During the upcoming Venice Biennale, Crystal Bridges Museum will stage an exhibition dedicated to the art singer-songwriter Jewel at the Salone Verde, a venue that’s a short walk from the Fondazione Prada. The exhibition, running May 10 through November 22, will be organized by Crystal Bridges curator-at-large Joe Thompson.
The exhibition, titled “Matricylism: An Archeology of Connections Lost,” takes as its theme “feminine memory [and] the mythology of feminine power,” Jewel told ARTnews in a recent interview; the title is a portmanteau of the words “matriarchy” and “cataclysm.”
She continued, “It explores cataclysmic events to matriarchy. I define feminine energy as the urge to connect and nurture, which everybody exhibits. If we disconnect from feminine energy, we lose the ability to connect deeply to ourselves in a meaningful way. We lose the ability to really nurture ourselves in a healthy way. We lose community because we lose the ability to connect to one another and nurture one another. I see it as a great illness in society that we’ve wanted to just disassociate from the feminine principles so thoroughly and divorce ourselves of it.”
“Matricylism” will feature paintings, a tapestry, and sculptures that carry a sonic component. The paintings that will be on view come from a body of work titled “Ceremony,” which Jewel described as being “about matriarchs and women in menopause,” noting that humans are one of few species that experience menopause. The portraits in the series, which have a surrealist inflection, imagine what Jewel’s “matrilineal lineage looks like backward and forwards through time.”
“Scientists think that menopause evolved biologically so that women would come offline reproductively, so that they could focus on teaching,” she said. “The series explores women as teachers, as well as feminine memory and feminine erasure.”
Jewel, Nepo Baby, from the series “Ceremony.”
Courtesy the artist and Crystal Bridges
Three large-scale sculptures will also feature in the exhibition that “represent undiluted feminine power” and carry the titles First Mother, Seven Sisters, and Heart of the Ocean. First Mother, made in collaboration with sculptor Patrick Bongoy, will resemble a pregnant kneeling woman and will be displayed outdoors. Seven Sisters takes its name from the Pleiades cluster, named for the sister-nymphs in Greek mythology. Heart of the Ocean, which measures eight feet tall, “represents the ocean being the womb, the wellspring of all living souls on earth,” Jewel said.
Jewel’s interest in this idea of the ocean as womb comes from her childhood in Alaska, growing up surrounded by big nature. “Even though I had a really difficult home life, because I had nature, I had such a visceral feeling of being supported, loved, and cared for,” she said. “I wanted to see if I could create a work that gave you that feeling that nature was reaching for you—a mother that is always reaching, even though we’re not always kind in return.”
Inside Heart of the Ocean is a computer to which has been input a livestream of open source oceanic data from the Atlantic Ocean—measuring wave height, precipitation, salinity, for example—compiled with the help of scientists at NASA, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. That data feeds into 60,000 points of programmable light that activate the sculpture. At one point, the sculpture will turn red for five seconds, based on the compression of 150 years of ocean warming data.
“I’ve always had a real fascination with science; I think if I wasn’t a musician, I probably would have gone into the scientific field. When I was homeless, like I would read quantum physics and super string theory, and it just made me feel like anything is possible,” Jewel said. “I wanted to see, if I was really loyal to the mathematics of nature, could I give you a big nature experience on your nervous system while indoors?”
Accompanying Heart of the Ocean is a soundscape that responds to a sound vocabulary created by Jewel. “Depending on what the ocean is doing, it can play that vocabulary in different ways—it’s this very other worldly sonification of data,” she said.
The challenge with this was that this sonification produces something that is in fact atonal; the height of an ocean wave, for example, may resemble a wave but as the wave goes higher, the note goes lower.
“You get more than one piece of data like that, and it starts sounding like a fax machine,” she said. “The trick with Heart of the Ocean was figuring out how to be very loyal to the data but create a piece that was harmonic. Some of the ways that I used sound in sonifying data was to have it trigger a key change.”
Jewel creating an orb for the Seven Sisters sculpture at the glass-blowing studio at the Toledo Museum of Art.
Photo Ben Morales
The Seven Sisters sculpture is also accompanied by a soundscape of seven women singing; that data draws from open-source data from the Pleiades constellation. “Each orb of light has its own voice, so this chorus of seven women singing will fill the space,” she said. A third soundscape will feature a heartbeat and the sound of the breath in another room.
The tapestry on view will measure eight feet tall and is of a woman in a green business suit who is engulfed in flames. “It kind of defies one meaning, but I felt it was important to include tapestry because it’s been traditionally thought of as woman’s work,” she said.
Crystal Bridges executive director Rod Bigelow said in a statement, “At Crystal Bridges, we are committed to lifting artists’ voices and creating spaces where curiosity and exploration can flourish. ‘Matricylism’ invites audiences to engage with urgent themes and discover new perspectives, sparking the kind of dialogue that deepens our connection to art and to one another.”
Jewel in the studio.
Courtesy the artist
Jewel studied drawing and sculpture, working in marble and clay, when she attended Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan for operatic singing. “Then, my music career took off amazingly, and so I didn’t do as much sculpture,” she said. “I was able to keep drawing throughout my career, but I just did it privately.” More recently, she began painting.
In 2024, Crystal Bridges organized the exhibition “The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel,” billed as the artist’s “inaugural museum venture.” That exhibition featured painting and sculpture, as well as a drone show that was set to a choreography and original score by Jewel.
The earlier exhibition, Jewel said, was about “bringing together visual art and music and behavioral health and seeing if I could positively impact people’s nervous systems by how I paced the show in the museum.” That response in viewers, in which their brain waves are subtly altered, is what she terms “neuro-ceutical.”
“I decided to take that further with this show,” she said. The Heart of the Ocean sculpture, she said, can get visitors to a Theta brainwave state, which is often considered a state of deep relaxation while still awake, in 20 seconds.
That’s part of why Jewel wanted to bring this exhibition to the Venice Biennale. “The Biennale is amazing but very busy and hectic, and tiring and depleting,” she said. “I built this show to be a restorative counterpoint, where you can come into the cool, into the dark, and into a really reflective moment that hopefully will leave you feeling nurtured and replenished when you leave.”
