Art – Annual Report

Acquisitions

In 2014 Crystal Bridges acquired 51 works of art: 12 gifts and 39 purchases. By classification: 6 prints,

20 paintings, 15 sculptures, 6 drawings, 2 mixed-media artworks, and one watercolor.

View 2014 Acquisitions

Loans

Outgoing Loans: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX

Artwork: Raphaelle Peale, Corn and Cantaloupe
Exhibition: Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine

De Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

Artwork: Keith Haring, Moses and the Burning Bush
Exhibition: Keith Haring: The Political Line

Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; and Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR

Artwork: Carroll Cloar, Charlie Mae Practicing for the Baptising
Exhibition: The Crossroads of Memory: Carroll Cloar and the American South

Peel Compton Foundation, Bentonville

Artwork: Paul Manship, Group of Bears

The High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

Artwork: Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix
Exhibition: American Encounters: Genre Painting and Everyday Life

Museum of Arts & Sciences, Macon GA

Artwork: Nathalie Miebach, Andrea Gail
Exhibition : The Weather Is Turning Weird

Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA

Artwork: Jamie Wyeth, Cornflakes
Exhibition: Jamie Wyeth

The High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

Artwork: Gilbert Stuart, George Washington
Exhibition: American Encounters: Anglo-American Portraiture in an Era of Revolution

Incoming Loans:

In 2014, Crystal Bridges has returned 357 artworks loaned from 33 individual and institutional lenders, renewed the loan of 61 artworks from 4 institutional lenders, and received 614 new artworks and objects on loan for exhibition purposes from 125 lenders.

Conservation

In total, conservation work was conducted on 11 artworks during the year. In accordance with the Museum’s conservation strategic initiative focus on sculpture, in 2014 conservator Paula Hobart carried out a complete assessment of all Crystal Bridges’ sculpture. She provided condition assessments and treatment recommendations for a total of 98 works, and performed conservation work on Saint-Gaudens’ Gertrude Vanderbilt at the Age of Seven, and Portrait of Martha Graham by Marisol, among others. Paintings conservator Nathan Sutton visited Crystal Bridges to provide a detailed condition report and treatment recommendations for Yosemite Falls by Thomas Hill; and artist Robyn Horn made a brief trip to re-stain her sculpture Already Set in Motion.

Works on paper from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection All of the works on paper from the Alfred Stieglitz collection were sent to the Conservation Center in Chicago in April, which made treatment recommendations for each work. Most of the works will be cleaned and treated to reduce distortions, while some have tears and stains that will be treated and repaired.

Scholarship

Reese Teacher Fellowship The William Reese Company Teacher Fellowship, established in 2013, awarded its first Reese Teacher Fellowship to Anne Greenwood, Hot Springs, Arkansas. Greenwood used her fellowship time to develop Realms of Fin and Feet and Wing, an online resource which offers interdisciplinary curriculum materials to integrate early American natural history documents and works of art into World History, American History, British Literature, American Literature, and Biology. This resource is accessible from the Library’s web page.

During 2014, additional Temporary Exhibitions included:

Collection

Books Purchased: 671
Books Received: 318
Books Cataloged: 1,858

Library Usage

Catalog Searches: 11,621
Visitors in Library: 11,155
Books Counted Used: 3,627
Books Checked Out by Staff: 575

Library Tours and Research Instruction

11 director-led library guest tours and rare-book viewings
15 school tours and library instructions
Teacher Institute library instruction

Major Gifts

Francis O’Connor of New York City gifted important American archives, including his research on American murals and promised gifts of in-depth research archives of Jackson Pollack.
Mrs. Maurice Katz of Los Angeles gifted more than 3,000 American books, catalogs, and ephemera.
Merrill Cheney of Santa Fe gifted a collection of eight American monographs and personal photos of American artists, including the de Koonings, as well as a collection of American art periodicals.
Kirk Dandridge of Fayetteville, Arkansas, donated a collection of Frank Lloyd Wright portfolios and books.

Partnerships

Crystal Bridges Library continues to work in partnership with five local libraries to extend the accessibility of books about American art to these communities. To accompany each temporary exhibition, the Crystal Bridges Librarian compiles a list of suggested reading and shares the list with the local libraries, which often add titles from the list to their inventories for circulation. The Library also partners with University of Arkansas Libraries and Special Collections for the hosting of our catalog and for special projects creating digital resources that draw from both collections.