Crystal Bridges Museum Acquires Record-Setting Work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Bentonville, Arkansas’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art announced today that it has acquired Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (L.A.), 1991, which sold last week at Christie’s postwar and contemporary evening sale for $7,669,000, a record for the late artist.

The piece involves an ideal weight of 50 pounds’ worth of small green pieces of cellophane-wrapped candy spread across the floor of a gallery, available for visitors to touch and eat. (They are continuously restocked.) “Untitled” (L.A.) will go on view at the museum in the next couple of months.

“Like many of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, [the work’s] open-endedness incorporates the viewer’s interaction, both physical and conceptual, to make meaning,” Chad Alligood, a curator at the museum said in a statement. “In its spirit of generosity, this acquisition particularly dovetails with Crystal Bridges’ mission to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit. And, because “Untitled” (L.A.) is a major work by one of the most important and influential Latino artists of the 20th century, it helps us tell an expanded story of American art.”