Singer Jewel Enters The Art World With The Portal At Crystal Bridges

Jewel is best known for her meteoric rise to fame in the 1990s with her album, Pieces of Me. But the immortally youthful muse has never stopped creating over the last four decades, leaving pieces of her artistry all along the way. Now in her fifties, Jewel proves it’s never too late to innovate. From music to paintings, curation, and artificial intelligence, Jewel has reinvented herself over and over. Each phase of her career proves a snippet of creative revelation, and this latest exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas is far from the exception to the rule.

Interviewing Jewel was a verbal treat, ever as eloquent as her timeless Grammy award-winning lyrics.

“I’ve always used art to heal, creating a medicine a tool to grapple with concepts and metabolize them myself,” she explained. “…Art is so powerful because it doesn’t need permission to enter the soul.”

Jewel approached Executive Director Rod Bigelow with a cold call in 2023.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Bigelow admitted, “But Jewel painted a compelling vision that blended art, technology and wellness.”

Jewel knew what she wanted. After all, Crystal Bridges specifically resonated with her: “Elevated, but not elitist.”

“They would be an amazing first fit,” she said. “Alice Walton, the museum’s founder, was an outsider, and the art world was cruel to her. But she still provided world class art to hillbillies. Art is for all; art changes lives. Everyone needs access to world class art.”

Jewel is a native of Homer, Alaska, who personally straddled the line between poverty and high culture, attending the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy with the support of her Alaskan hometown while also facing bouts of homelessness as a teen. Fame is merely an inflection point on a life of leading with empathetic narratives and authenticity. As such, democratizing access is essential to her, as is the museum’s mission to use cutting-edge technology to build community.

Crystal Bridges has previously exhibited groundbreaking blockchain art, including works by Beeple, the viral digital artist who broke records at Christie’s with the $69 million NFT (and Ethereum) sale of his work, “The First 5000 Days”.

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With these kinds of shows in mind, Jewel developed The Portal, which includes holographic art about journeys alongside traditional paintings. The doors of the museum collection opened to her for curation, and Jewel made thoughtful choices about contemporary artists, passing over household names like Mark Rothko in favor of Ruth Asawa and Julie Mehrutu for a total collection of 10. Jewel also included four of her own works in the show, weaving modestly throughout.

Ultimately, however, The Portal is an experience that transcends the two dimensions of paint and canvas. It is a surrealist realm reinvigorating the sheer concept of a journey, using digital aspects to enhance its meditative and mystical qualities.

Jewel shared that she was a founding investor in Innerworld, the behavioral wellness app. She harnesses her personal experiences and those in the space of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and mental health to connect in her art, inviting visitors to navigate the realms of reality just as she had done with song. She wanted the feeling to be, “as intimate as writing a song in your room.”

The program offers, “a meditative art walk” and silent disco each night featuring 200 lit drones in motion to conceptual song by Jewel. The drones flights are managed by Nova Sky Stories, whose recent clients include Central Park.

The Portal is defined by three realms: the seen realm, the inner, and the drone show…the unseen, unknown world of the future. Jewel leveraged science to “get people’s nervous systems in sync,” with the song set to regulate to the human heartbeat.

And yet, she remains humble.

“In this tiny funnel of a museum, my job is to help people forget their day and learn something and focus so they can move into the art walk,” she continued.

She drew heavily on the meditative properties of earth, and the power of “emotional impermanence” growing up in a wild place, where she felt “parented by the land.”

“I learned how to be a human by watching nature,” she said, without missing a beat. “Everything changes. It must. It’s the laws of physics.”

The three-month ticketed experience has been a great success, and continues through July.

“When I truly experienced The Portal for the first time, I was in awe,” Bigelow said as a participant. “To see Jewel’s vision come to life was, in a way, ethereal and inspiring.”

But Jewel has had enough success not to worry about that. She prefers to focus on the creative process. After all, she “let go of perfection” after the birth of her only son.

“I hope that my life is my best work of art,” she concluded majestically. “It’s not a popular viewpoint. Our world rewards us for a hit, but that has nothing to do with the artfulness of your life.”