Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Singer-songwriter Jewel brings art and mental health awareness to Crystal Bridges
She appears to you as a 7-foot-tall apparition in the lobby of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It’s singer-songwriter Jewel, barefoot and dressed like an angel in white silk. She speaks to you as leaves swirl around her and a raven lands on her arm.
“Open wide the doors of your heart,” she says. “The portal is calling. Listen. Love. Listen.”
It’s the hologram that greets you first when you visit “The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel,” which opens to the public on May 4 and will be on show for the next three months.
The experience continues with an art walk guided digitally by Jewel through gallery six, where contemporary art makes its home. Jewel selected a variety of pieces from Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection to signify aspects of the three realms: the inner life, the outer life and the unseen. Next to these chosen pieces are iPads that play videos detailing her reflections on the art, which she ends with a guiding, meditative question for the viewer.
Included are two artworks made by Jewel herself. One is an oil painting, “Double Helix,” which depicts her son with a poem she wrote for him in the background. The other is a sculpture, a Lucite clear figure that appears to be meditating and is full of different medications, which is meant to evoke thoughts on quality of life versus quantity.
The experience comes with a dinner option at Eleven restaurant and concludes with a 200-piece aerial drone show, which was choreographed by Jewel and set to an original score by the artist.
“This is something we jumped into when she called and said, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about doing (this)?’” Rod Bigelow, Crystal Bridges executive director, said during a staff preview April 22. Bigelow said the idea of merging art and mental health with new technologies is such a new concept that he confessed he didn’t really know what she was talking about at first. Still, he wanted to give it a try.
“It’s taken a full team to step in and embrace the idea that we can do something experimental and different and disruptive and exciting with the effort of bringing new audiences into this space,” he said.
“We are thrilled that someone like Jewel would partner with us on something so extraordinary.”
During the exhibit preview, Jewel noted that she has never done an art installation, making this a first for her. She told the staff members present that she was shocked to be met with such kindness and trust as she embarked on this new endeavor.
“For me, it’s just the most inspired I’ve felt since my early 20s,” she said. “I didn’t know I’d get to feel that again. I was lucky to get to feel it in my 20s. … So to be able to stand here and feel inspired, it’s a mending. It’s a healing for me. That’s what ‘The Portal’ is about. If all of us are to be brokenhearted at some point, if we really can’t get out of here without that, what do we do about it?”
During an interview with the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Jewel said the originating idea for “The Portal” began two years ago, but really it starts much further back than that and combines three main aspects of her life.
Jewel studied visual art in school. Even as her music career took off, she kept making visual art, she said, but nobody’s ever seen it. She’s also been working in behavioral health through The Inspiring Children Foundation for the last 25 years.
“So I have these three areas of my life: music, behavioral health and art,” she said. “I wanted to try and do an experience that merged them together into one immersive experience.”
Jewel started with a concept called the portal and knew she wanted to work with new mediums — the hologram, the drones — as well as traditional ones, like drums, oil painting, sculpture. She realized she wanted to make an hour and a half experience for people each evening, so for that reason there will be two drone shows a night. As they pieced it together, it evolved into being based around the three realms.
“It’s around this idea that we each travel through three realms of existence every day,” she said. “Often without realizing it, we all are traversing our inner life — our emotions and our thoughts; we’re all traversing the physical world — our families, our jobs, building things, buying things; and then there’s the unseen, however you define that, what gives you a sense of awe and inspiration — for some that’s a … spiritual world, some just know they’re inspired when they see James Webb telescope images. It’s so personal.
“The idea is this experience helps people get in touch with what the three realms mean to them. How do they navigate them?
Is it working for them? Is there anything they would change?”
For her, the drone show represents all three realms merging and how to traverse those together, since they overlap. The process of making it also merged mediums, which she compared to a cross between sculpture and painting.
“The sky is the canvas, it’s massive in scale and size, but with (drones as) sculptural shapes,” she said. “It was fun for me to design, to think of iconic images and shapes that speak to our subconscious separately of the music. … Getting to tie that to the storytelling of the music was unlike anything I’ve been able to create.”
Jewel believes that one of the best ways of accessing your inner realm is being curious, being observant and writing, but finds that there’s not a lot of space for that in life — to pause and think deeply to understand how we’re feeling. That’s what inspired the questions at the end of each segment in the art walk. Guests will have little books to write their answers and thoughts in.
By bringing in her own artwork to represent all three of her realms, Jewel wants viewers to understand what those realms mean to her. The oil painting she made of her son represents a celebration of her devotion and motherhood, she said. Its wood frame was sculpted by a robot that does three dimensional carving and made it into a shape like a double helix, a DNA strand.
Jewel thinks of motherhood as an artform and has always wanted her life to be her greatest work of art, not her music, visual art or other endeavors. She uses something she calls her “deathbed decisions” to put things in perspective.
“Whenever I had a big decision to make, I would pretend I was on my deathbed looking back on my life and ‘Would this decision rate?’ ‘Would I care about it?’” she mused. “I realized I wouldn’t care about more album sales, wouldn’t care about more money, (but) I would care about who I was spending my time with, and I felt that way about mothering.”
That’s why she didn’t make an album or go on tour for seven years. She had to help her son develop roots, and in the meantime found other ways of making money. In that way, Jewel said, life is sculptural.
“We have to create the shape that we want that works for us, so that when we’re on our deathbed, we look back and feel like it was a thing of beauty, that it was a worthy striving,” she said. “It takes thought, it takes being intentional, and that means you have to create space around having the time to think about ‘What shape do I want my life to be in?’”
Jewel wanted to create this kind of experience at a museum to give others time and a space to think of their life as artwork and consider: How do they like it? Is there too much of one element or not enough of another? And “if they could paint their life differently, what would they do?”
Her hope is for “The Portal” to give people permission to notice if you want something about your life to change and feel freedom in knowing that you can make that change.
“When we grow and change, that’s when new things can grow in our lives,” she said. “It’s fun for me at 50 to know new things are growing in my life.”