Kirk Crippens – A Photographer’s Response to the Foreclosure Crisis Kirk Crippens shares how the financial crisis affected him, his community, and his work.
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SEP 13 2014 – JAN 19 2015
About
Miles
Destinations
Artists
The Journey
The ultimate road trip, to a thousand destinations, for one unforgettable exhibition. In 2013, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s curatorial team hit the road to investigate what’s happening in American art today. Over the course of a year, the team logged more than 100,000 miles, crisscrossing the United States to visit nearly 1,000 artists.
Traveling to communities large and small, the Museum sought to discover artists whose work has not yet been fully recognized on a national level. On their travels, museum curators conducted hundreds of hours of one-on-one conversations with artists in their studios.
The Exhibition
The result of this unprecedented journey is a one-of-a-kind exhibition that draws from every region of the US, offering an unusually diverse look at American art. State of the Art brings together the artwork of more than 100 artists, ranging from works on canvas and paper to photography and video to installation and performance art, and more. The exhibition examines the ways in which today’s artists are informed by the past, innovating with materials old and new, and engaging deeply with issues relevant to our times.
Complimentary admission; no tickets or reservations required.
Art
Kristen Cliffel b. 1967 STUDIO IN CLEVELAND, OH Clay sculptor Kristen Cliffel uses whimsy to tell intensely personal stories. She draws upon incidents from her home life and transmutes them into a fairy tale realm full of familiar images from our shared, Disney-infused experiences. The resulting sculptures are playful, often humorous, sometimes cynical, and reveal both
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Kristen Cliffel – An Introduction to What Will You Give Me If I Let You Down Kristen Cliffel shares her use of personal events and common themes in her work.
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Kristen Cliffel – The Story Behind We’re Going to Need a Bigger Boat Cliffel shares her use of personal events and common themes in her work.
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Laurel Roth Hope b. 1973 STUDIO IN SAN FRANCISCO, CA Laurel Roth Hope is a self-taught artist and naturalist. She considers herself “an artist that wishes she was a scientist,” and she brings the two areas together with skill. By investigating the interactions between humans and animals, issues of friction and loss of species are bound
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Laurel Roth Hope – Flight of the Dodo Laurel Roth Hope explains the story behind her work Flight of the Dodo.
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Laurel Roth Hope – A Naturalist Turned Artist Laurel Roth Hope explains how she transitioned from being a park ranger to being an artist.
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Laurel Roth Hope – The Hows and Whys Laurel Roth Hope explains her process, her use of humor, and her hopes to inspire others to learn about the natural world.
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Laurel Roth Hope – The Passenger Pigeon Laurel Roth Hope talks about the extinct passenger pigeon and its relation to themes in her work.
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Lauren Gallaspy b. 1982 STUDIO IN SALT LAKE CITY, UT Lauren Gallaspy likes to set traps for herself, challenges that would daunt most artists working in clay. She builds sculptures that seem to fold in on themselves, marked with complex drawings and surface designs that disappear into folds and contours of the clay. Just when you
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Lenka Clayton b. 1977 STUDIO IN PITTSBURGH, PA Lenka Clayton uses the stuff of her life— specifically her life as a mother—as material for her art. So committed is she to this approach that she created a grant-funded “Artist Residency in Motherhood,” for herself, mirroring the terminology of programs that exist throughout the world to afford
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Lenka Clayton – A Documentary of Objects Lenka Clayton explains how she uses documentary techniques using objects rather than film.
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Ligia Bouton b. 1973 STUDIO IN SANTA FE, NM Encountering Ligia Bouton’s Understudy for Animal Farm, you are faced with choices. Twenty-eight brightly colored fabric hoods fashioned into pig heads are positioned on a rolling vendor’s cart. Each fabric design suggests a certain style, as they are crafted from pairs of humble domestic pillowcases. Next, you
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Ligia Bouton – Inside Understudy for Animal Farm Ligia Bouton explains how she uses her art to further examine themes in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
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Linda Lopez b. 1981 STUDIO IN FAYETTEVILLE, AR Linda Lopez’s ceramic objects almost appear to grow and propagate. Her squat, globular forms sprout rounded appendages and elaborate trellis-like crowns. The artist displays these objects in carefully orchestrated arrangements with a distinctly domestic atmosphere. In her work A Moment is Forgetfulness, a grouping of clay sculptures
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Luke Butler b. 1971 STUDIO IN SAN FRANCISCO, CA Have you ever walked in late to a movie? The lights are down, the opening credits have rolled, and for the duration you are convinced that you’ve missed something vital. Luke Butler’s series of paintings The End provokes a similar feeling, but fast-forwards the narrative to the
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Mark Wagner b. 1976 STUDIO IN LANCASTER, PA Artists often make extraordinary works from ordinary materials. Mark Wagner’s collages tackle some big subjects—American history and identity, social and environmental issues—using one ubiquitous printed object as his sole medium: the US dollar bill. Wielding a very precise blade, Wagner excises every element from the bill. Then, carefully
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Mary Ann Currier b. 1927 STUDIO IN LOUISVILLE, KY After nearly seven decades of making realist paintings, Mary Ann Currier needed a break. So when a studio drawer filled with colored paper broke—requiring her to empty its contents and seeing the materials layered one atop another—she decided to make some abstract collages. The artist established a
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On October 7, 2014, the Museum hosts the inaugural Summit at Crystal Bridges: Insights from a Changing America. Organized in conjunction with the ground-breaking exhibition State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now, this invitational event will bring together an extraordinary group of policy-makers, thought-leaders, educators, business people, artists, museum professionals and others to share
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As soon as we began discussing actual artists and specific works as a staff, we quickly started to understand just how many different people and departments within the Museum this exhibition process would touch. We were talking about types of installation projects we had never before attempted. I have fond memories of our first discussions
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Today we welcome guest blogger Madeleine Aguilar, the 16-year-old daughter of State of the Art artist Alberto Aguilar, whose home/studio is in Chicago. Madeleine and her siblings experienced Crystal Bridges and Bentonville for the first time when the family came for the opening of State of the Art. Here she describes their visit in a
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