Speakers, Exhibits Anchor Museums 2016 Schedule

In 2016, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is poised to offer its best year yet of programming, the result, a museum official says, of five years of on-the-job training.

In addition to its standard offerings of traveling exhibitions, performance art, and regional presenters, next year the museum is unveiling its Distinguished Speaker Series, a five-round community engagement program featuring five leading names from the arts and culture industry.

The series begins in May in coordination with the second annual Bentonville Film Festival, and is meant, at least in part, to further enhance the museum’s standing as a leading arts institution of the 21st century.

Taking place in the museum’s Great Hall, the new series will augment the Spotlight Speakers, a pre-existing 30-date program featuring local and regional talent.

“We wanted to increase the national significance of Crystal Bridges,” said Sara Segerlin, the museum’s senior programmer, referencing the Distinguished Speaker Series. “We’ve learned a lot in the last five years of what people are receptive to.”

While the program is still being booked, two of the five guests have already confirmed their participation in the series: educator and performance artist Nick Cave, and chef and food writer Ruth Reichl.

In terms of contemporary art, Segerlin described Cave as “the king,” and credited Reichl with helping ignite the garden-to-table movement that has transformed the culinary landscape of the United States.

In short, people like Cave and Reichl — those with big followings and the ability to influence a great number of people across a broad realm of endeavors — will be the lifeblood of the new speaker series.

“We want to be a platform for Northwest Arkansas to meet leaders from across the world right here,” Segerlin said.

Cave, a Missouri native, is perhaps best known for his “soundsuits,” bodysuits made with a dazzling mix of various materials including feathers, embroidery, buttons and beads. While the suits can take on any number of resemblances, they are oftentimes compared to African ceremonial costumes. 

Cave’s soundsuits are presented as static objects, but can also be used in live performances. Such was the case in 2013, when his “Heard-NY” featured 30 suits in the form of life-sized horses, powered by dancers from The Ailey School, prancing through the concourse at Grand Central Station.

Cave, however, is also known for his sculpture. In 2014, two of his collections were presented at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Both “Rescue” and “Made by Whites for Whites” utilized found objects and armatures, but in “Rescue,” a dog’s loyalty is highlighted, whereas in “Whites,” Cave addresses the stereotyping of African-Americans.

New York native Reichl is a chef, food critic and best-selling author. Earlier this year, she published “My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life.” The book, lauded by among others, Eater magazine, is considered a chronicle of how she survived the sudden shuttering of Gourmet Magazine, where she was editor-in-chief from 1999 to 2009.

Reichl, who began writing in the 1970s, worked as a restaurant critic for both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and in the course of her career, won six James Beard awards.

Showing she still had plenty of sting in her restaurant reviews, in 2014 she famously skewered Alain Ducasse’s restaurant Le Jules Verne, which just happens to be in the world-famous Eiffel Tower. While she raved over the chocolate pastry dessert, she was particularly hard on Ducasse’s foie gras, truffled macaroni au gratin, and lemon sorbet.

“It was, from start to finish, a miserable experience,” Reichl wrote in her blog post, “Paris: One Sad Night.”

A big part of the museum’s mission, Segerlin said, is to be an “in and out” museum, meaning people come in for exhibits and programs, and the museum reaches out to the surrounding community.

Another goal of the museum is to be diverse, hence the 2016 showing of films like “Mooz-Lum,” which explores Muslim life in America after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and a performance by pianist Thollem McDonas, whose music explores themes within post-classical, free jazz, noise, and punk.

“In everything we do our goal is to make an improved effort to build diversity in this community,” Segerlin said. “What is a 21st-century museum? Crystal Bridges realizes we serve a greater purpose and that we are more than paintings on the wall.”

 

Traveling Exhibits

In terms of what the museum is best known for, its permanent collection and temporary exhibits, 2016 will be a big year.

Though the museum is known to be tight-lipped about its acquisitions, there are those in the industry who expect Crystal Bridges to make a few calibrated moves next year.

New York-based Lee Rosenbaum, otherwise known as CultureGrrl, has covered art, architecture and museums for four decades, and Crystal Bridges since its conception. Rosenbaum, who also covers Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where a lot of fine art is sold, says the museum will indeed acquire new pieces, but will be more selective than in the past.

“I assume that Crystal Bridges will continue to grow its collection, as any dynamic museum must,” she said. “But purchases may become increasingly strategic — filling in gaps as good opportunities arise.”

Rosenbaum said the museum could be in the market for a “drip” work by Jackson Pollock, or works by female artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Agnes Martin.

Regarding traveling exhibits, Crystal Bridges will present works across a wide spectrum of mediums, tastes and levels of quality, from primitive to professional, from oil painting to photography.

On the schedule are: Samuel Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre,” “The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip,” “American Made: Treasures form the American Folk Art Museum,” and “The Art of Dance: 1830-1960.”

As in year’s past, tens of thousands are expected to attend the museum in 2016. Regardless of when they come, they’ll probably be satisfied with what they discover.

“The 2016 temporary exhibitions offer a broad and unique set of lenses through which to view American art,” said Margi Conrads, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs.

“Visitors can rediscover telegraph inventor Samuel Morse as an artist; experience the museum’s first-ever photography exhibition by joining internationally-renowned photographers on their American road trips; enjoy more than 100 artworks from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum; and be inspired by the first major traveling exhibition connecting visual art and American dance.”

The exhibition highlight is the monumental “Gallery of the Louvre,” created in Paris and New York between 1831 and 1833 by Morse, inventor of the Morse Code. The work, on display from Jan. 23 through April 18, imaginatively depicts a number of masterpieces from the Louvre’s collection all exhibited in the same space, the Salon Carré. 

At six feet tall by eight feet wide, the piece encompasses 38 paintings, a vase and a sculpture, and includes the portrait of one of Morse’s friends, James Fennimore Cooper, author of “The Last of the Mohicans.” 

Owned by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the work has its own anthology and is in the midst of a multi-year tour of the United States.

Terra curator Peter John Brownlee said Morse was probably trying to create a link between European and American art, and with the lines and play of light, to show the American public how painting was supposed to be done.

The painting, however, was a commercial failure, and after exhibits in New York and New Haven, Connecticut, Morse sold the painting to one of Cooper’s relatives.

“Despite being eclipsed initially by its failure to connect with audiences, ‘Gallery of the Louvre’ remains a grand achievement of great complexity,” Brownlee writes in a published guide to the painting.