The Garden exhibition, located between the Early American and Modern Art Galleries, takes you on a journey exploring flowers in different contexts to celebrate the connection between art, design, nature, and literature. Florals and greenery are timeless themes that provide examples of how humans connect with nature and ideas of growth, passage of time, and beauty. By enveloping you in immersive spaces, the feeling of being in a garden is brought indoors through a site-specific installation, detailed rendering of flowers, and new forms of ornamentation, reflecting on the nature of beauty in the process. The Garden looks at the myriad of ways artists use flowers for ornamentation, empowerment, and as an exploration of human experience.
The Garden will be on view April 21st - October 8th, 2018 at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Kendell Carter uses flowers as empowerment. As homage to “Black Excellence” today, Carter paints symbolic abstract portraits that use flowers for their uplifting and powerful nature. In this series, Carter uses clast latex and aerosol to make beautiful patterns from layered drips, painted flowers, and letters that spell out “black love”. These patterns reference floral ornamentation, but take this ornamentation outside of a exclusively decorative context through their gestural and celebratory nature.
The titles for these works reference the Emmy television awards and two actresses, Kerry Washington, nominated for her role in Scandal, and Taraji P. Henson, who was nominated for her role in Empire, to celebrate these strong Black women. Here he references fine art and nature with elements of celebrity, empowerment, and fashion.
