Roses, miles of thread preview of art to come

Artist John Salvest stands in front of his work Forever at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville last week. The piece is one of 227 in “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now,” which opens Sept. 13 and runs through Jan. 19.
Artist John Salvest stands in front of his work Forever at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville last week. The piece is one of 227 in “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now,” which opens Sept. 13 and runs through Jan. 19.

BENTONVILLE -- Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's long-awaited contemporary art exhibition "State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now" opens one month from today, though some of its large-scale art installations are already visible to museum patrons.

photo

NWA Media

A close view of Forever by artist John Salvest, part of a new exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, is made up of about 4,000 second-hand romance novels arranged to spell out the title of the piece.

Dallas-based artist Gabriel Dawe's thread sculpture, Plexus No. 27 (2014), is drawing comments from visitors traversing the stairwell that links the upper and lower north exhibition galleries. Dawe was in Bentonville recently to fashion the arrangement of 12 miles of multicolored thread onto 100 hooks in the dedicated space.

On the museum's south lawn, artist and University of Colorado-Boulder ceramics professor Kim Dickey's Mille-Fleur (2011) is also attracting attention. The 20-foot-long wall is covered in 10,000 handmade ceramic rosettes painted in a garden pattern reminiscent of a 16th-century tapestry.

The installations are two of 227 by 102 artists selected from across the United States for the Bentonville exhibit. Crystal Bridges curator Chad Alligood and museum President Don Bacigalupi visited nearly 1,000 previously undiscovered artists at their studios to make their selections for the temporary exhibition that opens Sept. 13. The selection and exhibition has attracted national attention.

Alligood described the works by Dawe and Dickey as "show-stoppers" for the institution and good examples of the overall idea behind the exhibition. Dickey's piece in particular "really speaks to the idea of craftsmanship and virtuosity of the hand."

"It's a magnetic piece," he said of Mille-Fleur. "It draws people over to it. They want to know how it's made. They come away from it wowed and floored, and they want to know more."

Dawe's work inside the museum evokes the same reaction, even though it's too high overhead for patrons to touch it.

"This explosion of colorful thread throughout the space changes as you move through the space," Alligood said. From a particular vantage point, it may appear a solid object; from another it appears to dissipate entirely.

About 20 percent of the artists will come to the museum to create their pieces on-site. The practice is not unusual for contemporary art and helps build excitement around the opening, he said.

Other works have been going up behind locked doors.

In 2011, when San Pedro, Calif.-based sculptor Danial Nord finished his large-scale State of the Art -- a reclining Mickey Mouse figure fashioned from the backs of bulky, outdated plastic televisions -- he did not envision the installation featured in a groundbreaking exhibition by the same name.

The work is in a room to itself and is an intricate network of electronics, video projectors, a DVD player and sound system with other materials that make the 17-foot-long sculpture pulse light and sound in its darkened room.

He collected the televisions from the city of Los Angeles' recycling department.

"The TVs were all being thrown out, at literally thousands a week," he said. "It was an amazing experience because it was almost like purgatory for electronics."

Nord describes the Mickey Mouse figure as "an icon of a sleeping giant in repose."

Most works for the State of the Art exhibition are on loan from the artists, though the museum may choose to acquire some for the permanent collection. Crystal Bridges, however, did commission Dan Steinhilber's Reflecting Room (2014), which the artist installed recently in a custom room in the temporary exhibition space. Besides the Mylar-lined walls and ceiling, the work entails only a fan that moves the lining so that the room appears to breathe.

Bacigalupi chose this exhibit without seeing the work, after talking to Steinhilber about the concept.

"He saw a lot of different pieces I was working on at the time, but this one wasn't up yet," Steinhilber said. "After he left, I finished it and then sent him several pictures at different angles.

"There's an element of bravery in picking a piece he didn't see firsthand," the artist said.

Steinhilber worked alongside his wife, Maggie Michael, who is also a painter. Both are based in Washington, D.C.

A 2010 critique by The Washington Post of a midcareer retrospective show by Steinhilber talked of the artist's use of commonplace materials, such as packing peanuts and dry cleaner's hangers, as well as trash bags, from which he once made an inflated igloo in white. "Critics describe him as the van Gogh of Home Depot," the review said.

Another State of the Art artist who works in found objects is Arkansan John Salvest, a longtime Arkansas State University art professor. His contribution is a wall-mounted collection of roughly 4,000 second-hand romance novels arranged so that the piece's title, Forever, is prominent in red against a light-colored background of book spines.

The title is meant to have a double-edged meaning, such as "Forever?" asked tongue-in-cheek, or the sentimentally stated "Forever," a word used frequently in the titles of the books.

He started buying the books several years ago from flea markets, yard sales and thrift stores without any idea of what he would do with them. Before coming to Crystal Bridges, Forever was included in a one-man Salvest show Object Lessons at the Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York.

"Although this class of literature is often derided, many thousands of people worldwide find comfort and pleasure in these tales of elusive doctors, millionaires, cowboys and sheiks," Salvest said in his artist's statement aboutForever. "It would be foolish to dismiss the Harlequin fan, for we all have an anodyne of some kind or another, its surrogate presence perhaps more eternal than that which we seek."

His 2011 temporary public art project, IOU/USA, a massive work made of shipping containers erected adjacent to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, earned international media attention. Even with the amount of publicity he's received, "without this kind of base underneath it, I have been kind of under-the-radar for awhile," he said recently about his place in the State of the Art exhibit.

"Who would have thought 10 years ago that a museum in Arkansas would possibly bring more attention to my work?" Salvest said on the day he finished installing Forever.

A full list of artists and their works won't be released until after the exhibition opens to the public.

A Section on 08/13/2014

Upcoming Events