SEP 13 2014 – JAN 19 2015

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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

Mary Ann Currier – A Change of Direction

Mary Ann Currier – A Change of Direction Mary Ann Currier discusses how serendipity prompted a temporary shift in her work.

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Mary Ann Currier – A Lifetime of Discovery

Mary Ann Currier – A Lifetime of Discovery Mary Ann Currier discusses her history and experiences as an artist.

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Matthew Moore

Matthew Moore b. 1976      STUDIO IN PHOENIX, AZ Matthew Moore is a fourth-generation farmer and a conceptual artist. His work has addressed the encroachment of suburbia on his own family farm, and the resulting sense of loss as one kind of place supplants another.   In lifecycles, Moore records time-lapse images of the growth cycles of

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Meg Hitchcock

Meg Hitchcock b. 1961      STUDIO IN BROOKLYN, NY Meg Hitchcock’s studio is clean, bright, and filled with elegant framed works featuring thousands of letters cut from books and applied in new configurations. Some feature a mandala-like composition, others echo the shapes of tree branches. In each work, Hitchcock has cut letters from a sacred book of

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Mequitta Ahuja

Mequitta Ahuja b. 1976       STUDIO IN BALTIMORE, MD In her multilayered drawing and painting practice, Mequitta Ahuja casts herself in the guise of mythic warriors, epic heroes, and power figures descending from traditions across cultures. In a practice she has deemed “automythography,” the artist combines aspects of real imagery with invented characters and settings, consolidating

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Mequitta Ahuja – The Power of a Mentor

Mequitta Ahuja – The Power of a Mentor Mequitta Ahuja discusses the history of her artistic practice and the mentorship of artist Kerry James Marshall.

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Mequitta Ahuja – Working with Traditional Images

Mequitta Ahuja – Working with Traditional Images Mequitta Ahuja discusses her process and the influence of traditional images from India in her work./p>

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Michael Menchaca

Michael Menchaca b. 1985      STUDIO IN PROVIDENCE, RI Mixing the language of popular cartoons with imagery drawn from Mesoamerican cultures, Michael Menchaca explores contemporary issues faced by those who migrate to the United States. Although his training is in printmaking, the artist also uses video, installation, and performance to examine tensions along the border between the

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Miki Baird

Miki Baird b. 1949     STUDIO IN KANSAS CITY, MO For her photographic assemblages, Miki Baird layers and repeats images to create three-dimensional, undulating structures. The photos are taken by the artist, snapped on the streets in her everyday life or shot from the window of her car during her daily commute. She finds

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Monica Aissa Martinez

Monica Aissa Martinez b. 1962      STUDIO IN PHOENIX, AZ Monica Aissa Martinez’s large, richly detailed, and colorful paintings begin with the anatomical structure of the human body, but manage to fold in the artist’s love of the maps collected by her grandfather, her own study of yoga, and a holistic approach to mind, body, and spirit

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Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman

Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman b. 1978 | 77       STUDIO IN BALTIMORE, MD | ATHENS, GA In this photograph from Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman’s Geolocation series, a lonely dog pokes his head through a screen door on a weather-beaten porch. Below the photograph, the artists provide a startling caption: “Two years ago today I

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Nathalie Miebach

Nathalie Miebach b. 1972      STUDIO IN BOSTON, MA Nathalie Miebach’s reed sculptures draw you in with their playful colors and shapes. Surprisingly, each of these toy-like works is derived from atmospheric and oceanographic data collected during a specific weather event or period of time. Various colors and types of reed represent wind speeds, temperatures, tide levels,

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Nathalie Miebach – Decoding O Fortuna, Sandy Spins

Nathalie Miebach – Decoding O Fortuna, Sandy Spins Nathalie Miebach guides us on a tour of the weather data used to construct her sculpture O Fortuna, Sandy Spins.

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Nathalie Miebach – The Intersection of Data, Form, and Music

Nathalie Miebach – The Intersection of Data, Form, and Music Nathalie Miebach explains how her sculptures can be converted into musical scores and her experiences working with music and musicians.

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Noelle K. Tan

Noelle K. Tan b. 1969      STUDIO IN HYATTSVILLE, MD At first glance, Noelle K. Tan’s photographs might appear as if something has gone awry within the process; the images appear either blown out or severely underexposed. But that isn’t the case. Still working with monochrome film in a traditional darkroom, Tan explores these tonal extremes to

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Noelle Tan – The Anthology of Unfinished Projects

Noelle Tan – The Anthology of Unfinished Projects Noelle Tan introduces her work and explains the title, An Excerpt from the Anthology of Unfinished Projects.

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Noelle Tan – The Power of Place

Noelle Tan – The Power of Place Noelle Tan discusses her experiences and the influence of place in her work.

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Pam Longobardi

Pam Longobardi b. 1958       STUDIO IN ATLANTA, GA Walking into Pam Longobardi’s studio is like visiting the dump. Not because her artwork isn’t refined and beautiful—it is—but because she sources some of her materials from the plastic garbage patches that litter our oceans. In her sculptural works, Longobardi edits these materials into meditative arrangements, begging

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Video Interviews with the Artists

Bios • Work • Process

Blog

Walk the Line with Joel Allen

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Steamboat Springs, Colorado-based artist Joel Allen works with tightly wound twine to create hanging sculptures that bristle with an accumulation of objects: wire, prescription pill bottles, wine corks, surgical tubing. They bear the aspect of furry cocoons, perhaps, or organic chandeliers, and they are curiously inviting. You want to touch them, even hug them. They seem

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Performance Art: Yesterday and Today

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“The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.”   These words were written by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose popularity exploded in the late 1960s for his exploration

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Jonathan Monaghan: Man Without a Movie Camera

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Today we offer up a guest post by artist Jonathan Monaghan, whose video work, Rainbow Narcosis, is featured in State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now.  You can view clips from the work here. –LD Playing video games as a child, I was always much more interested in exploring the created environments rather than

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