Let's start today at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville. Understandably, not many people at all are allowed to touch the art there. But last week there was an exception.
“So we are installing shoelaces into the ‘We The People’.”
Brady Kehl is a seventh grade science teacher at Sonora Middle School. Last week, he was one of a few teachers helping install the “We The People (Black Version)” artwork created by Nari Ward. For several years, the large cursive rendition of the opening of the United States Constitution, created with colorful shoelaces, has been a greeting for visitors in the first gallery at Crystal Bridges.
An ongoing expansion of the museum means some pieces and some walls are on the move. Emma Charles, a preparator at Crystal Bridges, says the wall “We The People” originally lived on is being demolished. She says the museum staff reached out to Nari Ward’s studio.
“We're about to move this work, like, we might want to get it conserved. Like, do you want to be involved? And they did. We had some kind of, like, frayed shoelaces. So Nari Ward’s studio assistant came out and helped us conserve about a third of the laces out of 5,000. So 1,500 to 2,000 laces were probably replaced over the course of two days.”
Staff also cut shrink tubing to become aglets—those plastic clamps at the end of a shoelace—for each of the 5,000 shoelaces. And this brings us back to seventh grade science teacher Brady Kehl.
“Just put in, like, 10 shoelaces over here. And it's kind of a surreal activity, to be honest, because I have a membership here and I come here all the time. And I've seen this specifically in the gallery. And so from now on, it's going to be cool to come show my wife or anybody I'm here with, say, hey, like, I put this in. So pretty cool.”
“Memorize the spot?”
“I think so, yeah. Absolutely I know which shoelace I started with.”
Last week, Crystal Bridges invited educators from schools participating in the museum's School Partnership pilot program, including Chelsea Jennings, the principal at Sonora Middle School. She says the partnership allows schools like hers to connect with museum educators to help lead lessons about engaging with art.
“And then our teachers are building lessons and strategies into their units to get students engaged in the arts in the classroom and across all the different subject areas. But it culminates into a public art project of our school’s choice. But we involved our students, our staff, our community members in selecting a meaningful public art project. And we've been working on it, and we will reveal it at the end of the school year.”
The Sonora Middle School project includes tile mosaic benches and tables for an outdoor classroom setting that will be at the school.
Dru Davison, program manager for school partnerships at Crystal Bridges, says each school participating in the Arts Integration Partnership agrees to create a collaborative art project that students are driving in their own local communities.
“That helps tell the stories of the unique attributes of each community. So Crystal Bridges is trying to help empower all our school partners to help tell their stories through collaborative, creative work. We know that employers are seeking a workforce that—it's not just about their ability to create individually, but employers want to know if young people can collaborate and be creative in groups. And what we're seeing all across the state is young people coming together to find out their stories, their unique stories of their community, and collaborate with their peers in order to help tell those stories. And that's a really important thing. And we love what is happening at Sonora and all of our school partners.”
Last week, it was the educators from participating schools partnering with the museum. Thursday, a handful were using pointed tools to embed shoelaces into the new wall that will house the “We The People” art exhibit in the new expanded Crystal Bridges.
Joanna Huggins, an English teacher at Washington Junior High, says she's honored to be part of the reinstallation. She says this work symbolizes the dreams of so many different people.
“I'm working on the O in the ‘People,’ and I think it's just really cool to be, you know, part of the artwork here. My job is English. We teach storytelling and storytelling and art go hand in hand.”
Bentley Fisher teaches English in seventh and eighth grades at Washington Junior High. He says as he was placing laces into the artwork, he thought about what this experience means for his future visits to the museum.
“Any time I come here, that will be the thing that I tell my students. You know, I had a hand in the ‘E’ here of—what are we at? Yeah, ‘We Are’. And that was an interesting thing too, that I was hearing about the artist when he was talking about it. Like depending on your perspective, like where you're standing to see this piece, it can be very clear and you can read it immediately, or it can be kind of disorienting and you kind of just see shapes and shades and lines, and you're not able to make out what it is. To me, that's kind of representative of the meaning here too, right? Because ‘We The People’ has meant different things at different times to all of us.”
Emma Charles, Crystal Bridges preparator, says transferring a work like this takes, as you might imagine, precision. More than 5,000 shoelaces are needed. Actual-size templates were created and the laces assigned to specific spots on the template. Then those laces become reinstalled in the corresponding location on the new wall.
“So where they're at, like, on the template is where they go on the wall. So you'll see the specific shape this little blue lace needs to also kind of go in the same place at the top of the E. You'll notice, like, at the bottom of the letters, the shoelaces are a lot longer. And as you get to the top, the shoelaces are a lot shorter. So kind of like how a wide-nibbed pen or like an old-fashioned ink pen would create wider lines at certain points. We're kind of creating that illusion with the shoelaces.”
And the reinstallation is not just being done by teachers and some of their students. The first shoelace was put in the wall by a visitor to the museum earlier this month—President Barack Obama. It’s a white lace on the left side of the W in the word We. He was accompanied by students from participating schools, including one from Sonora Middle School, Alejandro.
Sonora Middle School principal Chelsea Jennings says it was a special moment for her pupil.
“Originally, I was just bringing my student leadership team from the school to the Obama town hall event, but his teachers reached out and were like, this student is obsessed with U.S. presidents. He knows all the presidential facts. He wants to be president one day. If there is any way that he can go to this event, it would make his whole life. And so we made it happen. And I had told the story at a district leadership meeting, and our superintendent heard it. And when he was told he could select one student from the Springdale group to meet the president, he chose Alejandro. And so he got to meet the president, and he got to do the We The People installation with him.”
Jody Morrison, a seventh grade art teacher, says both this rare opportunity to be hands-on for an installation and the chance to connect her students to art at Crystal Bridges are amazing experiences.
“It is amazing. Like, I couldn't think of anything cooler to do right now with my time.”
English teacher Bentley Fisher says his afternoon at Crystal Bridges helping reinstall We The People is kind of unreal.
“As a kid from, like, lower-middle-class America, to be a part of an art installation in one of the finest galleries in the country, in the world, that's a pretty cool thing.”
And science teacher Brady Kehl says the program that led to this opportunity—the Arts Integration Partnership with Crystal Bridges—is helping make classes better for him and for his students.
“Just in general, we're all very visual people. And especially I think Gen Alpha and the end of Gen Z and just middle school and a lot of my kids, I know that art and visual pieces are going to spark interest. It's going to create motivation more and more. And so we've just noticed and we've realized as we have embedded certain types of instructional practices that integrate some art, that we've seen more engagement and more motivation from certain kids especially that are more drawn to that.”
The newly reinstalled “We The People (Black Version)” will be part of the expanded Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. The expansion will open to the public on June 6, 2026.
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