What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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8 WHAT'S UP! MARCH 26-APRIL 1, 2023 COVER STORY One Artist, Many Perspectives Crystal Bridges offers first solo Diego Rivera collection in more than 20 years APRIL WALLACE NWA Democrat-Gazette W orks by the great international artist Diego Rivera have arrived at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and they are a rare sight to behold. "Diego Rivera was the most significant artist of the 20th century, he was prolific," says Amanda Horn, senior public relations director for the museum. "This is the first exhibition of his work focused solely on his work in more than two decades, and we are thrilled to bring this opportunity to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — and more importantly, to the heartland." This is the second and final stop of "Diego Rivera's America," which was co-organized by Crystal Bridges and the San Francisco Museum of American Art and curated by James Oles, guest curator, and Maria Castro, assistant curator at SFMOMA. It was coordinated at Crystal Bridges by Jen Padgett, the museum's acting Windgate Curator of Craft. Visitors can look through more than 130 of Rivera's works in this exhibition that hosts a wide variety of media, including drawings, easel paintings, frescoes, book illustrations and even representations of his murals, among others. They depict scenes of everyday life and labor. The works, from both private collections and museums, came to Bentonville by way of Mexico, Argentina, England and all across the United States, Padgett says. They're organized by theme and largely in chronological order. "It goes from the moment in the 1920s when Rivera received his first major public commission to the 1940s," Padgett says. The earliest works in the collection show the visual attention to detail of Rivera, who at the time was driven by observing the world around him, but he was also thinking on a larger scale. "What is it that makes up personal identity? What creates national identity? How do we across the globe find points of collaboration and connection? He was actively thinking about all those things." What's special about the show, Padgett says, is how many different media are represented. Preparatory drawings are shown just ahead of the murals they were created in anticipation of. Pastels, watercolors, illustrations for magazines, all there. The portable frescoes were relatively easy to travel in comparison to showcasing the ambitious, large, permanent mural works that exist in Mexico City, California and other destinations. But they are such an important part of the artist's career that the curators felt they had to find a way to show them off. Three of Rivera's murals are projected within the exhibit, with videos that are trained on the mural site and occasionally include people walking by or taking it in. One is on a five- or 10-minute loop, but Padgett warns not to be waiting for anything to happen. The video is just to give the experience of seeing the mural itself. While taking the first of these expansive works in, a mural created in the 1920s for a preparatory school, it can be helpful to think of the figures in the mural as symbolic, Padgett says. "What Rivera did was to think about local and universal meaning, The biggest challenge of this exhibition, curators say, was deciding how to show Rivera's murals, which were a major trajectory of his career. "Diego Rivera's America" showcases three of them through video projections, as well as some portable frescoes. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Spencer Tirey) FAQ 'Diego Rivera's America' WHEN — Through July 31 WHERE — Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 600 Museum Way, Benton- ville COST — $12 per adult; members, SNAP partici- pants, veterans and youth ages 18 and younger are free INFO — crystalbridges.org or 657-2335