BENTONVILLE, ARK.- Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is offering a diverse group of temporary exhibitions for 2014.

At First Sight: Collecting the American Watercolor
January 18 through April 21, 2014
Every art collector has a first love. For Crystal Bridges’ founder and board chairwoman Alice Walton, it was watercolor painting that initially drew her attention. At First Sight offers a glimpse into how her early interest in watercolor grew into a lifelong love of art.

Making watercolor paintings has brought Walton great joy over the years, and it also contributed to her deep appreciation for the work of professional artists. Her initial interest in collecting watercolors grew into a fascination with American art, which soon inspired her to collect works by American artists in many media. At First Sight: Collecting the American Watercolor offers the rare opportunity to view some of the paintings that sparked Walton’s earliest collecting interests, including works by Thomas Hart Benton, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Like all artworks on paper, these paintings and drawings are only on view for a short time, as their exposure to light must be limited. With this in mind, Crystal Bridges is honored to share with our guests this very personal collection of artwork on loan from Ms. Walton. Exhibited in the museum’s permanent collection galleries, there is no cost to view At First Sight.

Edward Hopper: Journey to Blackwell’s Island
January 18 through April 21, 2014
Recently added to Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection, Edward Hopper’s Blackwell’s Island offers a distant view of the architecture of what is now known as Roosevelt Island in New York. Glimpse into Hopper’s process in creating his quiet, powerful scenes by viewing the artist’s preliminary sketches (a series of four on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art), and comparing the finished painting to Hopper’s watercolors of other familiar landscapes. Exhibited in the museum’s permanent collection galleries, there is no cost to view these works.

Born of Fire: Ceramic Art in Regional Collections
February 1, 2014, through March 2, 2015
Clay is one of humanity’s oldest building materials. A ball of humble clay, fashioned by human hands and hardened by fire, can be transformed into something as workaday as a terra cotta flower pot or as exalted as a bone china cup made of porcelain so thin as to be translucent. Today’s clay artists are constantly innovating with new techniques and expressions, but the process of crafting vessels of clay remains essentially unchanged over millennia.

Born of Fire is a year-long exhibition that explores some of the many incarnations of ceramic fabrication: from traditional Native American vessels to highly decorated 17th-century Japanese porcelain meant for European trade, to delicate, stylized contemporary works that explore the limits of the medium. The works are on loan from three institutions in our region: the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock; the Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO; and the Sequoyah National Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. Born of Fire will be on display in Crystal Bridges’ Great Hall Corridor through March 2, 2015; there is no cost to view this exhibition.