A world-class collection of American art, stunning architecture, and 120 acres of Ozark forest with five miles of trails. Admission to the museum is always free.
Planning a visit to Crystal Bridges this spring? Use this guide to learn what’s on and what to expect this season.
We have something for all types of learners. From educator resources to family activities to scholars, find what speaks to you and engage with us.
There’s more to the museum than just the galleries— come enjoy hands-on creative fun with art classes for all ages and experience levels..
Crystal Bridges members receive year-round perks, invitations to member-only events, travel opportunities, and more!
Museum & Buildings
Trails and Grounds open daily sunrise to sunset.
Become a giant of light towering over the trees. Plant a heartbeat in a field of 3,000 lightbulbs. Wade through a moving river of poetry, and more as you venture through this outdoor, nighttime experience.
The forest is listening—are you ready to be heard?
Back for its third and final season, Listening Forest combines light, sound, and technical marvels to create an immersive world waiting for its final piece: you. The forest’s eight interactive installations, each designed by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, invite us to play with tools built for surveillance and transform them into instruments of connection.
From bridges of light carrying a stranger’s heartbeat to a multisensory wave of offered voices, in the Listening Forest you’ll have the chance to use your hands, your voice, and even the afterimage of your own body heat to create fantastical experiences in the dark. And unlike a passive light show or display, you’ll be able to direct the forest’s response at every turn on this family-friendly walk in the woods.
Set to a custom soundtrack composed by electronic musician Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and open during the Ozarks’ best season, this really is an outdoor experience unlike any in Northwest Arkansas.
See you in the forest.
Some artworks in this experience contain light effects. Viewing discretion is advised for visitors with sensitivity to visual light stimulation. Hosts at each installation can provide more information.
Advanced tickets are encouraged. Walk-up tickets are available as capacity allows.
MEMBERS: Log in to see discount options. Not a member? Join today!
Wednesday and Thursday Nights*:
Adults: $25 | Adult members: $15
Youth 7-18: $10 | Youth members 7-18: $7
Youth 6 and under: FREE
Friday, and Saturday Nights:
Adults: $30 | Adult members: $15
Youth 7-18: $15 | Youth members 7-18: $15
November Family Weekend: On November 18 & 19, kids under 18 enjoy free admission when accompanied by an adult ticketolder.
Get Tickets
*Plus select Sundays during the holiday season (Nov 19 – Dec 31)
Closed: Mondays and Tuesdays; Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas
Call the Inclement Weather line to check on any cancellations: (479) 657-2488.
Learn more about the eight installations of Listening Forest.
Arkansas Text Stream Flowing from just beyond view, a rush of letters projects onto a 70-yard-length pathway, slowly traveling downstream. Moving according to fluid dynamics in a non-repeating pattern, the letters’ journey is programmed to be as unpredictable as the motion of water. As you walk, your body creates ripples and jetties among the texts. If you slow or stop, phrases will pool around your feet, revealing wisdom from the past, reflections on the present, and hopes for the future—all sourced from regional community members.
This stream of texts is ever-expanding. If you would like to add your own thoughts to this work, please submit your contributions. submit your contributions
Voice Forest From a distance, a steady murmur of voices radiates from a stand of illuminated trees. As you come closer, it’s apparent that individual voices are coming from specific trees and are punctuated with lights that blink with the words being spoken. Three nearby intercoms invite you to add your own voice to the memory of the forest. Each new addition shifts the recordings from one tree to another, changing the overall hum of the woods.
This chorus of new voices is joined by an audio archive selected in conjunction with regional, community partners. They range from historic recordings to more recent soundbites.
If you would like to add your own voice to this work, please submit your contributions. submit your contributions.
Recorded Assembly Acting as an invitation to Listening Forest, the first work you see consists of three monitors. Across these screens, faces blur and combine into an ever-changing composite portrait. As you approach, your likeness is quickly mapped and mixed with a collection of 600,000 previous participants to create an abstract and constantly modulating landscape of humanity.
In its more utilitarian applications, facial recognition software like this is often used for surveillance, where it enlists biometric data to single out and police individuals. Here, Lozano-Hemmer employs the same technology to emphasize our shared humanity, creating a composite portrait of faces that revels in anonymity. The resulting imagery creates a poetic inversion of this software, one that emphasizes inclusion rather than division.
Pulse Forest 3,000 lightbulbs flicker in time to the literal hearts of the Ozarks. Temporarily displaying the heartbeats of the last 3,000 participants, Pulse Forest expresses the fleeting nature of life, where every heartbeat replaces the one before. Like a memento mori, the work is a gentle reminder of death’s inevitability, presented in a way that celebrates the beauty of presence and life.
Lozano-Hemmer took inspiration from a scene from the 1960 Mexican film, Macario. In a scene from this film, thousands of candles inside a cave each symbolize a single life. The artist combined that visual with the experience of hearing the dual heartbeats of his twins. Fittingly, the pulsing lights and gentle chorus of beats create a near-womblike environment in the forest.
Thermal Drift This work features a towering projection and glows with the most generous use of color in the exhibition. Using a thermal camera, the familiar color scheme—sometimes associated with surveillance footage—is now rendered as colorful particles. As you stand in front of the screen, these dots gradually drift outward, bouncing and swirling around as you disrupt their paths with your own movements.
Synched with an audio track, a dark screen glitches and shutters in time with the audio before opening up to a brilliant screen of color and particles. As the track reaches its close, the heat signatures become more ragged and erratic as the entire image returns to black, and the loop repeats in an endless cycle of renewal.
Remote Pulse Placed on opposite sides of the North Forest, two Remote Pulse stations connect strangers across the exhibition. A small terminal at either end has sensors for guests to place their hands. When both sides are activated, you’ll feel the pulse of the stranger on the other side under your own palms. Overhead, a set of pencil-lights pulse in time with the user’s heartbeat while crossing with the stranger’s pulsing beams above the forest.
An earlier version of this work, Border Tuner, connected participants across the US/Mexico border through heartbeats and the ability to speak to strangers. Constantly adapting to new settings, here Lozano-Hemmer removes the voice component and adds the lights, protecting anonymity as participants create their visible bridge of connection in the sky.
Embodied Light Beacons In this installation, three giant stick figures meet in a forest clearing. Composed of limbs made of light, each robot-like figure waits motionless until you step behind it and control its arms, legs, and head by moving your own appendages. At this scale, all actions are captured as exaggerated beams of light that illuminate the night sky or enfold a fellow giant in a well-lit embrace. This amplification of size, coupled with the coordinated droning swooshes and sound effects of moving “limbs,” encourages you to view your own body in a new way.
Summon A bridge spans a dry ravine scattered with an array of light batons. As you speak or sing, microphones on the bridge transmit those sounds downstream as white streaks of light cascading towards the valley’s vanishing point. After a few minutes of gathering sounds, the batons at the end of the ravine glow blue, a thick fog starts to form, and a cacophonous composite of the gathered sounds slowly creeps toward the bridge. Eventually, this wall of audio, blue light, and fog engulfs you completely. Once the moment passes, the setting becomes quiet in anticipation of a new round of sound offerings. If the forest is always listening, Summon expresses that idea in a tangible way by giving visitors back what they gave to it.
Scanner composed each of the tracks in direct collaboration with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to create an experience that is atmospheric, dynamic, and expertly tailored to enhance the <em>Listening Forest</em> experience. <a href=”https://scanner.bandcamp.com/album/listening-forest” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Download the soundtrack</a>.
Listening Forest by Scanner
Lozano-Hemmer is an award-winning media artist originally from Mexico City. He creates platforms for public participation using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and telematic networks. His work has been commissioned by events such as the Vancouver Olympics, collected by museums including MoMA, Hirshhorn, Tate, and SFMOMA, and exhibited in art biennials in Venice, Sydney, New Orleans, Shanghai, and Singapore, among others. Listening Forest will be the most significant display of his outdoor installations to date, providing a mid-career survey of his largest works.
Scanner traverses the experimental terrain between sound and space, connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations, and recordings. His albums Mass Observation (1994), Delivery (1997), and An Ascent (2020) have been hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music. To learn more about Scanner’s practice, visit his website.
Take a look at our Plan a Visit page for museum hours, directions, parking info, and more.
Plan your visit to Crystal Bridges
Get a closer look at what to expect in the final season of Listening Forest.
What to Expect at Listening Forest
The forest is waiting—are you ready? See available dates, choose your timeslot, and get tickets today.
We would like to thank the following community members for their important voice and text contributions to the artworks Arkansas Text Stream and Voice Forest:
Arkansas Soul Writers
Courtesy of Ozark Highlands Radio and the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage, and Tourism Speakers: Alaina Balke, Dylan Hawf, Bobby Glendy, Bonnie Montgomery, Caleb Ryan Martin, Charley Sandage, Cindy Woolf, Dane Joneshill, Jay Unger, Molly Mason, Dave Smith, JC Bonds, Jimbo Mathis, Joe David Rice, Joe Purdy, Marty Stuart, Mary Gillihan, Pam Setser, Patsy Montana, Richard Mason, Tom Simmons, Willi Carlisle
Noelia Cerna, Ozark Poets & Writers Collective
The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History and Arkansas Story Vault Speakers: Gerald Alley, E. Lynn Harris, Dorothy Gilliam, Edith Irby Jones, Randall Ferguson Sr., Ida Adcox, Janis Kearney, Dr. Sheldon Riklon, Melisa Laelan, George Takei, Al Witte, Margaret Moore Whillock, Beatrice Shelby, Juanita McClellan, Christopher Mercer, John Ware, Peggy Parks, Gordon Morgan, Donna Axum Whitworth, Jim Blair, Milton Crenchaw, Margaret Clark, George Haley, Dale Bumpers, JB Hunt, Betty Bumpers, Jocelyn Elders, Mike Beebe, Jerry Jones, Bob Lamb
Ra-Ve Cultural Foundation and Dhirana Academy of Classical Dance Speakers: Pearlyn, Shreya Ramani, Medhansh Sankaran, Aparna Asok, Srividya, Nandhini, Clemens, Paru Muni, Vinitha, Allan Paulose, Sudhir Katke, Chithra Sandeep
Sean Teutan
Visionairi Enterprises