Located on the square in downtown Bentonville, Pressroom is a popular destination no matter the meal. A rotating suite of works from the Oz Art NWA Collection regularly adorn the walls, providing visitors the opportunity for everyday art encounters. Open Thursday through Monday, Pressroom is the perfect spot to meet friends for lunch, have brunch with the family, or enjoy a date night. Serving modern comfort food featuring local ingredients, craft beer and cocktails, and more, this local favorite offers something for everyone to enjoy.

Adrian Esparza
Cargo Flower, 2019
Sarape, wood, nails, and enamel 84 x 82 in

El Paso based artist, Adrian Esparza, explores material culture by “re-instilling lost value in found objects.” Esparza first drew international appreciation through his deconstruction of the Mexican serape. Drawing inspiration from modern architecture, physical landscapes, and mid-century minimalist artists, Esparza depicts dramatic one and two-point perspectives to form striking dimensionality and volume. The artist diffuses color and expands space by weaving sarape thread around nails to form a grid. Geometric structures present in his drawings and sculptures re-imagine his own Mexican-American cultural heritage. [Source]

Cargo Flower, a construction of enameled wood and thread, is made of un-woven sarapes. Re-composing this colorful thread, Esparza retains the complex associations of the blanket’s origins while “re-instilling lost value in found objects,” in his words. The work’s title refers to the transportation of objects and people from Latin America to the United States.

These two images come from a series of collages by the artist Margarita Cabrera, who is based in El Paso, Texas, at the US-Mexico border. In these works, Cabrera collaged fabric from Border Patrol uniforms in the shapes of various cacti. Cabrera affixes the plant shapes onto the surface of butterfly-patterned prints. In Cabrera’s work, the recurring image of the butterfly represents the plight of the Latin American immigrant: like butterflies, they travel hundreds or thousands of miles in search of their future happiness. For some immigrants, a landscape is not merely something to be painted, framed on a wall, and admired; the landscape represents the very real challenges and harsh elements they must overcome to achieve their goals.

Margarita Cabrera
Time Does Not Forgive – New Landscape 2, 2019
Relief print with border patrol uniform fabric and watercolor
41 x 33 in.

Margarita Cabrera
Time Does Not Forgive – New Landscape 3, 2019
Relief print with order patrol uniform fabric and watercolor
41 x 33 in.

In her work, Monica Tap uses landscape to consider questions of time and history, technology, and memory. Her paintings are arrangements assembled from various fragments: outtakes from painting’s history, elements from her own snapshots, color notes, memory. Each painting is both an invention and a response to place that she knows and has recorded. She is interested in how location or landscape can trigger memory; akin to how painting readily conjures its own past. This history reveals how aesthetics, among other factors, have operated to tame nature into landscape, and the artifice and assumptions underlying this error.

Over the past fifteen years her canvases have been exhibited in Canada; London, England, and New York. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her project, Translation as a Strategy of Renewal in Painting. Tap’s work is represented in private, corporate, and public collections in Canada and the U.S. Originally from Alberta, Monica Tap completed her BFA and MFA degrees at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She lives in Toronto and is a Professor at the University of Guelph. [Source]

Monica Tap
Amnesia Garden: The Stars Are Out, 2018 Oil on canvas
51 x 51 in.

Monica Tap
Charles’ Tree, 2018 Oil on canvas
46 x 41 in.

Jay Lynn Gomez was born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents who have since become US citizens. She briefly attended the California Institute for the Arts before leaving to take work as a live-in nanny with a West Hollywood family, an experience that did much to inform her subsequent artistic practice. Gomez’s work is known for addressing issues of immigration and making visible the “invisible” labor forces that keep the pools, homes, and gardens of Los Angeles in such pristine condition. [Source]

In incisive, understated paintings, cutouts, and works on paper, Jay Lynn Gomez draws attention to the domestic workers and other laborers who support the rich—and rarely get the attention they deserve. Gomez draws on her own experiences as a live-in nanny for a Hollywood family as she highlights the complex interpersonal and class dynamics that keep opulent, bourgeois households afloat. In her “Magazine” series, Gomez painted maintenance workers into torn-out luxury lifestyle magazine ads. In No Splash (after David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, 1967) (2013), she recontextualized the famous David Hockney painting to highlight the workers who make such pristine poolscapes possible. Gomez has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Madrid, Miami, and Chicago. Her work belongs in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, the Museum of Latin American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego. [Source]

Jay Lynn Gomez
Back of House (line cooks at a Hollywood restaurant), 2018
Acrylic on canvas
12 x 12 in., 20 x 20 in., 20 x 20 in.

Watch our Instagram reel HERE!