Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Current Exhibition

Alfred Maurer: Art on the Edge
October 10, 2015 – January 4, 2016

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Crystal Bridges is an American modern art museum located in the charming small town of Bentonville, Arkansas. The glass and wood space was designed by Boston-based architect Moshie Safdie and opened its doors to the public in 2011. The museum sits on 120 acres of Ozark forest: the flow of the space is great, surrounded by nature and lots of water and connected by three miles of trails that are used for walking, running and biking. Outdoor sculptures by Keith Haring, Paul Manship, Roxy Paine, Mark di Suvero and James Turrell are some of the must-see pieces. The permanent collection boasts a wide array of work from artists like Jasper Johns, Chuck Close, Winslow Homer, Mark Rothko, Josef Albers, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Donald Judd. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House was fully relocated to Crystal Bridges and opens on November 11, 2015. Arkansas is considered a flyover state by many, but this world-class museum is changing that. After my recent visit I am happy to report it is well worth the trip.

—Crystal Bridges Museum

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Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

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Written by John Cage
Hardcover, 176 pages
6 x 8.5 inches
Published by Siglio Press, 2015

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"It is a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories. It is also a diary. For each day, I determined by chance operations how many parts of the mosaic I would write and how many words there would be in each."

As the quote above states, John Cage authored his version of a daily diary over 16 years – complete with intertwined observations, obsessions and jokes – in the same way he composed much of his music. One of the 20th century's most visionary and enduring avant-gardists he was a strong and vocal proponent of operations of chance, from his use of the I Ching throughout his life, right down to his aleatoric compositions. Co-edited by Joe Biel and Richard Kraft, Diary is brimming with non-standard text treatments and is a thought-provoking assessment of Cage's methods of composition, making it a beautiful and intriguing work of art in its own right.

—Available from Siglio Press

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia

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Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403
October 24, 2015 – February 28, 2016

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“This Walker-organized exhibition, assembled with the assistance of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, examines the intersections of art, architecture, and design with the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. A time of great upheaval, this period witnessed a variety of radical experiments that challenged societal and professional expectations, overturned traditional hierarchies, explored new media and materials, and formed alternative communities and new ways of living and working together. During this key moment, many artists, architects, and designers individually and collectively began a search for a new kind of utopia, whether technological, ecological, or political, and with it offered a critique of the existing society.

Presenting a broad range of art forms and artifacts of the era, Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia features experimental furniture, alternative living structures, immersive and participatory media environments, alternative publishing and ephemera, and experimental film. Bringing into dramatic relief the limits of Western society’s progress, the exhibition explores one of the most vibrant and inventive periods of the not-too-distant past, one that still resonates within culture today.”

—Walker Art Center

Ron Nagle – Five O'Clock Shadow

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Matthew Marks.
523 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
September 11 – October 24, 2015

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It's impossible to do this show justice. Not only the work itself, which is exceptional, but also the installation, which is almost as impressive. When you're making sculptures that are only a few inches in size, and when those sculptures are displayed inside recessed, glass-fronted cubes, it's incredibly difficult to take a photo that adequately reflects the attention to detail of either. Which is another reason to recommend going to see this show if you happen to be in New York before it closes on the 24th. Offering a selection of recent drawings alongside 35 sculptures made between 1991 and 2015 – the largest exhibition of Nagle's work ever organized in New York – I cannot recommend Five O'Clock Shadow highly enough.

—Matthew Marks

Talia Chetrit – Parents

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Off Vendome
254 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011
September 10 – October 17, 2015

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Off Vendome is a strange place. The New York gallery is spread over two floors of a residential building, on the fringes of what might be considered Chelsea proper. It has a flag outside, a carpeted stairway, patchwork plasterwork, a small office and a large, bright main exhibition space. And for the next couple of days both are host to an exhibition entitled Parents by the artist Talia Chetrit. In the office are a selection of framed photographs, shot in her teens and more recently, while upstairs is a new video installation. The artist's first foray into film offers a humorous and frank portrait of her parents – frequent subjects of her photography – as they pose, clown around, and embrace without the knowledge that they're being captured on video. Chetrit set up a second camera while taking their portraits, and they assumed they were posing merely for a photograph. The short video captures these delicate moments of union, romance and companionship and the body of work is very much worth a look. You'll just have to hurry, as the show ends on Friday.

—Off Vendome

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Richard Serra Ramble Drawings

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Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
September 26th - October 24th, 2015

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The Gagosian has presented more than 25 major exhibitions by the artist Richard Serra since 1983, and the gallery recently opened a show in New York focused on his Ramble Drawings. Perhaps most well-known for his large-scale sculptures, these works on paper represent another side of the artist’s oeuvre. Featuring hand-applied fields of black litho crayon, they have a quality not entirely dissimilar from examining one of his CorTen steel pieces up close.

—Gagosian Gallery

Robert Smithson in Texas

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Hardcover, 80 pages
9.5 x 11 inches
Published by the Estate of Robert Smithson
and James Cohan Gallery

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The famed land artist Robert Smithson’s association with Texas started in 1966, when he was hired as a consultant on the construction of the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. His ideas were never put into practice, but his participation in the project fueled his thinking about large-scale earthworks. He returned to the state at numerous intervals with equally striking proposals, and this beautiful volume, released by the artist’s estate and the James Cohan Gallery, is dedicated to his time there. The monograph includes essays, illustrations and film stills centred around the making of his final sculpture Amarillo Ramp. This semicircular construction of earth would ultimately be his last, and the project was finished posthumously after Smithson sadly died in a plane crash while surveying the work from the air. 

—Available from Amazon

The Collections of Harry Smith: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I and II

01

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—01. Paper Airplanes and String Figures.

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I am enraptured by the varied activities of Harry Smith – painting, collecting, filmmaking and musical anthropology – and with his recognition steadily rising over the last decade, it is becoming easier to link these disparate polymathic activities to him. The themes that bind all of these practices together are his interpretation of patterns in culture, and the creation of his own systems of visual and auditory information. When Smith’s work is viewed with these things in mind, it is clear that a specific thread runs through all of the artifacts he laid his hands on. A series of mounted string figures and 251 found paper planes – two of his most storied collections – form the basis of these new photographic volumes, shot by Jason Fulford and published by J&L Books and Anthology Film Archives.

—Available from Artbook