salt Lake City-based artist Lauren Gallaspy deals in the latter.

“I create spatial stories on clay,” Gallaspy explained. “They’re told on these permanent but fragile objects that get at some of the vulnerability of bodies and objects and animals and landscape interacting in a range of ways: pleasurable, violent, ambiguous, strange, surprising.”

The stories hinted at in Gallaspy’s sculptural ceramics are visceral, almost nightmarish. In one need not be a house to be haunted, viewers can feel the tortured shapes that struggle to free themselves of the clay vessel. The woman painted on the surface might be alive or dead, dreaming or caught in some chaotic other world.

The tensions between the image and the material catch viewers in the crossfire, causing us to crave resolution, explanation.

“I’m careful about the images that I allow into my world and I’m always thinking about how one might be affecting another,” Gallaspy said.

“I do kind of think of these as rambling, strange stories that don’t have a beginning or an ending.”

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JAMIE ADAMS St. Louis, MO

GUY W. BELL

Little Rock, AR

ZOË CHARLTON Washington, DC

ALBERTO AGUILAR

MEQUITTA AHUJA

San Diego, CA

ELISHEVA BIERNOFF

JULIE BLACKMON LIGIA BOUTON Springfield, MO

Santa Fe, NM

COLIN CHILLAG

SONYA CLARK

LENKA CLAYTON

KRISTEN CLIFFEL KIRK CRIPPENS

DAVID ADEY

San Diego, CA

ADAM BELT

Phoenix, AZ

CATALINA DELGADO-TRUNK

KIM DICKEY

DAVID ESTERLY

JUSTIN FAVELA

Albuquerque, NM

Barneveld, NY

DAVE GREBER

New Orleans, LA

Boulder, CO

Las Vegas, NV

TERI GREEVES Santa Fe, NM

Chicago, IL

San Francisco, CA

Richmond, VA

DORNITH DOHERTY

Denton, TX

Baltimore, MD

Pittsburgh, PA

ANGELA DRAKEFORD Omaha, NE

CAMERON KEITH SHEILA GAINER GALLAGHER

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER Lowell, MA

Steamboat Springs, CO

San Diego, CA

Emeryville, CA

ANDY DUCETT

ALA EBTEKAR

St. Louis, MO

LAUREN GALLASPY

Boston, MA

Salt Lake City, UT

JEILA GUERAMIAN

EYAKEM GULILAT TERENCE HAMMONDS Norman, OK

Cincinnati, OH

MIKI BAIRD

Kansas City, MO

KELSEY BROOKES LUKE BUTLER

Cleveland, OH

Minneapolis, MN

Brooklyn, NY

JOEL S. ALLEN

San Francisco, CA

VANESSA L. GERMAN

Pittsburgh, PA

San Francisco, CA

JIMMY BAKER CIncinatti, OH

SUSAN GOETHEL CAMPBELL Ferndale, MI

MARY ANN CURRIER

GABRIEL DAWE

ANGELA ELLSWORTH

EMILY ERB

Louisville, KY

Phoenix, AZ

Dallas, TX

Philadelphia, PA

GHOST OF A DREAM

Adam Eckstrom & Lauren Was Brooklyn, NY

MEG HITCHCOCK LAUREL ROTH HOPE Brooklyn, NY

San Francisco, CA

CALDER KAMIN Kansas City, MO

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ISABELLA KIRKLAND

AUTUMN KNIGHT JIMMY KUEHNLE Houston, TX

Cleveland, OH

CHRIS LARSON

Minneapolis, MN

NATE LARSON Baltimore, MD & MARNI SHINDELMAN Athens, GA

MONICA AISSA ASPEN MAYS MARTINEZ Columbus, OH

MICHAEL MENCHACA

NATHALIE MIEBACH

JONATHAN MONAGHAN

HIROMI MIZUGAI MONEYHUN

MATTHEW MOORE

CELESTIA MORGAN

JOHN DOUGLAS RANDY REGIER POWERS Wichita, KS

JOHN RIEPENHOFF

ALISON RUTTAN

JOHN SALVEST

CHRIS SAUTER

JONATHAN SCHIPPER

DAN STEINHILBER

WILMER WILSON IV

DAN WITZ

A. MARY KAY

Lindsborg, KS

ADONNA KHARE Santa Monica, CA

Phoenix, AZ

Knoxville, TN

WATIE WHITE Omaha, NE

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CARL JOE WILLIAMS

New Orleans, LA

Sausalito, CA

Providence, RI

Milwaukee, WI

Philadelphia, PA

Boston, MA

Chicago, IL

Brooklyn, NY

Washington, DC

Jonesboro, AR

WORKS PROGRESS Colin Kloecker & Shanai Matteson Minneapolis, MN

Jacksonville Beach, FL

San Antonio, TX

Phoenix, AZ

Brooklyn, NY

Birmingham, AL

Washington, DC

JAMES LAVADOUR

SUSIE J. LEE

COBI MOULES

PEGGY NOLAN

Pendleton, OR

Brooklyn, NY

NOELLE K. TAN Hyattsville, MD

Seattle, WA

Miami, FL

BOB TROTMAN Casar, NC

TIM LIDDY

St. Louis, MO

DANIAL NORD San Pedro, CA

JAWSHING ARTHUR LIOU

PAM LONGOBARDI

LINDA LOPEZ

FLORA C. MACE

DELITA MARTIN

PETER GLENN OAKLEY

KIM CADMUS OWENS

FAHAMU PECOU

GINA PHILLIPS

HAMILTON POE

New Orleans, LA

Detroit, MI

KEDGAR VOLTA

MARK WAGNER

DAN WEBB

JEFF WHETSTONE

Bloomington, IN

Banner Elk, NC

VINCENT VALDEZ JASON VAUGHN San Antonio, TX

Madison, WI

Atlanta, GA

Dallas, TX

Jacksonville, FL

Fayetteville, AR

Atlanta, GA

Lancaster, PA

Seattle, WA

Seattle, WA

Little Rock, AR

Durham, NC

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Collection Connections Artists naturally engage with ideas and issues of their own time and place, but they are often very attuned to art that came before, as well. Several of the works featured in State of the Art have connection with specific works in Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection. Some of these may be fairly obvious to you, while others may require a deeper investigation. To get you started, here are a few works with connections to Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection that you won’t want to miss.

MYTH AMERICA

FROM TOP: Benjamin West, Cupid and Psyche, 1808, oil on canvas. Photo: Robert

LaPrelle. Jamie Adams, niagaradown, 2013, oil on linen. Courtesy of David Klein Gallery.

Photo: David Klein Gallery.

Artists throughout history have used well-known popular mythologies in order to convey symbolic meanings.

Benjamin West (1738–1820) turned to ancient Roman poetry for inspiration in Cupid and Psyche, a tender rendering of the mythological lovers’ tale. The background images of doves and eagles may allude to the struggles and successes of the artist’s young native homeland, the United States. State of the Art artist Jamie Adams draws on more recent popular imagery in his niagaradown, blending a classic Hudson River School setting with figures seemingly borrowed from Hollywood films of the twentieth century.

The image is a complex layering of American subjects and their respective meanings.

There are many more connections to be experienced between the artworks in State of the Art and those represented in Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection. We encourage you to explore and discover connections of your own.

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COLOR IN CONTEXT State of the Art artist Sonya Clark’s Albers Interaction series directly refers to the work of Modernist painter Josef Albers (1888–1976), whose Homage to the Square: Joy is in the Museum’s permanent collection. Albers, author of The Interaction of Color, argued that colors convey different meanings depending on the viewer’s perspective relative to the colors nearby. Clark uses combs—associated with African American hair styling—to create small colorful sculptures that echo Albers’s paintings. A visit to Ghana initiated her investigation when she was referred to there as oburni, a word for “white person.” She learned that the lighter tone of her skin, compared with that of the locals, classified her “color” as white to the Ghanaian people; yet in America her “color” is classified as black. Her skin color in both countries is the same, but the perception of that color is dramatically different, based on context.

FROM LEFT: Josef Albers, Homage to the

Square: Joy, 1964, oil on board. Photo: Dwight Primiano. Sonya Clark, Albers Interactions, 2013–2014, combs and threadourtesy of the artist. Composite photo source: Taylor Dabney.

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER ARTIST Consider A Yellow Rose Against a Cloudy Sky by Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) alongside State of the Art artist Flora Mace’s Tazetta Narcissus. They share a similar format: in each, a centrally-positioned flowering plant gracefully hovers within a vertical field. They also convey an intrinsically human impulse that reaches across the centuries: to observe and record the natural world. Heade was renowned for his skill in rendering botanical specimens in oil paint. An amateur naturalist, the artist traveled widely to observe flora and fauna from life. A century-and-a-half later, Mace also seeks to highlight and preserve the inherent beauty of the natural world. The artist devised a method that involves taking apart a plant leaf by leaf, encasing each element in a composite to preserve its shape and color, then rebuilding the entire plant before encasing it in layers of glass. The process preserves the plant’s natural shape and color for millennia to come.

FROM LEFT: Martin Johnson Heade, A Yellow Rose Against a Cloudy Sky, 1876, oil on board.

Flora C. Mace, Tazetta Narcissus, 2014, botanical, glass, composite, and steel stand.

Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ann Welch.

BODIES OF WORK Direct and intensive study of the body underpins both Écorché: Relief of a Horse (Josephine) by Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) and Male Torso - Anterior View by State of the Art artist Monica Aissa Martinez. Eakins, a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, believed that an artist could not understand the anatomical form of the body if it were shrouded in clothing. This sculpture presents a relief of a “flayed” horse, its skin removed to reveal the muscular systems beneath. Like Eakins, Martinez incorporates anatomical studies as a foundation for her compositions.

However, as a practitioner of yoga and Tai Chi, Martinez is also interested in understanding how energy travels throughout the body. Layered within the skeletal frame and organs, the brightly colored lines map not only the flow of blood cells and oxygen, but also the movement of spiritual energy.

FROM LEFT: Thomas Eakins, Écorché: Relief of a Horse (Josephine), modeled ca. 1882, bronze.

Monica Aissa Martinez, Male Torso – Anterior View, 2012–2013, casein, gouache, gesso, and micaceous iron oxide on canvas. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.

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RY

E D IT O R

EBER LINDA D

During 2013 and early 2014 a two-man curatorial team visited more than 900 artist studios. The days were spent in traveling from one artist studio to another, averaging about 6 or 7 visits a day.

The evenings were spent researching and evaluating the artists recommended for the next week’s visits. Most of the discussions about the work took place in rental cars, in between studio visits, Curator Chad Alligood driving, and Museum President Don Bacigalupi recording

LD So I understand you had most of your initial discussions about the work in the car in between visits. How did that go?

DB We invented a scoring system around these three criteria: engagement, virtuosity, and appeal. And every single time—of the 900-plus visits—I would say to Chad: “And the scores?” And he would say “What are the criteria again?” Every.

Single. Time. Nine Hundred Times! And I would say “Engagement.” And he would say “Oh, engagement.” And then he would think. So I had to prompt every single score on every single artist, which is really funny.

CA I knew it was E.V.A., but I would sort of lose it…I’m driving by the way, he was just sitting there, so I was thinking of other things.

DB We would also invent a three-word name for the work. It was like writing poetry.

It was really challenging, to compress a body of work into three words. Which three words are going to be most meaningful to immediately take you back to that studio or remembering that practice?

CA Navigating in-between visits was really interesting. I was trusting my iPad—which has Google Maps and live information—to take me places. But the iPad would sit on my leg, and Don 34

could not handle that. He wanted to use the GPS unit, mounted on the windshield, which has the advantage of being in your eyesight, but also has the disadvantage of not giving you live traffic information…

DB So the compromise was: if we were using the iPad I would hold it up in the position of a mounted GPS so he could see it, rather than looking down and then looking up to drive… badly.

CA Drive badly? Come on! I drove 99 percent of the time and I got one traffic ticket.

DB Only a couple of life scares. Two or three.

CA I’m a good driver and we never got in any fender-benders and there were some times when things got a little hairy. We drove in really difficult places to drive, like LA and Houston....and New York.

LD Don talked about a moment in New Orleans when he realized you wouldn’t be able to go everywhere, and how Chad helped him get past that moment.

CA The constraints of an exhibition, especially in this case, are space, time, and resources. Those constraints both contain what you’re able to do and also push you to better heights of achievement. So this was a moment for Don when he came up against one of those constraints. I was

Chad Alligood and Stephen Ironside

their thoughts in a notebook.

THIS PROJECT IS A CALL TO ACTION—FOR ALL OF US—TO PAY MORE ATTENTION hired for this project specifically and I knew that we weren’t going to get everywhere, because everywhere is always changing.

The Chicago that we visited when we were there months ago is not the same Chicago you would see if you went today. And so to get everywhere, especially within a year, is just a physical impossibility. Our biggest constraint was time. And yet, because of what I just said, time was also one of the great liberators. The work that we saw was just made, it was fresh out of the box. So if we had four more years, it wouldn’t be the same. The conversation would not be as current, it wouldn’t be as fresh. And so the constraint of time was actually one of the great strengths of the project.

LD Don, you said you were thinking of this as a “first step.” What comes next?

DB I think this project sets an example to get out and actually see artists at work, at whatever scale and whatever place you can do it. Not just the artists that are being shown to great fanfare and on the cover of magazines, but working artists—wherever they are and whatever they’re doing and whatever stage of their career they’re at.

I think the value of that will be reinforced very strongly and I’m certainly hopeful that there will be followers of that.

LD How is this work essentially American art? Or is there an American art now?

DB We have artists who are international in origin and who have backgrounds of all stripes and derivation. I think the American-

TO THE ARTISTS WHO LIVE AND WORK AMONG US, WHEREVER WE ARE. DON BACIGALUPI

ness of the story is that this country has always been a country of immigrants. And the blend of Native voices, which are in the show as well, and immigrants from all over, whether they’re seventeenth generation or first generation—the conversation of all those voices together is part of the American story.

CA Some of the themes that emerged in the exhibition could be called American themes. American art has always been engaged with an idea of expansiveness in nature and integration within the landscape. Artists working in America today, at least some of them, are looking to nature as a source of inspiration, discovery, asking questions through the lens of nature. American popular culture is a theme that comes out in the show and artists’ interrogation of popular culture and how it’s disseminated. And America being the center of cultural and capitalistic production. That’s all

endemic to the American story. There’s an awareness of materiality and mindfulness and spirituality that is a really interesting current in American culture today. That’s in the show. And themes that are directly coming out of the current social, political, and economic climate, that’s a thread in the show that comes out quite strongly.

When you ask about an American art, art in America engages with the issues that are most current to the things that artists are thinking about and, more broadly, what the culture is engaged with. Those themes come out in the show and I think people will identify it as an American voice.

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Throughout 2013 an d early 2014, while Museum President Do n Bacigalupi and Curator Chad Alligoo d were scouring the country for compelli ng artists, the home team back at the Museum was doing its part to br ing State of the Art to life as w ell.

G E TTI NG IT TOGETHER From the 102 artists selected for the show, the curators chose 227 works of art. To help them visualize how those works would come together, they needed models of the galleries. A model of the Temporary Exhibition Galleries already existed. Demorotski arranged to have a scale model of the Twentieth-Century Art Gallery built to match it.

“It’s a nine-foot-long beast,” she said. “It had to be the same scale as the original model so the curators could move artworks from one gallery to another.”

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While the cabinet-maker was building the gallery model, Demorotski was using cardboard and photos to build scale models of all 227 works of art. When the models were complete, Bacigalupi and Alligood began planning the exhibition: moving walls around, trying out different configurations of the gallery spaces to find one that would show the work to best effect and still allow for adequate movement of people—a lot of people— through the exhibition.

MI SSION CO N TRO L Catherine Hryniewicz is Crystal Bridges’ Exhibition Coordinator.

Once the exhibition design was finalized, it was up to her to get the spaces ready for installation. Because of the size of the exhibition, additional furniture was needed: pedestals, vitrines, label rails. In addition, more than a dozen new walls had to be built.

Adding walls to the gallery impacts the HVAC system because of the changes in air flow. The inclusion of many works with audio and video components calls for special adaptations to the electrical system, and mounts for video projectors.

Sound-based artworks have acoustical needs requiring soundabsorbing curtains or panels.

A view of State of the Art North Gallery. Photo: Dero Sanford.

While the curatorial team was visiting studios, Curatorial Assistant Ali Demorotski was tasked with keeping them supplied with the information they needed to make their visits. She compiled the recommendations for each upcoming city and assembled information about each artist to help the curators in their research.

By Wednesday or Thursday of each week, the curators emailed Demorotski their list of the 30 or 40 studios they hoped to visit the next week. Demorotski would then contact the artists, organize a plan for the visits, and set up appointments in time for the curators begin on Monday or Tuesday of the following week.

“It was a bit like air traffic control,” she said. “It would never have happened without email, the Internet, GPS, and Wi-Fi.”

Everybody feels a sense of ownership because there are so many works that require special attention from one department or another. Everyone had something to be proud of in the end.

A L I D E M O ROTS K I

In addition to coordinating the installation, Hryniewicz was developing a growing list of supplies to shop for: balloons for Alberto Aguilar’s installation, furniture and flooring for Jonathan Schipper’s Slow Room. She also managed the scheduling of 23 of the artists who came to the Museum to oversee the installation of their work.

MOV E ‘EM OUT During the summer, the Museum’s preparation and installation (“prep”) team began the long and complex process of moving all of the permanent collection objects out of the Twentieth-Century Art Gallery.

“In order to maintain some of the chronology of the guest’s experience of the permanent collection, we decided to present a Highlights of the Twentieth-Century Art Collection exhibition in the first of the two Early Twentieth-Century Art Galleries,” said Curator Manuela Well-Off-Man. “Of course, some of the works also had to be moved to the vault—or to another gallery.”

To make room for the Highlights exhibition, many works from the Early Twentieth-Century Gallery also had to be relocated or stored. In the vault, additional shelving was added to handle the influx of artworks: not only those from the Twentieth-Century Gallery, but the State of the Art works that began to arrive in July.

MOVE ‘ E M I N Associate Registrar Melanie Fox was in charge of arranging the incoming shipment of all the artwork. She coordinated schedules between the artists, the shipping companies, and the prep team, who had to be ready to receive and store the work. Special arrangements had to be made for Danial Nord’s installation, which arrived on no fewer than 11 pallets and was moved directly from the truck to the gallery for lack of storage space. The prep team, augmented by temporary assistants, hauled crates, installed artwork, and problem-solved through a myriad of challenges both minor and major.

TH E VIDEO ROAD CR E W One of the very special elements of State of the Art is the presence of the artists’ voices in the form of video and audio clips. In June and July, three members of the Museum’s communication team set out to interview and shoot video footage of 32 of the artists in their studios. They split up and traveled to 22 cities, shooting hours and hours of video. The team then performed a miracle of video editing: producing dozens of short videos which were uploaded to the exhibition web site and State of the Art app … just in time for the opening.

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Build YourOwn Bring home State of the Art and build your own exhibition with this unique catalog and game. Each box includes 99 artist cards featuring a photo of one of the artworks in State of the Art, plus information about the artist.

Purchase at the Museum Store. $49 / $44.10 for Members

Dero Sanford

Don’t miss out on our many other State of the Art items in the store! $7.50 / $6.75 for Members

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$11 / $9.90 for Members

$22 / $19.80 for Members

$20 / $18 for Members

$5 / $4.50 for Members

Is it time for you to renew?

Want to give a gift membership?

Not a member?

Simply call the Member Priority Line, go to CrystalBridges.org/Get-Involved, or visit our main lobby.

Get the Most out of Your Membership!

Universal benefits for all levels Free admission to all temporary exhibitions for you and your guests (guest tickets vary by level) Early notification to select events Members-only exhibition previews, last looks, events, and programs Complimentary subscription to C magazine for Members 20% off public events, programs, classes, and workshops 10% off Store purchases and invitations to double-discount shopping events 10% off 21c Museum Hotel’s best available room rate 10% off gift membership for friends and family Access to the Member Priority Line: MON – FRI 479.418.5728 Monthly emails highlighting Member opportunities Ability to rent Museum facilities for meetings and events Opportunity to join artinfusion, a social affinity group for Members ages 21-40s

It is our sincere hope that as Members you have a strong sense of belonging to this vibrant, new American art museum that you have helped guide with your engagement, advocacy, and financial support.

Collectively, you are responsible for the Museum having reached more than 1.5 million guests since our opening through your multiple visits and participation in an incredibly effective grassroots promotional movement. Thanks to you, we often hear the phrase, “I was told I had to come see Crystal Bridges!”

Additionally, your membership dollars have helped serve more than 30,000 people in our region through low and no-cost programs in 2014 alone. As Members you are, quite simply, a force for good.

Entering into Crystal Bridges’ third year, we are especially grateful that you are sharing in this remarkable journey of becoming a place known for stimulating exhibitions, thoughtprovoking lectures, cool social gatherings, and relevant programs for all ages.

Thank you for helping make Crystal Bridges a place where everyone belongs.

Sandy Edwards DEPUTY Director

March Henning, Stephen Ironside, and Dero Sanford

The other day as I was walking to the Museum Store, I saw a family having their photo taken by the impressively large “You Belong Here” sign that covers a glass wall in the courtyard. The backdrop and their happy faces said it all—they belonged at Crystal Bridges. It made me smile.

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Art thrives in communities that embrace and celebrate it.

Whether you as an individual and art enthusiast do that by viewing, buying, or making art, you help to strengthen the creative spirit that allows art to make a difference.

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Rod Bigelow Executive Director

RO D B I G E LO W

State of the Art has been the focus of the time and attention of nearly every member of our staff since we launched this project. Without precedents, we were blazing our own trail in this endeavor, defining and redefining the project’s parameters as we developed a more thorough understanding of exactly what it would take to share the discoveries of what’s happening in American art right now.

Fortunately, Crystal Bridges is accomplished at trailblazing.

Since the founding of the Museum, we’ve been setting goals and making them happen through teamwork, passion, and pure dogged determinism—and the support of our valued Members. It must be that American Spirit we’re always talking about.

Our work for State of the Art is not finished, however. As our President, Don Bacigalupi, has said: State of the Art is a beginning, a first step, a call to action. Having opened a door on a new way of looking for and thinking about contemporary art, what is our role now in keeping that door open and helping to usher you, our guests and Members, into this Brave New World?

Primarily, we hope to continue to open similar doors for all of you, and spark an interest in conducting your own journeys of discovery into the heart of American art today. Perhaps, having experienced the diverse and fascinating range of work presented here, and having heard the artists talk about why they do it and what it means to them, some of you will approach the next work of contemporary art with slightly different eyes. Perhaps, on your next vacation, some of you will drop by local art galleries and see what work is being produced in the towns and cities along your way. Some of you, perhaps, may look at the works in State of the Art and feel that spark of inspiration, encouraging you to see more, or perhaps even create works of your own.

Art thrives in communities that embrace and celebrate it. Thank you for your support of Crystal Bridges, and for helping to make the first step in our Discovering American Art Now possible.

State of the Art is a beginning.

It’s your move.

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SPONSORS Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr

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