State of the Art: Record

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
State of the Art: Record, an exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, will be on view at the LSU Museum of Art from March 10 through June 19, 2022. This exhibition explores the meaning of record to better understand the world around us. Recordings preserve information. This can include an idea, a sound, a moment in time—the important outcome remains the same: the record. The artworks in this exhibition reveal a broad expanse of this concept and is divided into three parts: historical record (preserving history and re-constructing history); seeking the intangible; and finding order. Some artists grapple with the constantly unfolding historical record. Others use their work as a way to record concepts too big for words or too abstract for simple explanation. Others employ their artistic skills to order their surroundings, transforming chaos into something manageable. Record speaks to the task of documenting the random, confusing, and sometimes inexplicable, and underscores a desire to return to the existing record in order to reconsider.

These 20 artists, a group of the 61 artists from the original State of the Art 2020 exhibition, represent a sample of American art created in recent years. The approaches, backgrounds, and details of these artists’ practices vary widely, but the echoes across works and sections of the show speak to broader trends in contemporary art in this country. Organized around the theme of “record,” this focused exhibition invites visitors to consider how these artists put this theme into action.  For example, Marcel Pardo Ariza’s Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis selects fragments of bodies—legs, arms, feet, hands—from contemporary and historical images of queer people in the San Francisco Bay Area to link them across time and generations. Peter Everett’s painting Lych ventures completely into the realm of abstraction as a way to employ shape and color as translators of meaning. Other works such as Jenelle Esparza’s Dancer In An Unconscious Rhythm preserve the history of labor and the resilience of the human body to heal itself; Paul Stephen Benjamin’s installation Daily Meditations seeks to find order and meaning through his daily ritual of manually typing out reflections on the question, “What is the color black?” Kellie Romany also seeks order through stained ceramic discs with oil paint, mimicking the varying shades of skin tones based on nineteenth-century anthropologist and ethnographer Felix von Luschan’s chromatic scale of 36 skin-color tiles that was used to determine a person’s race in Europe and America up until the 1950s. Visitors will be able to touch and inspect these discs during this exhibition, watch a performance art piece by Kellie Romany during the opening reception, and listen to an artist talk and create a ceramic disc with the artist during Romany’s time at LSU MOA (program details below).

Artists included in this exhibition are David Harper, Damian Stamer, Carla Edwards, Jenelle Esparza, Marcel Pardo Ariza, Kate Budd, Mari Hernandez, Tabitha Nikolai, Enrico Riley, Jordan Seaberry, Diego Rodriguez-Warner, Frances Bagley, Peter Everett, Mae Aur, Alex Chitty, Paul Stephen Benjamin, Jill Downen, Kellie Romany, Nicolas Lobo, and Cory Imig.

ON VIEW AT LSU MOA: On view March 10–June 19, 2022

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, March 10 from 6–8 PM (details below)

LSU MOA Installation

Exhibition Lenders & Sponsors

State of the Art: Record is organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. The national tour of State of the Art 2020 is sponsored by Bank of America with additional support from Art Bridges. This exhibition and its programming are sponsored locally by a generous grant from Art Bridges.

Additional support is provided by generous donors to the Annual Exhibition Fund: Louisiana CAT; The Imo N. Brown Memorial Fund in memory of Heidel Brown and Mary Ann Brown; The Alma Lee, H.N. and Cary Saurage Fund; Charles "Chuck" Edward Schwing; Robert and Linda Bowsher; LSU College of Art + Design; Mr. and Mrs. Sanford A. Arst; and The Newton B. Thomas Family/Newtron Group Fund.

State of the Art: Record Zine Project

Visitors were encouraged to view State of the Art: Record at LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, LA during the spring of 2022, and take in the way each artist creates, responds, or reflects on a record or the idea of one. Makers were given these questions as a starting point: What does it mean to record? What constitutes a record? Who creates the record and can a record be changed?

Participants in this zine responded to these ideas or created their own record in any media they desired. Poetry, painting, photography, collage–anything was fair game. Flip through this zine to see these art makers and the works they created in response to this exhibition.

LSU Museum of Art thanks the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, LSU College of Art + Design, and Therese Knowles of the LSU-University Laboratory School for partnering and facilitating zine submissions. Printing of this zine publication is sponsored by Baton Rouge Printing. LSU Museum of Art thanks Baton Rouge Printing for making printed copies available to zine participants.

Upcoming Lectures and Programs

Past Events

Press