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Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

By Brent Hoffmann, 2005 & Susan Robertson, 2009
Photographs by the authors

Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, scoured the U.S. for the best of America’s traditional, modern, and contemporary art.  To show it, she funded a museum in the little town where her father got his start in mega-retailing: Bentonville, Arkansas. Said Miss Alice, “To me, people everywhere need access to art and that’s what we didn’t have here and that’s why Crystal Bridges is so important.  It’s important to be located here.”  And to house it, she chose architect Moshe Safdie, who created a stunning array of buildings amid lush landscaping in the Ozarks.  The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in November, 2011.

We visited the free museum in late spring, 2023.  A direct flight from O’Hare took us to Bentonville, where we checked into the 21C, a contemporary art museum hotel — a short walk from Crystal Bridges.  Here’s what we saw:

The museum consists of seven concrete, glass, and wood pavilions nestled around two ponds.  They house galleries, meeting and classroom spaces, a large gathering hall, and a gift shop.  A planned expansion by 2024 will increase the museum’s size by 50 percent.  (Note the crane in the photo.)

Hungry?  The pond-straddling Eleven Restaurant features a wood-beamed, dramatically curved ceiling.  A Jeff Koons’ sculpture dangles over the diners.  It’s a gold-colored, ton-and-a-half metallic heart. 

The art galleries are arranged chronologically. The first gallery features colonial portraits, including one by John Singleton Copley from 1765,  “Mrs. Theodore Atkinson Jr.”  The artist depicts this lady as a wealthy, refined Bostonian.  

A gallery of early 20^th century art features a bronze sculpture from 1928 of a dancer by Harriet Whitney Frishmuth.  It’s titled “The Bubble,” and a frosted glass globe is gracefully balanced in the dancer’s hands.  Behind it are four tempera and gold-leaf murals -– “In Exaltation of Flowers” – painted by Edward Steichen in 1910-1913. 

The modern art gallery houses “Trinity,” an oil painting from 1962 by Adolph Gottlieb.  It’s displayed along the gallery’s curving wall; note the sloping wood-beamed ceiling.  

A local favorite is “Tobacco Sorters” – a 1944 tempera by Thomas Hart Benton.  Bentonville is named for Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the artist’s uncle.  

Next to the museum is the Bachman-Wilson House, a prime example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian architecture.  Built in New Jersey in 1956, it was acquired in 2013 — then disassembled, shipped, and reassembled adjacent to the Crystal Bridges Museum.  A ticket is required to tour the interior. 

Crystal Bridges is surrounded by 120 acres of forest where visitors can stroll on five miles of trails with strategically sited modern sculpture.  One trail passes by a pond covered with 1800 mirrored stainless-steel spheres.  The work, titled “Narcissus Garden” was created by Yayoi Kusama in 1966.   

On another trail, a tourist clutches the leg of Louise Bourgeois’s “Maman” (1999).  The monumental spider sculpture cradles 20 marble eggs in a wire-mesh sac on her abdomen.  Bourgeois’s bronze arachnids command prices upwards of $30 million at auctions.

Local architect E. Fay Jones developed his own “Ozark Style,” and we visited two of the most important examples: Thorncrown Chapel (1980) in Eureka Springs, Ark., and Cooper Chapel (1988) in Bella Vista.  Both airy glass-walled buildings are inspired by Gothic architecture.  Thorncrown has angular wood cross-bracing; the Cooper has pointed steel arches and a circular rose window.  Thorncrown Chapel, voted by the American Institute of Architects as the fourth-best building of the 20^th century, was listed on the National Historic Register in 2000.  Jones studied architecture at the University of Arkansas, completed a Taliesin Fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright and, eventually, became dean of the University of Arkansas School of Architecture.

We dropped in at a small, temporary exhibit in downtown Bentonville: the Walmart Museum.  In addition to perusing the history of Sam Walton, who passed away in 1992, visitors can learn his “10 rules for building a business” – and then ask questions of a hologram of the founder.

Visitors can enjoy Crystal Bridges, its surrounding forest trails, the Bachman-Wilson house, Thorncrown and Cooper chapels, and the Walmart museum – all in four days

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