The Worcester Art Museum has commissioned Massachusetts-based artist Crystalle Lacouture to create a new installation for the Wall at WAM. She is the 11th artist featured in this series since it began in 1998. The billboard-sized wall fills a 67-foot expanse on the second story of the Museum’s Renaissance Court. For her Wall at WAM installation, Correspondence (for Elizabeth Bishop), Lacouture created an original painting which was translated into a monumental mural that reverberates through the space and is visible through a promenade of arches integral to the design of the 1930s building in which it resides.
Lacouture makes abstract paintings that embrace the powerful symbolism of pattern and color to create sensitive, mystical designs imbued with deep personal meaning. Lacouture’s work references sacred geometries—recurring patterns found throughout nature and world religions—as well as art history, particularly art created for devotional purposes. For her Wall at WAM commission, Lacouture was inspired by ideas of place and space, and of corresponding design elements across time and cultures. She incorporates into this site-specific installation patterns found in artworks throughout the Museum’s collection, such as the wave-like trim along the bottom which corresponds to an ancient Antioch mosaic installed directly below her mural. The title, as well as several elements of the painting, reference poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), who was born and buried in Worcester.
Lacouture’s symbolic reference to Bishop and her citations of artworks in WAM’s collection pay homage to those artists and are a larger meditation on the city of Worcester and its art museum. Lacouture invites the viewer to be present in this space and consider their own connections to it through the experience of her transcendental, monumental artwork.
Crystalle Lacouture (American, born Montreal, 1978) is an artist who works conceptually across disciplines including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. She received her BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Skidmore College and has exhibited throughout New England, New York, and beyond. She is represented by Praise Shadows Gallery, Brookline, and is based in Boston and North Adams, MA.
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.
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