The AARDT Foundation is a nonprofit operating out of a former industrial warehouse in Birmingham, Alabama. The foundation's collection spans works from the early Renaissance to the present day, exploring a variety of distinct forms of expression against its utilitarian backdrop. 

Crawford's painting, Emergence explores figuration and the contours of the female form. Her soft painting style both reveals and takes away as her figures drift into empty spaces on the canvas. Emergence is displayed alongside drawings by Willem de Kooning and Hans Hoffman, as well as Ita Maude Wooller's abstract painting, Woman. 

Emergence sits in the middle of a historical dialogue between Hofmann and de Kooning's early-to-mid century drawings of the human body, and Wooller's contemporary work of abstraction. Crawford's figure strikes a balance between that which is concrete and recognisable, and a dreamlike, abstract indeterminancy that arises from her use of negative space.      

Her monotype, Shadow also joins the collection and is displayed alongside Giovanni Battista Piazetta's Saint Teresa in Ecstasy.

Shadow, a reflection painted from behind, is juxtaposed by the classical composition of Piazetta's female saint who leans back in a quiet contemplative ecstasy. The two works share a minimalist close-crop composition, and muted colour relationship. There is a strong contrast in the whites and sepias in both the draped clothing and the nude figure.

Crawford's positioning alongside Piazetta establishes her work in the art historical canon and the development of figurative painting from the 18th century to the modern day.

Read more about the AARDT Foundation here.