BENTONVILLE, ARK.
‘A Compass for the Field’
Photographs by Meredith Mashburn, Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Through Lunder Institute @, a new initiative by the Lunder Institute for American Art, Colby is hosting timely, public discussions at a half-dozen top museums to help their leaders and curators grapple with a question that goes to the core of their existence and sets the path for the future:
What is the state of American art?
“The Lunder Institute serves as a compass for practitioners in the field, and it helps us to think about the many different directions that we have yet to explore,” said Erica Wall, executive director of the Lunder Institute, during a March event at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. “But what we’re really asking is what is the state of America, and how is that reflected in our exhibitions, discourse, and scholarship?”
The question about the state of American art is being presented under the framework of the Lunder Institute @, an ambitious new project that will culminate in the fall when Colby brings representatives from each participating museum to Mayflower Hill to compare answers, anticipate what the field will look like, and consider how they can welcome more diverse artists and operate more openly in the years to come. The program will repeat next year with a new cohort of museums.
Part of the Colby Museum of Art and established in 2017 with a gift from Peter Lunder ’56, D.F.A. ’98 and Life Trustee Paula Lunder, D.F.A. ’98, the Lunder Institute for American Art supports innovative research and creative production that expands the boundaries of American art. Through fellowships, workshops, gatherings, and grants, the institute amplifies marginalized voices, challenges convention, and provides a platform for generative dialogue through art and scholarship.
The Lunder Institute initiated this traveling program as a vehicle for museum leaders to talk with one another and with the public about the most critical questions related to the museum field. In doing so, it offers partner institutions the opportunity to consider, discuss, and respond to those issues, opportunities, and challenges in relation to their own institution, collection, and location. Importantly, this work also fosters dialogue within and among institutions, Wall said.
Based on initial responses and requests from other museums, it’s likely the initiative will continue in future years with other participants, she said, and some of the museums in the inaugural program may continue the discussions on their own. “We are making our presence known in the field through this work,” Wall said. “We are going beyond our borders in Waterville to engage with people and institutions across the country.”
Lunder Institute @ launched Feb. 10 at the de Young fine arts museum in San Francisco, and continued March 2 at The Broad in Los Angeles; March 7 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark.; April 7 at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass.; May 23 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and Sept. 13 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The Colby symposium will be Oct. 28-30.

Arkansas travelers
Many senior staff members from the museum and Lunder Institute attended, including Julianne Gilland, Beth Finch, Courtney Bassett, and Louise Kerr. In addition, six members of the Museum Board of Governors also made the trip.
Before the public program, they spent several hours in conversation with the curatorial and leadership teams at Crystal Bridges. They learned about the evolution of the collection and toured the museum, which is undergoing a massive expansion. Members of the group also engaged in a far-reaching conversation about the state of American museums with Stephen Reily, founding director of Remuseum. Associated with Crystal Bridges, Remuseum is an independent research project that seeks to promote innovation among art museums.
Reily hopes the work of Remuseum will give museums “the freedom to think differently,” an idea that aligns perfectly with the goals of the Lunder Institute, Wall said.
As participants in Lunder Institute @, each museum was asked to respond to the question of the state of American art by having internal conversations across departments and a public program. In Bentonville, that resulted in a series of “bite-sized” conversations among artists and curators about the work they are doing and where it fits in the larger discussion of American art.
The artists included Danielle Hatch, a multidisciplinary artist who uses fabric installations in bright, splashy colors to explore the relationship of the female body to the built environment, notions of artificiality, and power structures; Linda Nguyen Lopez, whose colorful abstract craft-based ceramic works animate everyday, mundane objects; and Kayln Fay Barnoski, an interdisciplinary artist and member of the Cherokee Nation, whose work focuses on self-location, community-building, collaboration, and empathy.
They were interviewed, respectively, by Alejo Benedetti, curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges; Jen Padgett, the museum’s Windgate Curator of Craft; and Jordan Poorman Cocker, the first full-time curator of Indigenous art at Crystal Bridges.

‘We are many things’
Barnoski hammered that point during their discussion with Cocker, a member of the Kiowa Tribe. A musician and visual artist, Barnoski expressed gratitude that Cocker, as an Indigenous curator, has the authority to shape the artistic offerings and conversations at Crystal Bridges. Too often, they said, Indigenous artists feel pressure to produce work that fits certain perceptions in order to gain entry and acceptance.
“In these institutional spaces, we feel the need to be one thing because that is what makes us accessible and that is what makes us attractive to these spaces,” Barnoski said. “But in reality, we are many things—we are sisters, we are aunties, we are artists, we are musicians, we are storytellers. And to take us out of those things is to remove so much of us.”
Barnoski is many things. They use music, printed publications, storytelling, and contemporary craft in their work, and they see their artistic practice “as a way to find the ways in which we all intersect and build bridges of understanding.”
Hatch told Benedetti she was drawn to fabric because it represents a common language and is something that everyone engages with daily through clothing and décor. In her practice, she treats fabric as a narrative material, often working with homeowners and building owners to cover their structures with fabric to infuse the environment with the joy and energy of vibrant colors—think pink houses. “We all make choices related to fabric,” she said. “What do our fabric choices related to clothing and home décor signify or obfuscate? What are the stories they tell about class, gender, culture?”
As the artist and curator discussed her work, members of the audience used craft materials arrayed on each table to decorate pink sleep masks that Hatch distributed to everyone who attended. “But I call them eyes koozies,” she said, imploring people to “dive in, add decoration, color, patterns, and imagery that you feel comfortable with.”
Lopez is a first-generation American, whose mother is of Vietnamese and her father of Mexican descent. As they all learned English together, and English was the only language Lopez spoke, communication was challenging. “We had very little verbal communication growing communication and learned at a young age to animate objects with color and energy. “Now, all the objects around me are alive,” she said. “I have empathy for everything around me.”
She works in clay because she can manipulate the material to create any form. She is best known for making what she calls dust furries, which are inspired by dust bunnies. But because she likes to bring everything to life, her furries resemble little creatures that are packed with personality. She likes working with the idea of dust, she said, because dust “captures time and captures people. Dust is like a mini time capsule.”
Lopez recently celebrated two milestones that suggest the doors of acceptance have opened—or that change is at least possible. Crystal Bridges purchased one of her pieces for its collection, and Lopez recently received one of 50 United States Artists Fellowships, which includes a $50,000 unrestricted award. That prize recognizes the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines.
This summer, Lopez will be an artist in residence at Colby’s Island Campus. She and three other artists will develop work in response to the islands and specifically Betsy Wyeth and her legacy. The work will be presented in an exhibition about Betsy Wyeth in summer 2026 at the Joan Dignam Schmaltz Gallery of Art at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center in downtown Waterville.


Eager participants
The results of their work are evident across the Crystal Bridges galleries—in the newly acquired piece by Lopez, the artwork of Indigenous artists that appears throughout the museum, and in an 1858 stoneware jar thrown by David Drake, an enslaved potter from South Carolina.
The museum’s acquisition of a large piece of functional domestic pottery was a bit of a departure, she said. But purchasing the piece and displaying it prominently among a seascape by Winslow Homer and a Hudson River School landscape by Asher Durand solidified the museum’s commitment to craft and to tell artists’ stories not yet told.
“We are a museum of American art, and we like to push that definition up, down, around, and everywhere in between,” said Besaw.
Ultimately, that’s the goal, Wall said. It all comes back to the Lunder Institute being a compass for the field, pointing it in directions not yet taken but rich in promise.