The Garden

*The Garden* exhibition takes you on a journey exploring flowers in different contexts to celebrate the connection between art, design, nature, and literature. Florals and greenery are timeless themes that provide examples of how humans connect with nature and ideas of growth, passage of time, and beauty. By enveloping you in immersive spaces, the feeling of being in a garden is brought indoors through a site-specific installation, detailed rendering of flowers, and new forms of ornamentation, reflecting on the nature of beauty in the process. The Garden looks at the myriad of ways artists use flowers for ornamentation, empowerment, and as an exploration of human experience.

Through the centuries, the garden has inspired artists to try different techniques, from abstraction to paintings, wallpaper to sculpture, and more. Discover how artists in the Crystal Bridges collection such as Martin Johnson Heade and Andy Warhol, alongside contemporary artists such as Jessica Pezalla and Kendell Carter, view the natural world. Full of color, charm, and character, The Garden will bring your visit into full bloom.

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.