Displaying items by tag: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

When the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened its doors for the first time in Bentonville, Arkansas on November 11, 2011, the institution presented about 450 works of art, nearly half of its entire holdings. A little over a year later, the Crystal Bridges’ collection has ballooned and now includes over 2,000 artworks thanks to an active acquisition program led by Executive Director Don Bacigalupi, museum curators, and a solid leadership board. Within the past year, the Crystal Bridges Museum has acquired five sculptures, eight paintings, one mixed media work, 468 prints, and 504 works on paper, including photographs, drawings, and watercolors.

Museum officials were particularly excited to acquire a large painting by Abstract Expressionist artist, Mark Rothko, titled No. 210/No.2011 (Orange) (1960) and held an official unveiling back in October. The piece, which has only been exhibited twice in public, is currently part of the museum’s temporary exhibition, See the Light: The Luminist Tradition in American Art. After the show closes in late January, the Rothko work will be moved to the museum’s Twentieth-Century Art Gallery.

Other major acquisition include a portrait by American folk artist Ammi Phillips (1788-1865), titled Woman in Black Ruffled Dress (circa 1835); a neoclassical white marble sculpture completed in 1867 by William Wetmore Story (1819-1895); a contemporary mixed-media work from the early 1980s by Californian artist Miriam Schapiro (b. 1923); and a large painting titled Tobacco Sorters (1942-44) by the twentieth-century American artist, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), which was commissioned by the American Tobacco Company.

A private collector who specialized in early twentieth-century works facilitated the major growth in the museum’s print department. The recent acquisitions vary in style from Benton’s Regionalism to Charles Sheeler’s (1883-1965) Precisionism and include drypoints, etchings, engravings, lithographs, screenprints, woodcuts, and wood engravings. A selection of recently acquired prints will be part of the temporary exhibition Art Under Pressure: Early Twentieth Century American Prints, which will be on view from December 21 through April 22, 2013.

Founded by Wal-Mart heiress, Alice Walton, in 2005, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas was the target of an email hoax that went public on Wednesday. The email stated that the museum would be closed on Black Friday to stand in solidarity with the Wal-Mart workers who are planning demonstrations over the Thanksgiving weekend. The email used fake quotes by Walton including one that said, “We have decided to stand with the workers of Wal-Mart, the source of my family’s fortune, in their Black Friday strikes, walkouts and pickets.” A spokesperson for the museum said that all information stated in the email is false and that the museum will be open on Friday.

The demonstrations held on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, will allow Wal-Mart employees to voice their unhappiness with their powerhouse employer. Many claim that the retail giant enforces unfair labor practices and disregards workers’ requests for better pay, fair schedules, and affordable health care. It is widely known that Wal-Mart has been wary of a unionized workforce in the past.

The email hoax also stated that the Crystal Bridges Museum would host a temporary exhibition on labor in American art starting on Saturday, November 24. There is no such show expected to be on view at the museum.

For the second time in two years, Paris' musee du Louvre, Atlanta's High Museum of Art, Bentonville, Arkanas' Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Chicago's Terra Foundation will join forces to promote American art history education. The collaboration, which launched last year, was conceived in 2007 after the High's exhibition Louvre Atlanta, the product of a collection-sharing agreement with the French institution.

This installation of the four-year collaboration will focus on American genre painting of the 19th century, specifically how artists associated with the movement depicted day-to-day life at a time when America was still coming into its own. The exhibition, titled American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life, will open at the Louvre on January 17, 2013 and travel to the Crystal Bridges Museum in May and then to the High Museum in September. Featured paintings include Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate's The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix (1856) from Crystal Bridges, Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South (circa 1870) from the High Museum, and George Caleb Bingham's The Jolly Flatboatmen (1877-78) from the Terra Foundation. The Louvre's contributions, a painting by the Dutch artist Jan Steen and one by Englishman William Mulready, will explore the European influence on American genre painting.

Last year's inaugural exhibition focused on American landscape painting and featured works by Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole. It is currently wrapping up its run at the High Museum ending January 6, 2013.

Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum is getting its own luxury hotel, according to the AP. The city has been upgrading water and sewer lines. Several restaurants are also in the works for the area.

Ms. Walton, you are about to put Bentonville, Arkansas on the map! Or something. Though we don’t doubt that the museum will contain some interesting art—Ms. Walton told the Times last month she was snatching up “substantial” bodies of work by Martin Johnson Heade and John Singer Sargent among others—Crystal Bridges is really starting to sound like, well, the Wal-Mart of museums.