Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art doubled in size this summer when it opened an expansion, by Safdie Architects, that continues the spirit of the museum’s transformation of its woodland setting. (photo by Steve Paul)
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — In the vast and newly reinstalled collection of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, it’s instructive and enlightening to be greeted right away in a gallery walk-through with two major pieces that help define its mission.
On your left as you enter the first of two Visions of America galleries is Our Town, a 12-foot-wide canvas by Kerry James Marshall. The painting, depicting a scene of young Black joy amid a subtle aura of social anxiety, is something like a founding acquisition for the museum, acquired as Crystal Bridges and its benefactor, Alice L. Walton, built its collection before opening in 2011.
On the wall behind your right shoulder is a brand-new museum commission, a 9-foot-wide mixed-media triptych by Teri Greeves titled Gkou stah gyah, gyah sta’ah gyah. The work depicts three Native American female figures, each created with a dizzying array of beadwork, fabric, bone and other materials, collectively reflecting Greeves’ Kiowa heritage.
The two works together struck me as an exemplary announcement of inclusion and as a message that the museum has embraced a vibrant new age in art far beyond the old “golden-age” hits. A few rooms later, for example, I encountered the uber-historic Asher Durand painting, Kindred Spirits. This is the 19th-century icon of artistic idealism and Manifest Destiny that Alice Walton famously wrenched out of the New York Public Library for upwards of $35 million while establishing her collection and planning the museum two decades ago. I’d seen it in 2011 when the museum opened, but now, even in the year of the nation’s semiquincentennial, the Hudson River classic seemed quaint and somewhat less majestic in the larger scheme of the collection.
When Crystal Bridges opened in a wooded valley owned by the Walton family just north of downtown Bentonville, it made an indelible statement on behalf of cultural enrichment. The Northwest Arkansas town, also home, not coincidentally, to the globally connected mega-merchant Walmart, has undergone an unceasing transformation from sleepy nowhere with a Confederate monument in its central square, to a lively magnet with chef-driven restaurants, an enviable network of biking and hiking trails, and a hipsterish vibe interwoven with old-fashioned tourist come-ons.
The museum’s appreciation for the long history of American art, including an ever-expanding core of Indigenous legacies and the topical and technical challenges of up-to-the-minute works (hello, again, to the AI frontiersman Refik Anadol), has continued to ignite enormous interest.
At the beginning, Alice Walton commissioned the suave Boston architect Moshe Safdie to create something special on her family’s patch of the Arkansas woodlands. That he did, with a gently rolling grouping of concrete, wood, and glass-lined structures straddling a re-engineered stream and spring-fed ponds, hence the name Crystal Bridges.
The museum’s great popular success, including its focus on education outreach to schools throughout the region, made an expansion seem inevitable. And Walton’s fondness for what Safdie wrought also made it seem inevitable that he, and not another architect, would add to the original scheme rather than complement and/or complicate it with a different vision.
So, as of this summer’s reopening, the array of three additional, seamlessly connected structures completes what the architectural firm describes as a figure-eight pattern in the landscape. While one new two-story volume is essentially orthogonal and topped by a series of skylighting scoops, the other two new pieces extend the interplay of curved and ribbed copper-clad roofs above massive wavy wooden beams with great expanses of glass and structural concrete. Visually the banded roofs can strike one’s eyes as having organic origins — perhaps reminiscent of the squat body of a beetle or a low-lying armadillo’s carapace. (This latter hallucination was possibly set off by frequent road-kill sightings while traveling the Missouri and Arkansas highways toward Bentonville.)
Judging from the opening weekend crowds, the museum and its 114,000-square-foot expansion (essentially doubling the size) seem capable of comfortably handling a steady influx of art-gazers. A complex of well-appointed education studios was abuzz with young and old visitors alike making ceramic objects, sketching, screen-printing and experiencing other aspects of hands-on art-making. A second dining area, Quartz + Honey, juts out from the new, northernmost bridge gallery at the opposite end of the complex from the long-established, vaulted-ceilinged Eleven restaurant and café.
While the museum and the Walton family espouse natural connections between art, community and general well-being (see also recent major investments in healthcare), the urge to collect continues apace.
A checklist of acquisitions from 2024 onward itemizes nearly 150 works of art and craft (newly re-emphasized). On the list are some perhaps not-so-surprising old-school names as Mary Cassatt, Grandma Moses, Charles Russell, Guerrilla Girls and photographer Annie Leibovitz (a portrait of Taylor Swift, no less). But so are works by leading contemporary Black artists (Hank Willis Thomas, Ebony G. Patterson) and Native Americans, including the Teri Greeves as well as important pieces by Jeffrey Gibson, Kent Monkman, Nicholas Galanin and more. (The museum’s expanding Indigenous holdings include numerous works formerly held by Bruce Hartman of Kansas City, the founding director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College.)
KEITH HARING LIVES
Some four decades after his rise to prominence as a street-and-subway artist in New York, Keith Haring (1958-1990) seems to be having a newly delirious moment.
In 2023 came the revival, via a sprawling New York exhibit, of the Luna Luna amusement park project, which Haring and other artists helped create in Germany in 1987.
The Crystal Bridges reopening prompted a special exhibit in a new changing gallery of “Keith Haring in 3D,” a colorful and multi-layered show that reflects Haring’s art-for-all aesthetic. The exhibit, one of the first to explore the three-dimensional aspect of Haring’s all-too-brief but action-packed career, presents sculptures, painted objects (a motorcycle, a Buick, furniture parts, an electric guitar given to Sean Lennon), ceramic vessels, masks, stage-set designs via videos, and much more.
Having just seen the new, sprawling Marcel Duchamp exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I was prepped to appreciate Haring’s borrowing of his predecessor’s devotion to found objects and “readymade” art.
Haring’s signature draftsmanship and recurring figures — the baby, the howling wolf, the flying saucer — even in two dimensions, frequently present the illusion of motion beyond the static surface. Seeing him magnifying the motion and transforming the space around us with vivid strokes, neon gestures, satiric squiggles, social consciousness, physical presence and pop-slathered joy amounts to a restorative experience. Who couldn’t use more of that?
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 600 Museum Way, Bentonville, Ark., is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Closed Tuesday. Fall exhibitions include “Keith Haring in 3D” through Jan. 25, 2027, and “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” opening Sept. 12. For more information, crystalbridges.org.
