passage opens at newly re-imagined Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, April 22, 2023

Anne Lindberg: passage

Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR
April 22, 2023 - Spring 2026

A luminous cloud of color floats above Museum visitors, creating an unexpected art experience as they walk through the galleries. This exhibition is a newly commissioned work by Anne Lindberg, an artist based in upstate New York.

Lindberg makes site-specific installations—sculptures that respond directly to the architecture of the surrounding space. Her work, which is created for AMFA, will draw visitors’ attention to the thoughtful details of the new Studio Gang-designed building. Exhibiting art in an unusual location—a corridor—will activate the space for visitors. With the help of assistants, Lindberg pulls colorful cotton thread taut between walls and staples it into place, repeating the process over and over.

“The piece begins as a whisper and gains mass as time goes on,” she explains. “It’s performative.” Although her installations are volumetric, Lindberg considers them to be drawings—they create lines in space. One wall will feature a large vertical drawing on mat board with dozens of brightly colored, thin, horizontal lines created by the artist with the help of a parallel bar. The drawing, grene, has been acquired for the AMFA Foundation Collection.

AMFA selected Lindberg as an inaugural installation artist because of her unique attention to architecture and relationship to drawing, a strength of the AMFA Foundation Collection.

The artist designed this installation specifically for the narrow corridor gallery. Lindberg notes, “passage is a narrow-compressed form that floats overhead and is located within a slender pinch point between large exhibition spaces in the Museum. The overall form shifts direction mid-way along its horizontal length to create a gap or pause, a peek through its vertical depth.” The work is also unusual in that visitors will walk below it, creating an immersive experience.

In addition to drawing, Lindberg’s practice is rooted in fiber art. With the artist’s time-intensive handiwork, choice of thread as a medium, and focus on material qualities, she continues to expand upon a centuries-old tradition. Lindberg earned an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which boasts a fiber program that challenges the divisions between art, craft, and design. Before earning her graduate degree, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, making diagrams and counting threads of textiles from West Africa.

Lindberg chose her color palette for passage with AMFA’s grounds and MacArthur Park location in mind. “I selected green, green blue (with some yellow) for the primary chromatic dynamic to suggest a connection to the landscape surrounding the Museum,” the artist explained. “The outside comes inside, a kind of inversion into the very center of the Museum.”

She is interested in the way that colors affect viewers’ bodies and minds, how they can create physiological responses of calm or relaxation. “Green is a color that symbolizes nature, good health, growth, renewal, and a call to action – all positive associations that hopefully give the work an uplifting character.” As light streams through the thread in passage, it will bathe viewers in a green and yellow glow.

Anne Lindberg: passage is presented by Terri and Chuck Erwin with additional support from the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Theresa Bembnister is the curator of the project.