Artist Crystalle Lacouture Commissioned for New Wall at WAM Installation, Opening Fall 2024 at The Worcester Art Museum

Worcester, MA—August 6, 2024—The Worcester Art Museum (WAM) announced today the relaunch of its long-standing “Wall at WAM” commissioned art initiative, featuring a new, large-format installation by Massachusetts artist Crystalle Lacouture. Known for her abstract, contemplative, and vibrant works, Lacouture draws inspiration from sacred geometries and art history, including spiritual abstraction and devotional paintings, influences found in and around the Museum’s Renaissance Court where the work will be installed. This new commission also marks the 26th anniversary of the Wall at WAM initiative and will be on view through 2025.  

“Crystalle Lacouture’s work has an almost mystical quality to it that will bring a fresh and serene energy into the heart of the Museum. She is the perfect artist to usher in a return to the regular rotation schedule intended for the Wall at WAM,” said Samantha Cataldo, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Worcester Art Museum. “We have had such a terrific public response to Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison’s These Days of Maiuma, which opened on the Wall in 2013, and we are now looking forward to commissioning new artists to share their work with our audiences.”  

For her Wall at WAM commission, Lacouture was inspired by ideas of place and space, and of correspondence between time and cultures. She incorporates into her work patterns found in art throughout the Museum’s collection, such as an ancient Antioch mosaic installed directly below the Wall at WAM. Lacouture’s new work, titled Correspondence (for Elizabeth Bishop), further references poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born in and later buried in Worcester, and was known for her extensive correspondence history with various friends in addition to her poetry. The installation features a repeated spiral motif, reflecting Bishop’s use of the sestina poetry form and Lacouture’s interest in sacred geometries. Lacouture inserts meaningful lines of Bishop’s poetry into the borders of her geometric design using binary code, such as “In Worcester, Massachusetts,” the opening line to her well-known “In the Waiting Room” (1971).   

Roughly 17 x 67 feet, Lacouture’s geometric design is notable for its hand-worked painting style. This approach reflects the technique used in some early devotional works from the Medieval period that can be seen at the Museum, and embraces a historically feminine aesthetic through the use of graceful lines and a palette that includes bright pinks and soft blues. These colors, evocative of the body and the sky, also connect to another part of Elizabeth Bishop’s work, as both her poetry and correspondence are full of references to constellations, planets, and sharing the same skies as her correspondents even though miles apart. Lacouture’s symbolic reference to Bishop and citations of artworks in WAM’s collection are both specific homages to those artists and a larger meditation on the city of Worcester and its art museum. Correspondence (for Elizabeth Bishop) asks viewers to consider their connections to it through the experience of her transcendental, monumental work.  

“I was honored to create this work for WAM and enjoyed the challenge of translating my work, which is often intimate and vertically oriented, to this monumental, intensely horizontal format. I enjoy that, because of its placement in the Renaissance Court, you can engage with the piece across the museum; it sort of presents and represents itself through archways, from above and below, following you around the museum.” said Lacouture. “I hope that people will feel the joy in this homage to the Worcester Art Museum and Elizabeth Bishop and correspond with the work in this space which inspired it.”  

Crystalle Lacouture received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Skidmore College and has been featured in numerous exhibitions and residencies across New England, New York, and beyond. She is represented by Brookline-based Praise Shadows Gallery and has been profiled in Boston Art Review and interviewed on podcasts such as “I Like Your Work” and “Artist Mother Podcast.” Along with Yng-Ru Chen, owner and chief executive of Praise Shadows Art Gallery, and Sarah Galender Meyer of Galender Art Advisory, Lacouture is a cofounder of the upcoming Arrival art fair, which will premiere in North Adams, Massachusetts, in summer 2025.  

Correspondence (for Elizabeth Bishop) by Crystalle Lacouture is organized by Samantha Cataldo, Curator of Contemporary Art, with Delaney Keenan, Curatorial Assistant.  

Contemporary art installations in common spaces at WAM are supported by the Fletcher Foundation, Larry and Marla Curtis, the Don and Mary Melville Contemporary Art Fund, the John M. Nelson Fund, and Marlene and David Persky.