Crystal Bridges is teaming up with jeweler Tiffany & Co. to highlight their jewelry alongside art and precious gems from the museum’s collection. Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis takes us to the new exhibition in this report.
Crystal Bridges curators and administrators often say that the museum exists at a crossroads: the intersection between art, architecture and nature. Tour through the Visions of America Gallery and you’ll see many examples of this junction.
Take the centerpiece of that gallery’s nature section. It’s a 1917 stained-glass window depicting a waterfall cascading through the mountains. It’s on display next to another window featuring Arkansas’ state seal.
When Crystal Bridges acquired the windows from a church in San Antonio, a conversation started about their designer, Tiffany Studios. That’s the same Tiffany as Tiffany & Co., the jewelry designers. Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of Tiffany & Co. founder Charles Lewis Tiffany, started the studio as a decorative arts company best known for its stained glass.
And although Tiffany Studios no longer exists (it ceased operations in 1932), its work has inspired a collaboration between Tiffany & Co. and Crystal Bridges.
Jen Padgett is the Windgate curator of craft, and she says that when the museum acquired the stained-glass windows, Tiffany & Co. started thinking about projects with museum staff.
“We were really excited about the ways that the Tiffany & Co. history and the jewelry that they’ve created intertwines with histories of American art.”
Aside from the windows, a team-up between Crystal Bridges and a jewelry designer makes sense as the museum is emphasizing the precious gems throughout its collection, like a specimen of wulfenite sitting next to the windows.
“We have exceptional examples of gemstones that are found right here in the United States. And so having the opportunity to talk to the Tiffany company team and especially their wonderful chief gemologist, Victoria Reynolds, who came in and was responding to the ways in which how do U.S.-sourced gemstones help to tell a story about what is unique about this country, about finding beautiful things here in the United States and having those be both inspiration for artistic practice, and then also the actual materials of jewelry pieces itself.”
Visitors come face to face with Arkansas gemstones when they enter a new exhibition titled “Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination.” The first gems on display are diamonds, one from the Tiffany collection and two that people discovered at the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro.
“And this happens still on a regular basis because the Crater of Diamonds Park is open for diamond mining. So people from the public can go mine diamonds and be able to keep the diamonds that they’ve found.”
But this gallery isn’t just gemstones. It’s filled with elaborate decorative items like necklaces, earrings and watches from the Tiffany archives, alongside complementary paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the Crystal Bridges collection.
These delicate jewelry pieces have intricate little details all over them. They take time and closeness to fully observe, so Padgett says Crystal Bridges curators and the head of exhibition design, Alvaro Amat, chose some large complementary art to counter that intricacy.
“So we were thinking a lot about scale of objects, the size of the objects in the exhibition, because jewelry pieces are quite small, and within the cases, they create this own little world around them. So the pacing of how you have different pieces of jewelry. And then what are those moments for the larger works? We were really wanting to think about what is the balance of those?”
One of the show’s defining moments came about during a trip the Tiffany & Co. team took to Crystal Bridges.
“And so they were coming to look more at the space, to think about what the show looked like. And we went to our vaults and saw what work might be available, or what is it that could potentially be a fit. And one of the works that just stood out so much and was a bit of an unexpected pairing was this painting by Hope Gangloff.”
The painting, “Queen Jane Approximately,” shows a woman in a blue dress with fish on it, lying on a love seat. Lines are defined, the painting is colorful and the scene reveals more details the longer you look.
“And when they came and saw this painting, the Tiffany team was so struck by the color. So there’s this amazing language of color, from the light blues to the darker tones, the color of the fish, the way that this lilac and cream piece of furniture that she’s sitting on, it just has this amazing color language.
“And then the attention to pattern, the attention to design, and the way in which the individual brush strokes to me almost look like gemstones. It’s like they make up this kind of pattern that scintillates when you look across this part of her dress.”
Turn away from the painting and you’ll see two fish-adorned brooches by French designer Jean Schlumberger.
“So these are from the 1950s. These are really distinctive of Schlumberger’s work. He was looking to nature and interested in looking to land, sea, water. And these fish clips are ones where you can see his amazing ability to capture that sense of a fish moving through water quickly, and then paying attention to the colorful gemstone choice on that.
“When you see that in relation to the painting where you see the little fish imagery, there’s these multiple layers, we’re looking back and forth between these, helps you to appreciate both and just makes a really stunning visual combination in the galleries.”
The temporary gallery is in a small space on the museum’s Bigelow Bridge in Box A. Inside Box A is another, even smaller display space for the exhibit’s centerpiece: the painting of Queen Jane, the fish clips and, most centrally, a necklace called “Hedges and Flowers.”
Alvaro Amat led the exhibition design and says his team had never worked in such an intimate setting.
“We had our own skepticism about that idea because we’ve never contained a space in a space this small. We usually work with very large galleries and we try to create the flow there. So we went back and forth with them and defining what that chamber would look like. And that’s how we came together with the idea of this colonnade that encloses another space within the bigger space.”
Throughout the exhibition, lighting draws guests in for a closer look. The Tiffany & Co. team brought in its own lighting designer and mount maker, who were both on site during the installation process.
“These little jewel boxes that have these very unique lighting is something that we conceived together. And then we had their lighting designer define all the look and feel for how these jewels were going to be displayed, which is something that for us was a huge learning process.
“We were able to combine the Crystal Bridges way of doing things with the Tiffany way of doing things and come up with, I think, a very successful in our mind display of different kinds of objects that have different, you can notice, different kinds of color lighting, the contrast between these little environments when you’re supposed to kind of get immersed into the details versus looking at things that are talking to each other in a larger space.
“And that was, I think, a great learning opportunity for us as an institution and for them as well. I don’t think they’re used to work in the museum context, working in our own process of thinking about conservation, visitor flow and also how people learn about different stories that are overlapping together.
“So I think it was a very fruitful, I have to say, a complicated process, but it was delightful to be able to come to this result, which is encouraging us, creating an appetite for maybe more of these kind of shows where we have more jewelry, more crafts with crystals. I think there’s a lot of ideas that are floating now around the museum.”
Lighting and juxtaposed grandeur also helps smooth the transition from Tiffany pieces to ones from Crystal Bridges’ collection. In one case, that effect was achieved before the collaboration between the jeweler and the museum even began.
“I’ll point out in this corner the great grouping of, of course, the wisteria table lamp, which is a longtime favorite in the Crystal Bridges collection created by Tiffany Studios and here partnered with another work from Crystal Bridges, the George Inness landscape. And we include this because Louis Comfort Tiffany trained with George Inness.
“So even though Louis’ father had this wonderful, impressive design and jewelry company, he was interested in a different path. And so he actually went and did artistic training in painting with Inness and got this real strong interest in light from that experience and the light within the Inness painting.
“If you look at the kind of back and forth between light in the foreground, shadow in the foreground, in the midfield, you have that balance of light and shadow, and then even to the sky, how some clouds are getting a little bit of the sun and some are darker. There’s this sensitivity to light and how that is rendered. That goes on to inform Louis Comfort Tiffany’s work and actually transform into that use of light as a material itself, whether in a lamp or in a window that has natural light behind it.”
You can see all sorts of wearable art, from necklaces, earrings, watches and beyond, at “Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination” until March 29 at Crystal Bridges. You can find it in the Permanent Collections Gallery with no ticket required.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
