LANDSCAPE OF CRYSTAL BRIDGES

bentonville, ar

 Throughout this 11-day course, I learned about the ways in which we define and experience space and place. During the first part of this course, I spent time along the landscape of Crystal Bridges Art Museum, drawing what I felt rather than just what I knew or saw. This allowed me to understand and express my feelings about the places I was experiencing and helped me better understand the difference between space and place.

By being in the landscape over the course of several days I learned about perceptualism and integrationism as well as landing and grounding when studying sites around me. The second part of the course consisted of trying to connect and understand the relationship between real-life sites along the landscape of the museum with the landscape paintings that people will experience as they move throughout the museum.

We grouped all the drawings from the class to create categories that describe the most common moments along the landscape of the museum that people might encounter. We then studied the landscape paintings from the Hudson River School on display in the museum and found moments in each that fell into the categories we created.

By placing these paintings into categories and then mapping the categorized landscape, we created a map for visitors so that they can experience a feeling by looking at a painting and then be able to experience that same feeling in a real-life landscape and connect the two. This experienced feeling then becomes the difference between a space and a place.