ArtForum.com reports on the first two living artists to have work installed at the museum:
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has announced the first two works by living artists to be installed in the museum, joining its permanent collection: A “Skyspace” by James Turrell and Lowell’s Ocean, 2005–2008, by Mark di Suvero will grace the wooded one-hundred-acre grounds of museum, founded by a foundation of the family that owns Wal-Mart. The pieces were revealed on Friday during a museum update by Crystal Bridges executive director Bob Workman.Turrell’s piece will feature a palette of native stone in its construction. [ . . . ] “This work fits comfortably into the Ozark landscape in a way that reflects the intersection of art and nature, a particularly American tradition and a focus of Crystal Bridges,” said Workman. The di Suvero sculpture, completed in 2008, has a base constructed of welded steel I beams and features a curled spiral in the middle, cut from a single plate of steel. It stands more than twenty feet tall and weighs in excess of twenty-six thousand pounds. “These two artists bracket not only the north and south ends of the Crystal Bridges outdoor sculpture park but articulate an ongoing dialogue in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century sculpture,” said Crystal Bridges chief curator Chris Crosman.
Two New Works for Crystal Bridges Museum (ArtForum.com)