Moving East

When Mindy Besaw first visited Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, she was "pleasantly overwhelmed."

And that was long before she knew she would earn a curatorial position at the museum in Bentonville. She lived in Lawrence, Kan., at the time, and taught a survey of American art at the University of Kansas. A new art museum was going up in middle America -- a rarity -- so she made it down for the mid-November grand opening weekend. On the walls were works by the very artists she spent time teaching about -- several by John Singer Sargent, Richard Caton Woodville's "War News from Mexico" and Robert Henri's "Jessica Penn in Black and White Plumes."

She was named to the museum's curatorial staff in late July. She started part time at Crystal Bridges later in the fall and transitioned to a full-time post in January. The part-time appointment was designed to allow Besaw to finish a draft version of her dissertation for the American art doctoral program at KU. Her research looks into living artists that borrow or re-appropriate images and ideas found in the works of Western art pioneers such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. Her previous appointments also had a Western art focus, but Besaw wanted the opportunity to expand her knowledge base. And the combination of looking at the past while also investigating living arts -- the concept explored in her dissertation -- is something Crystal Bridges does well, Besaw says.

Besaw often interacted with fellow Crystal Bridges curators Manuela Well-Off-Man and Chad Alligood via phone while working part time. Her early efforts can already be viewed. She partnered with Well-Off-Man to build "A Changing Perspective of Native Americans," which debuted only a few weeks ago and explores many years of art featuring Native Americans. The curatorial team has also been thinking about how to restore and maybe reimagine the museum's main galleries now that the nearly all-consuming contemporary exhibit "State of the Art" has left and more works from the permanent collection can be returned to the walls.

Besaw's next major project is a collaboration with museums in Canada and Brazil. Titled "From Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic: Landscape Painting in the Americas," the exhibit, slated for a November debut in Arkansas, will be displayed only at Crystal Bridges, the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo in Brazil and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada.

Besaw will be featured in a meet-and-greet on Saturday at Crystal Bridges. She has selected several key works to discuss and will lead both a discussion and a question-and-answer session.

Besaw lives in Rogers with her husband, Chuck, and their daughter, Lyla.

-- Kevin Kinder

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