What We Did

As curator at Crystal Bridges, Dylan conceived and shaped The Garden—a floral exploration suspended between art, information, and interior fantasy. Jessica Pezalla’s delicate paper blooms cascade around a 1920s sculpture; Rebel Walls wallpaper serves as both ornament and atmospheric stage.

Why It Matters

The Garden invites us to remember flowers not as decoration, but as poetry. It’s a meditation on how beauty, narrative, and ornament can direct our experience—turning architecture into a sensory story. Here, florals are not just seen—they’re felt. They invite you to trace petals with your eyes, remember the scent of time, and understand that nature, history, and ornament can conjure a story you live inside.

Jessica Pezalla’s installation—made specifically for the space at Crystal Bridges—is made up of delicate folded-paper florals and foliage that canvas the walls and envelope the artwork and architecture, creating an immersive environment that puts us into a simulation of a garden space. Pezalla runs Bramble Workshop which is a creative design studio based out of Portland. Using recreations of florals, she crafts ornate storefront and window displays and installations, bringing the outdoors indoors.

From floor to ceiling, her work creates an enveloping context for Harriet Whitney Frismuth’s Roses of Yesterday, a sculpture cast from 1923 to 1940 which could appear in actual gardens or outdoor spaces.

Bold wall patterning covers large sections of the walls in two rooms in the exhibition. In the first example, large antique roses and wildflowers are paired with detailed studies, a majority from the nineteenth century. In the downstairs gallery, bright green leaves climb a lattice grid to create a simplified garden context for a room containing largely contemporary art.  This paper, designed by Rebel Walls is created in their studio similar to how a garden grows; the company states, “We see our studio as a greenhouse where we let both our and your wallpaper ideas grow and come alive.”

The wallpaper references decorative motifs and domestic spaces to give context to the art works and serves as another example of a designer drawing inspiration from nature to adorn an indoor space. Along with the art on the walls, the addition of wall paper visually immerses us in pattern while also suggesting familiar spaces like home.

The Garden was curated by Dylan Turk in his role as Curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. This exhibit was produced by Crystal Bridges Museum in its entirety. Made possible by Neil Lane, Rebel Walls, and Shindig Paperie.