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We are pleased to announce Anne Kraybill as Chief Executive Officer of Art Bridges!

Welcome Anne Kraybill, CEO

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 was co-curated by The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site, Thomas Cole National Historical Site, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Its tour is organized by Crystal Bridges.

This interdisciplinary project takes inspiration from the influential series of paintings 

 (1863-64) by Martin Johnson Heade, but expands outward to explore pollination in nature and ecology, cultural and artistic influence and exchange, and the interconnection between art and science from 19th into the 21st century. Paintings, sketches, and natural history specimens from the collections of Thomas Cole National Historical Site, The Olana Partnership, and Crystal Bridges form the core of the checklist.

 will be shown in conversation with artworks by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, along with their natural specimen collections. Additionally, the exhibition will highlight artworks by Cole’s daughter Emily Cole, Church’s daughter Isabel Charlotte Church, and works by contemporary artists, including Vik Muniz, Roxy Paine, Maya Lin, and Paula Hayes, among others.

An interdisciplinary project exploring the concept of pollination and interconnection between art and science from the 19th into the 21st century.

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The series features African American abolitionists, scientists, teachers, performers and sports figures, and momentous meetings of allied heads of state. Rather than creating separate series featuring individual fighters, as did Jacob Lawrence, Johnson offered portraits surrounded by vignettes that defined the individuals through their accomplishments. Each story is told within a single image. 

, William H. Johnson linked past and present and celebrated individuals who, over the course of some two hundred years, had changed the lives of people across the globe. Johnson had been a star student at the National Academy of Design in the 1920s. After graduating, he left Harlem Renaissance New York and headed for Europe, where he spent time living and traveling in Denmark and Norway. 

On his return in late 1938, he abandoned his characteristic expressionistic brushwork and adopted a faux-naïve style to depict the lives of black Americans—farming, dancing, and preparing for war. The Fighters for Freedom was Johnson’s last body of work. 

By the mid-1940s, devastated by his wife’s death, his mental health deteriorated, and he was hospitalized at Central Islip State Hospital, where he remained, unable to paint, for the last two decades of his life. The exhibition brings together 28 paintings which have not been seen together for almost seventy-five years.

, William H. Johnson created a pantheon of historic and contemporary leaders who dedicated their lives to racial justice, individual accomplishment, and social equality.

In Conversation: Will Wilson

Installation

Frank S. Matsura: Portraits from the Borderland

William Bullard

Rediscovering an American Community of Color: The Photographs of William Bullard, 1897- 1917

Companion Species

There is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in Art

Peoria Riverfront Museum  -  Peoria, IL

Andy Warhol

Endangered Species

William H. Johnson Three Great Abolitionists: A. Lincoln, F. Douglas, J. Brown

Oklahoma City Museum of Art  -  Oklahoma City, OK

William H. Johnson

Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice installation

Partner Story - Gibbes Museum of Art

Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice

 features 29 portraits of African American activists, scientists, and luminaries alongside international heads of state. The portraits were selected from a collection of more than 1,000 works by prolific twentieth-century painter William H. Johnson and given to the Smithsonian American Art Museum by the Harmon Foundation in 1967.

Building new audiences through intentional partnership at Gibbes Museum of Art

Photographer Richard Misrach and composer/artist Guillermo Galindo began collaborating in 2011, after both artists had created bodies of work inspired by the Mexican-American border region and its human impact. In today’s political climate, art surrounding this border is more relevant than ever, compelling us to put ourselves in the shoes of these migrants — to envision their journey. 

Misrach’s large-scale photographs beautifully capture the various types of landscapes, textures, and experiences found across the almost 2,000-mile dividing line. But, by showing moments of disruption on the land, they also introduce a complicated look at policing the boundary. Galindo’s installation 

 is an original score for eight instruments, created out of discarded objects found and collected at the border. The composition embraces the pre-Columbian belief that there was an intimate connection between an instrument and the material from which it was made, with no separation between spiritual and physical worlds. 

Based on the Mesoamerican “Venus calendar,” 

 plays for a total of 260 minutes and is separated into 13 cycles of 20 minutes. Within these cycles, the instruments play in small groups of two or more, or all together as an orchestra. When experienced as a whole, the images, instruments, and emanating sounds create an immersive space in which to look, listen, and learn about the complicated issues surrounding the Mexican-American border. 

While the artists do not seek to provide solutions to these issues, they do provide insight into a place where most people have never ventured, creating a poignant connection that draws on our humanity.

This exhibition brings together the sights and the sounds of the Mexican-American border through a transformative and multi-sensory experience.

Border Cantos | Sonic Border

Richard Estes: Urban Landscapes

Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture  -  Spokane, WA

Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture  -  Spokane, WA

Frank S. Matsura

Commenting on the Present By Examining the Past

Walker Evans American Photographs

Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist

Art Bridges Permanent Collection

Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics

Border Cantos Sonic Border Richard Musrach Wall, Jacumba, California

Richard Misrach (b. 1949), Border Patrol target range, Boca Chica Highway, near Gulf of Mexico, Texas (Campo de tiro de la Patrulla Fronteriza, autopista de Boca Chica, cerca del golfo de México, Texas), 2013, pigment print, 60 x 80 in. Courtesy the Artist.

Richard Misrach Effigy #2 near Jacumba California Border Cantos Sonic Border

Guillermo Galindo Effigy immigrants' clothing, wood axis, and strings

Hudson River Museum  -  Yonkers, NY

Westmoreland Museum of American Art  -  Greensburg, PA

Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA

Samek Art Museum  -  Lewisburg, PA

Figge Art Museum  -  Davenport, IA

Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo

Partner Story - Westmoreland Museum of American Art

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For The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Border Cantos exhibition was an opportunity to connect with and learn from individuals in the Greensburg, Pennsylvania community. Art Bridges funding enabled The Westmoreland to contract the Center for Audience Research & Evaluation at Crystal Bridges to conduct evaluation spanning from a front-end study in fall 2019 and summative evaluation during summer 2021. Across these two studies The Westmoreland gathered critical insights which guided exhibition interpretation, measured visitor impact, and informed future installations about social issues.

Using evaluation to inform exhibition marketing and programming, and measure impact

, ca. 1863 – 1864, Oil on canvas. 12 1/4 x 10 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2006.84. Photography by Dwight Primiano

Martin Johnson Heade Amethyst Woodstar hummingbirds

Isabel Charlotte “Downie” Church (1871-1935). 

Botanical Study of False Solomon’s Seal

, September 26, 1890. Watercolor on paper. 10 ½ x 7 in. Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; OL.1985.303

Isabel Charlotte "Downie" CHurch Botanical Study of False Solomon's Seal

, 2016.
Styrene, acrylic, cast neoprene, paper, hair, polyurethane foam, ash, talc, starch, acrylite, vinyl film, copper, wood, steel, lighting, and BK7 glass
diorama window: 7 3/8 in.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2016.22.
Photography by Edward C. Robison III

Patrick Jacobs Pink Forest with Stump Cross Pollination

Thomas Cole’s Box of Minerals and Artifacts

, c. 1830-1848 . Various minerals, artifacts, and specimens.
18 x 20 x 3 in.
Thomas Cole National Historic Site; Gift of Edith Cole Silberstein and the Greene County Historical Society, TC.64.11.2

Thomas Cole Thomas Cole's Box of Minerals and Artifacts

Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment

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