Crystal Bridges and the Momentary present 2027 exhibitions celebrating connections between art, nature and community
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BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Crystal Bridges and the Momentary today announced its 2027 exhibition lineup, inviting visitors to explore the connections between people, places and the natural world. From wildlife habitats and ecosystems to communities, histories and creative expression, the 2027 exhibitions explore the many ways we are connected to one another and the world around us. At Crystal Bridges, The National Geographic Photo Ark: Animals of Earth opens in March, showcasing powerful photographs by Joel Sartore that celebrate Earth’s biodiversity while raising awareness about wildlife conservation. Opening in May, State of the Art 2027 brings together more than 65 contemporary artists from across the United States in the most collaborative edition of Crystal Bridges’ exhibition series to date.
At the Momentary, Alex Prager: Pacific Noise brings together photographs, films and sculpture, inviting visitors into a cinematic world where reality and fiction collide. Through uncanny emotionally charged scenes, Prager transforms the Momentary into a dreamlike landscape inspired by Los Angeles, nostalgia, fantasy and lived experience. The exhibition marks Prager’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States in over a decade. British artist Lucy Sparrow’s first museum exhibition in the United States, The Beginning of Convenience, is on view through July 11, 2027. The immersive “time capsule” installation of a 1980s-90s Walmart-inspired supermarket includes more than 20,000 individually hand-crafted and exquisitely detailed felt replicas of products, ranging from food and beverage items to beauty products and household goods typical of a not-so-distant past.
Crystal Bridges continues to offer free exhibitions that invite visitors to engage with art in intimate settings. Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination remains on view through March 29, 2027, exploring the iconic jeweler’s nearly 190-year legacy through exceptional jewelry, gemstones and works from the museum’s collection. Opening April 24, 2027, Mind and Matter examines the connections between art, perception, neuroscience and wellness through works in a variety of media. Many Ways of Seeing: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, on view through February 20, 2028, celebrates the renowned collection jointly owned by Crystal Bridges and Fisk University and its enduring impact on American art and culture. All three exhibitions are free and open to the public.
CRYSTAL BRIDGES
The National Geographic Photo Ark: Animals of Earth | March 20, 2027 – August 22, 2027
Photo Ark: ANIMALS OF EARTH by Joel Sartore Exhibit Rendering. Courtesy National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Photo Ark: Animals of Earth is an experiential exhibition featuring immersive room-sized projections and interactive elements that transport guests inside photographer Joel Sartore’s project, The National Geographic Photo Ark. Crystal Bridges’ presentation also features a selection of 30 additional printed photographs of animals with local and regional ties.
The National Geographic Photo Ark is a multi-year effort to raise awareness of and find solutions to some of the most pressing issues affecting wildlife and their habitats. Founded by Joel Sartore—National Geographic Explorer, photographer and 2018 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year—the project aims to document every species living in the world’s zoos, aquariums and wildlife sanctuaries; inspire action through education; and help protect wildlife by supporting on-the-ground conservation efforts.
Joel Sartore started the National Geographic Photo Ark in his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska in 2006. Since then, Sartore, a world-renowned photographer, has traveled the world in his quest to create a photo archive of global biodiversity that will feature portraits of more than 25,000 species of birds, fish, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates. Once completed, the Photo Ark will serve as an important record of each animal’s existence and a powerful testament to the importance of protecting them. No matter its size, each animal is treated with the same amount of affection and respect. The results are portraits that are not just stunningly beautiful, but intimate and moving. “It’s the eye contact that moves people,” Sartore explains. “It engages their feelings of compassion and a desire to help.”
The National Geographic Photo Ark is a powerful tool for teaching people of all ages about our planet’s amazing biodiversity and fostering a real connection to Earth’s wildlife. The project engages students in the classroom through free educational materials and activities and inspires the public through special exhibitions, books, TV specials, features in National Geographic magazine and events around the world.
The National Geographic Photo Ark: Animals of Earth is an exhibition designed and created by the National Geographic Society and Moment Factory. The presentation at Crystal Bridges is sponsored by Christie’s, Stephen and Barbara Heyman, Janice and Paul Serfass and Stout Executive Search.
State of the Art 2027 | May 15, 2027 – January 24, 2028
Kathy Laio, Liu Nian, 2021, oil and acrylic on panels, 180 x 120 in. Courtesy of the artist. © Kathy Laio. Photography by E. G. Schempf.
Featuring more than 150 artworks, State of the Art 2027 explores themes of movement, inheritance, labor, process, memory and belonging. Together, these works offer an expansive portrait of contemporary American art while creating new opportunities for audiences to engage with artists whose voices and perspectives are shaping the field today.
Since its debut in 2014, State of the Art has showcased contemporary artists whose work reflects the people, places and ideas shaping life across the United States. Building on the success of previous editions, State of the Art 2027 continues this commitment with its most collaborative exhibition yet.
Developed in partnership with Art Bridges Foundation, the exhibition features more than 65 artists from across the country, representing a wide range of backgrounds, disciplines and career stages. The project highlights artists working beyond traditional art-world centers, offering a broad view of contemporary American art today. Contemporary American art is not concentrated to a single place or idea but is shaped by artists working across a wide range of communities and contexts.
A hallmark of this third edition is its collaborative curatorial approach. Working with five partner museums, Seattle Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and The High Museum of Art, and a network of curatorial advisors, co-curators Ashley Holland, director of curatorial initiatives and partnerships at Art Bridges Foundation, and Victor Gomez, assistant curator, contemporary art at Crystal Bridges, identified artists whose practices are deeply connected to their communities and reflective of the diverse creative landscapes across the nation.
State of the Art 2027 is organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The exhibition is sponsored by Good Chaos, Stout Executive Search, Juliana and Clay Carlton, Christie’s, Shari and Lamar Steiger Family, Harrison and Rhonda French Family, Frederick and Shelby Gans, Stephen and Barbara Heyman, Janice and Paul Serfass and Deborah Wright.
Mind and Matter | April 24, 2027 – February 20, 2028
Judith Schaechter, Super/Natural, 2023-2025, Stained glass, wood, and brass, 102 in. x 74 in. x 74 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, Purchased with the Fund for Craft, 2026.42
Mind and Matter examines the ways our brains interpret the world around us through art. This exhibition brings together objects from the Crystal Bridges collection that explore perception, neuroscience and wellness through creative materials and ways of making.
Mind and Matter features artworks in a variety of mediums like stained glass, fiber and wood by artists Lia Cook, David Ellsworth, Robyn Horn, Michael Lee, John Jordan, Michael Peterson, Judith Schaechter and Devorah Sperber. The exhibition debuts several new acquisitions to the Crystal Bridges collection, including Super/Natural by Schaechter and Su Series by Cook. Created during Schaechter’s residency at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, Super/Natural is an immersive stained-glass dome exploring biophilia, beauty and the brain’s response to art. In Su Series, Cook based each of the 32 individual weavings on the same photograph of herself as a child. The panels are unique as Cook uses different weaving techniques and patterns, drawing from data science and medical imaging technologies to investigate perception and cognition.
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
Mind and Matter is sponsored by Christie’s, Stephen and Barbara Heyman, Janice and Paul Serfass and Stout Executive Search.
Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination | On view through March 29, 2027
Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination installation image. Photo Courtesy Crystal Bridges.
Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination explores Tiffany & Co.’s nearly 190-year legacy of creativity, craft, and exquisite design. On view through March 29, 2027, the free focus exhibition brings together objects from the Crystal Bridges permanent collection with exceptional jewelry and gemstones on loan from The Tiffany Archives (spanning 1885 to 1987), situating Tiffany & Co. within the broader story of American art and highlighting its role in transforming the nation’s natural riches into objects of beauty and cultural significance.
Founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany in 1837, Tiffany & Co. has shaped American jewelry design for nearly two centuries. Bringing together treasures from The Tiffany Archives with paintings, glass, books, minerals and sculpture from the Crystal Bridges collection, Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination explores the natural world as both inspiration and material. From native flora and fauna to gemstones sourced across the country, the exhibition places the House within the broader context of American art, revealing how Tiffany transformed the country’s landscapes and natural resources into enduring works of creativity and beauty.
The exhibition is on view through March 29, 2027. This exhibition is free and open to the public.
Nature Adorned: The Artistry of Tiffany & Co. and the American Imagination is sponsored by Stout Executive Search, Juliana and Clay Carlton, Christie’s, Shari and Lamar Steiger Family, Harrison and Rhonda French Family, Frederick and Shelby Gans, Stephen and Barbara Heyman and Janice and Paul Serfass.
Many Ways of Seeing: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection | On view through February 20, 2028
Many Ways of Seeing: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection installation image. Photo Courtesy Crystal Bridges.
The 101 objects in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection have inspired countless new ways of seeing and thinking over the past 100 years. At the turn of the twentieth century, many of the artworks passed through Stieglitz’s New York galleries, where visitors came to see the latest examples of modern art. Upon his death in 1946, Stieglitz left thousands of artworks to his widow and fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe to disperse. Most objects went to major museums in the northern half of the US, but one group found a new home at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn.
At a time when much of the American South was still racially segregated, this 1949 donation to a school for Black students was remarkable and heralded among the Fisk community. In 2011, Fisk and Crystal Bridges announced a joint ownership agreement whereby the collection would rotate between the two institutions, traveling between Nashville and Bentonville every two years.
Many Ways of Seeing: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection celebrates the ongoing legacies of Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe and their 1949 gift of art to Fisk University in Nashville. Seventy-five years after the debut at Fisk and 15 years into co-ownership with Crystal Bridges, the collection continues to inspire a spirit of boldness and experimentation in art and in life. This milestone also led to a new illustrated publication—the collection’s first—to share these stories with generations to come.
This exhibition opened with the museum’s expansion on June 6, 2026, and is on view through February 20, 2028. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Many Ways of Seeing: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection is sponsored by Stout Executive Search, Juliana and Clay Carlton, Christie’s, Shari and Lamar Steiger Family, National Endowment for the Arts, Harrison and Rhonda French Family, Frederick and Shelby Gans, Stephen and Barbara Heyman and Janice and Paul Serfass.
THE MOMENTARY
Alex Prager: Pacific Noise | February 20, 2027 – July 25, 2027
Alex Prager, Ceremony, 2026, Archival pigment print, 61 x 73 7/8 x 2 ¼ in. Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Marking Alex Prager’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States in over a decade, Alex Prager: Pacific Noise invites visitors into the artist’s carefully constructed world, where fiction and reality blur. Prager has developed a distinctive visual language informed by Golden Age Hollywood filmmaking, including film noir and Technicolor, classical mythology and the allegorical paintings of Dutch Renaissance masters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel. Her increasingly ambitious, large-scale productions have become a defining hallmark of her practice. Featuring approximately 30 photographs, films and sculpture spanning the north half of the Momentary, the exhibition focuses on Prager’s work from the past decade while incorporating select earlier pieces that trace Prager’s artistic evolution. Often celebrated for her meticulously constructed and endlessly alluring imagery, this dissonant presentation in the industrial context of the Momentary creates a unique space to experience the multiple mediums in Prager’s practice.
Making their institutional debut, Prager’s newest photographs embrace a heightened sense of fiction. Known for her cinematic depictions of Los Angeles, Prager pushes further into the surreal, populating scenes with elegantly dressed figures wearing exaggerated wigs, prosthetics and costumes. Through these playful distortions, she transforms familiar realities into something both recognizable and uncanny.
At a time when questions of authenticity are ever-present, Pacific Noise explores the shifting boundaries between the real and the imagined. Through Prager’s lens, the exhibition embodies a teetering line of artifice and reality, separating the real world of Los Angeles from the buzzing distortion of a hyper-real Hollywood. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Alex Prager: Pacific Noise is organized by the Momentary in Bentonville, Ark. The exhibition is sponsored by David & Sayoko Teitelbaum and Jim Smith & Rebecca Hurst.
Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience | On view through July 11, 2027
<i>The Beginning of Convenience</i> installation image. Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images for the Momentary.
British artist Lucy Sparrow is internationally renowned for her unique and immersive installations filled with thousands of items, all meticulously handcrafted from felt. Through her work, Sparrow transforms everyday retail environments into playful, nostalgic and tactile worlds that are both familiar and entirely new. Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience, Sparrow’s first museum exhibition in the United States, takes visitors back in time through an immersive “time capsule” installation of a 1980s-90s Walmart-inspired supermarket.
Expanding on her extensive archival research practice, The Beginning of Convenience includes more than 20,000 individually hand-crafted and exquisitely detailed felt replicas of supermarket products, ranging from food and beverage items to beauty products and household goods typical of a not-so-distant past. Throughout the exhibition, Sparrow explores a particular moment in history that she refers to as the “beginning of convenience,” a time when the rise of dual-income households in the 1980s necessitated consumer goods that prioritized speed and convenience over effort and taste. Changing roles within the household led to the development and proliferation of quick and easy consumer goods, such as microwave dinners, frozen foods, and out-of-the-box meals. Sparrow’s labor-intensive handiwork of “convenient” supermarket wares invites us to see the familiar with new eyes.
In addition to the supermarket experience, The Beginning of Convenience features a built replica of Sparrow’s studio – known as the Felt Cave – and a new self-made documentary that follows Sparrow’s work in the months leading up to the exhibition at the Momentary. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience is sponsored by Procter & Gamble, The Coca-Cola Company, Willard & Pat Walker Charitable Foundation, Juliana and Clay Carlton, Lamar and Shari Steiger Family in honor of Jack Shewmaker, Tyson Family Foundation in honor of Don Tyson, the Soderquist Children in honor of Don Soderquist, Goldman Sachs, Chris and Meagan Nicholas, JM Smucker Company, AMP Sign & Banner, CCF Brands, Circana, Courtney and Seth Dallaire, Sandy Edwards, Jennie and David Hartman, Dayna and Phil Martz Family, Doug and Shelley McMillon, Donna and Wayne Morris, Kelly and John David Rainey and Kieran and Emma Shanahan.
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About the Momentary
Opened in February 2020 in Downtown Bentonville, the Momentary is a venue for the music, art, and food of our time; and a catalyst for creativity and economic vitality. An extension of Crystal Bridges, the Momentary is ‘a living room’ where community gathers to be inspired, connected, and joyful. The Momentary was founded by the Walton family, based on the vision of Tom, Olivia, and Steuart Walton. Its commitment to cultivating arts and cultural experiences provides more opportunities for education, engagement, and enjoyment in our region. The Momentary welcomes all with free general admission. Offerings include live music by national and regional artists, visual and performing arts, an artist-in-residence program, culinary experiences, such as national and local chef dinners, Onyx Coffee Lab, and the sky-high Tower Bar, indoor and outdoor gathering spaces, an outdoor festival space, and a retail shop. For more information, visit theMomentary.org. The Momentary is located at 507 SE E Street, Bentonville, Arkansas 72712. The Momentary’s Founding Funders are Walton Family Foundation, Walmart, RØDE Microphones, The Coca-Cola Company, Tyson Family Foundation, and Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation.
About Crystal Bridges
The mission of Crystal Bridges is to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature. Since opening in 2011, the museum has welcomed more than 15 million visitors across its spaces, with no cost for admission. Crystal Bridges was founded in 2005 as a public 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization by philanthropist Alice Walton. The museum’s expansive collection spans five centuries of American masterworks from early American to current day and is enhanced by temporary exhibitions and five miles of trails featuring public art installations from prominent artists.
The museum is nestled on 134 acres of Ozark landscape and was designed by the world-renowned Safdie Architects. A rare Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house was preserved and relocated to the museum grounds in 2015. Crystal Bridges offers public programs including lectures, performances, classes, and teacher development opportunities, and is the home of the prestigious Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art and Tyson Scholars of American Art Program. Some 600,000 school children have participated in the Willard and Pat Walker School Visit program, which provides educational experiences for school groups at no cost to the schools.
Additional museum amenities include a restaurant, gift store, library, and five miles of art and walking trails. In February 2020, the museum opened the Momentary in Downtown Bentonville (507 SE E Street), a venue for the music, art, and food of our time. Crystal Bridges’ 114,000 square foot expansion opened to the public June 6 and 7, 2026, allowing the museum to expand access for all. For more information, visit CrystalBridges.org. The museum is located at 600 Museum Way, Bentonville, Arkansas 72712.
Media Contact
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