Immersive exhibition with 10 distinct art experiences celebrates museum s tenth anniversary
Alice Neel, Hugh Hurd, 1964. Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 × 30 1/4 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.
BENTONVILLE, ARK
.- On November 11, 2011, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened its doors for the first time. Over the course of a decade, the museum has greeted over five million visitors from around the world to enjoy world-class art, architecture, and nature. This year marks a decade since Crystal Bridges opened, and the museum is recognizing this milestone with a new exhibition celebrating its collection and community.
Crystal Bridges at 10 is an immersive exhibition with 10 distinct art experiences celebrating the museums collection and the local community one decade into the museums lifetime. Primarily drawing from the museums collection, the exhibition features 130+ artworks, presenting crowd favorites in new ways, showcasing works never bef
Close aerial of Crystal Bridges looking north. Courtesy of Safdie Architects.
The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is marking its tenth birthday with a major growth spurt. The museum in Bentonville, Arkansas a small city best known as the home of Walmart’s headquarters has announced it will build an architectural expansion to increase its footprint by 50 percent.
The project will be overseen by Safdie Architects, which also designed the museum’s original facility. It will add nearly 100,000 square feet to the museum’s 200,000-square-foot campus, increase gallery space by 65 percent, add educational spaces, a dedicated floor for community gathering, a circular event plaza, and a new windowed bridge to showcase art that is not light sensitive.
Understanding II, 2013. The four-color lithograph was printed with the collaboration of Tamarind printer Emily Diehl.
Dyani White Hawk (Sičangu Lakota) creates intricate, exactingly-executed paintings that often combine the Lakota art of quill work with strong lines that echo blanket and moccasin patterns. She uses abstraction to bring American Indian tradition into a dynamic contemporary context. Her Tamarind lithographs are examples of her remarkable skills as an artist.
She says, “As a woman of Lakota and European ancestry my life experiences have been a continual negotiation of both Western and Indigenous educations, value systems, and worldviews. Through the amalgamation of symbols and motifs derivative of both Lakota and Western abstraction, my artwork examines, dissects, and patches back together pieces of each in a means to provide an honest representation of self and culture.”