Baton Rouge, Louisiana—LSU Museum of Art (LSU MOA) will present State of the Art 2020: Record, an exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, this upcoming spring 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. 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 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 (pictured above) 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 (pictured left) 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.

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. Support also by LSU MOA Annual Exhibition Fund donors.

Programs

ABOUT LSU MUSEUM OF ART

LSU Museum of Art seeks to enrich and inspire through collections, exhibitions, conservation, and education, serving as a cultural and intellectual resource for the University, Baton Rouge, and beyond.

 LSU Museum of Art is supported in part by a grant from the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, funded by the East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President and Metro Council. Additional support is provided by generous donors to the Annual Exhibition Fund, members, and community partners. Supported by a grant from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture Recreation and Tourism, in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council. Funding has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support provided by Art Bridges and Junior League of Baton Rouge. Thank you to the following sponsors of Free Friday Nights and Free First Sundays at LSU MOA: Louisiana Lottery Corporation and IBERIABANK, a division of First Horizon, for sponsoring free admission and Louisiana CAT for sponsoring programming.