BENTONVILLE, ARK.- As part of Crystal Bridges’ 114,000 square foot expansion, the museum has launched a new public art initiative aimed at expanding the role of contemporary art on its campus. Art Everywhere transforms unexpected areas into immersive art experiences, blurring the boundaries between collection galleries and the transitional spaces that connect them. Through site-responsive commissions by ten artists, Art Everywhere activates high-traffic and unconventional locations throughout Crystal Bridges and the Momentary, including hallways, stairwells, elevators, crosswalks, and even restrooms, and invites visitors to encounter art in new, memorable ways.
Crystal Bridges provided the artists with a broad invitation to consider exploring relationships with the natural environment as well as the museum’s distinctive sense of place in the Ozark landscape as inspiration for their Art Everywhere projects. Each artist then interpreted the brief through their own creative lens, tailoring their work to a specific site within the building. The result is a diverse array of projects that reflect individual artistic approaches while thoughtfully merging Crystal Bridges’ three pillars of art, architecture, and nature.
“Art Everywhere reflects our commitment to access and our belief in the transformative power of integrating art into everyday experience,” said Laura Pratt, manager, curatorial affairs and lead of the Art Everywhere initiative. “With our reinstallation and expansion, we are creating new avenues to explore the stories of American art that are both engaging and inviting. Art Everywhere challenges the notion that art can only be experienced within the traditional gallery setting by meeting visitors in unexpected and surprising places throughout Crystal Bridges. The artists in the program have created incredible projects that inspire delight, curiosity, and connection across all the museum's public spaces, demonstrating that art can be enjoyed by everyone, everywhere."
The ten artists in the Art Everywhere program represent a wide range of approaches and mediums that weave a diverse and powerful visual narrative across campus.
Paula Hayes’ Caves and Minds, on view near the entrance of the museum’s Contemporary American Art Gallery, took inspiration from the crystal grotto on Crystal Bridges’ grounds and the museum's monumental Holy Grail quartz cluster. Designed as a contemplative area to rest and recharge, Caves and Minds features glowing shelves topped with an array of terrariums that Hayes arranged and filled with minerals that she sourced from Arkansas mines, like quartz and wavellite, alongside specimens from other places in the United States, including a Herkimer diamond from her family land.
As visitors enter the new North Temporary Exhibition Gallery, they will encounter the lush terrain of Shara Hughes’ Valley of Water. The large-scale landscape mural reflects on the passage of time and the promise of new beginnings at the transition from one year to the next in her signature vibrant palette and emotive brushstrokes.
Judith Schaechter’s Transient Lament wallpapers transform two large elevators, one in the Eleven restaurant and one in the creative learning Hub, into immersive environments filled with a swirl of otherworldly, intricately detailed moths and butterflies, all drawn by the artist. Schaechter is best known for her mastery of realizing fantastical, layered compositions in stained glass. Her Art Everywhere commissions are her first works of public art.
Liz Nielsen created six new works for the restrooms in the museum’s Lower Lobby. Using her unique process that allows for the creation of photography without a camera, Nielsen constructed custom “negatives” through a system of layering exposures in the dark room. Her Art Everywhere commission was inspired by the similarities in the geography of Crystal Bridges’ place in the Ozarks and her home in the Catskills Mountains of New York.
A Ladder Into a Door by Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann adorns the walls and ceiling of a hallway between the museum’s Lower Lobby and Walker Landing. Mann creates rich, layered landscapes using a variety of materials and techniques, including sumi ink painting, collage, papercut, and mosaic. Her Art Everywhere installation features floral motifs from Chinese art history and her cultural heritage alongside plants that can be found on the Crystal Bridges Campus.
Located in the main elevator stairwell at Crystal Bridges, Theodora Allen’s Shooting Star VIII soars across three floors of windows. Allen draws on a variety of symbols that reflect on the life cycles of nature and culture: destruction, transformation, and renewal. The hand at the center of the comet holds a flowering apple blossom branch, the state flower of Arkansas.
Adjacent to the elevators in the Main Lobby, Kay Rosen’s REFLECTION welcomes visitors to Crystal Bridges. In the spring of 2011, Crystal Bridges commissioned Rosen to create a work for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that announced the museum’s grand opening. The resulting work powerfully communicated the museum’s vision by capturing the relationship between the individual, the community, and nature. Fifteen years later, Rosen worked with the museum to create a version of the work as an Art Everywhere mural to honor the continued resonance of Crystal Bridges’ founding mission.
More Art Everywhere projects will be installed in fall 2026 by artists June Sekiguchi, Caledonia Curry (Swoon), and Heather Hart. Kay Rosen’s REFLECTION, Paula Hayes’ Caves and Minds, and Heather Hart’s Oracle of Tabitha rooftop sculpture will be accessioned into Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection. The other seven Art Everywhere works will be on view for three to five years.
In addition to Art Everywhere, Crystal Bridges’ new Library Everywhere initiative brings books into gallery spaces. Visitors can find art-related reading options in both English and Spanish in many of the museum’s permanent collection galleries.
