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Reading the walls inside the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville’s newest temporary exhibit, one learns that nearly 10 million people visited the official centennial art celebration in Philadelphia in 1876.
Now, 150 years later, as America prepares for its 250th anniversary, Crystal Bridges joins many museums across the country in offering a retrospective on this nation’s art, symbols and culture.
“The museum’s take is likely to be different than most museums,” said Larissa Randall, assistant curator of American art at Crystal Bridges.
“You might have a preconceived notion of what a 250th exhibit should look like,” she told a group of guests during a media preview on Thursday morning. “But one goal of the exhibition was to surprise people.”
The surprise starts from the first steps someone takes into the gallery space. The exhibit unfolds with a themed section called “Washington Mania” – filled with images, memorabilia and ephemera related to the first president.
Journalist, activist and artist Sherl Oring captures real-time answers to the prompt “What does independence mean to you?” Participants in the project get a copy of their answer, and another copy goes on the wall as part of the living exhibit “The Spirit of Independence.” (Flyer photo/Kevin Kinder)
“The exhibit moves forward with a look at American crafts such as quilting and foundational documents, including copies of the Declaration of Independence and “The Federalist Papers.” The documents and quilts share a physical space together but also a metaphorical one,” Randall said. “Both are multi-authored and are living documents.”
The “live” element is demonstrated in an ambitious quilting project organized and conceived by the artist Basil Kincaid. A quilter who carries family traditions into his own work, Kincaid sent some 30,000 students a prompt to decorate a fabric square with their thoughts on the American experience. With their prompts collected and in the museum’s possession, five local quilting guilds will staff a live quilting demonstration at the very center of the exhibit as they stitch together the squares. Live quilting will take place nearly every hour the exhibit is open, roughly eight hours a day, six days a week, through July 27.
Another in-person artistic installation will also be live, though not as frequently as the quilting station. Journalist and artist Sheryl Oring has been capturing people’s stories live for 20 years as part of the ongoing work titled “I Wish to Say.” She has a new prompt for guests this time – “What does independence mean to you?” The responses are captured live on copy paper as Oring types on a vintage typewriter. The participant gets one copy, and the other goes into the collection, where it is displayed on the walls.
Thematically, the exhibit also moves through four recurring symbols of America: eagles, flags, liberty figures and future generations. And while there are traditional flags included in the flag section, there’s also the flag collage called “Bonfire” by Carla Edwards. In her description of the work, Edwards said, “the composition, color and ritual customs with the flag are so fixed. There is nothing fixed or universal about the experience of citizenship; it’s very murky. My method of making this series acknowledges that complexity.”
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