After nearly 1,000 studio visits across the country and hundreds of hours of interviews with largely undiscovered artists, officials at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art have chosen 102 artists for a first-of-its-kind exhibition -- "State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now."
The artists whose works were selected are split almost equally among the West, Midwest, Northeast and South and include Arkansas artists Guy Bell and Delita Martin of Little Rock, Linda Lopez of Fayetteville and John Salvest of Jonesboro.
The exhibition runs Sept. 13 through Jan. 19. The selection process has been underway for more than a year. Almost all the artwork selected was completed since the museum opened on Nov. 11, 2011.
Crystal Bridges President Don Bacigalupi and assistant curator Chad Alligood combed the country to find the best new artists in America. Traveling more than 100,000 miles, they dubbed the project "the ultimate road trip." The artists range in age from 24--87 and comprise 54 men and 48 women.
"We didn't go into the project with any kind of quotas," Alligood said. "The wonderful thing about this research process is that the artists that we visited and the ones we selected for inclusion reflect the diversity and talent of the United States as a whole."
From those 102 artists Crystal Bridges borrowed 227 works. Bacigalupi and Alligood began with a list of "thousands" of recommendations from museum colleagues, curators, artists, those who operate artist-run spaces, gallery owners, academics and others. Bacigalupi and Alligood reviewed the list and prioritized it each time they went back out on the road, Alligood said.
"We were always in two places -- sometimes three -- at once, and the real challenge was always staying present," he said, "Luckily, the artists made that easy."
For now, all the works in the exhibition are on loan from the artists and other sources. Any acquisitions would come later, Alligood said.
Works by the four Arkansas artists include Bell's oil on canvas Cain and Abel (2013); Lopez's ceramic-and-wood piece A Moment is Forgetfulness (2013); Salvest's Forever (2013), made of secondhand romance novels on armature; and three mixed media works by Martin -- The Dream Keeper, Bearer and Standing in the Night, all completed in 2013.
For many of the artists interviewed, it was their first-ever studio visit.
Bell said his call from Alligood came almost "out of the blue." He was given only two days notice of the assistant curator's visit in August 2013. Bell was short on completed works and had gathered art from friends and collectors for his interview at the studio of Greg Thompson, owner of Greg Thompson Fine Art in North Little Rock.
"I didn't realize the implications at the time," Bell said. The buzz surrounding his interview caused a spike in sales. Bell said he sold double the number of works per month in the past year, maybe more. It was enough that the 34-year-old was able to make a living strictly from his art.
During his visit, Alligood asked questions like "How do you come to your ideas?" and "What influences you?" and "What artists influence you?" Bell said. Swiss surrealist painter H.R. Giger's use of dark values plays into Bell's work, as does the scenery of painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton.
Bell's body of work is heavy with landscapes, and he puts a great deal of thought and deliberation into the way he composes them.
"I always include things like towers and bridges and maybe old dirt roads -- any aspects of the man-made. I do that with the intent of reiterating that there is no untouched natural landscape," he said.
Thompson represents Bell and believes Bell's selected painting Cain and Abel is his best work. The painting of two dogs fighting represents the biblical battle between Adam and Eve's sons.
Thompson said Bell is "extremely talented, very focused and very driven," with his sights set on the regional and international stage.
"He is definitely someone to keep your eye on," Thompson said. "He's going to be the next big thing to come out of Arkansas."
Even a landscape painting "is not just a landscape painting," Thompson added. "There's usually something going on in it, usually behind the scenes, that reaches to a deeper level of the human experience."
Martin said she was thrilled to have her three works picked for "State of the Art."
"I still have to pinch myself," she said. "It's such an amazing opportunity for all us artists." She was tipped when a friend saw a rendering of a painting of Martin's on Bacigalupi's blog on the Huffington Post website. Alligood initially saw her work on the Arkansas Arts Council's website, but when he contacted her she wasn't aware that he was working on the "State of the Art" project.
All three of her works -- but particularly The Dream Keeper -- depict her black/American Indian grandmother in storytelling mode.
"I named it The Dream Keeper because basically that's what she was to me," Martin said Tuesday.
Attempts to contact Salvest, an art professor at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, were unsuccessful. Thompson is also wowed by Salvest's work, adding that he is represented by galleries on East and West coasts. His Forever work on loan to Crystal Bridges fits his method of operation, Thompson said, in that it was made using found objects -- in this case, old books.
Lopez, an instructor in the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville's art department, was camping in Colorado and not easily accessible.
A Section on 07/16/2014