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Friday, 10 October 2014 10:58

Crystal Bridges Tackles Contemporary Art

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 in Wal-Mart's hometown, Bentonville, Arkansas, with a respectable collection of work by famous artists from Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" to a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart.

But the museum has just opened a massive exhibition of contemporary art called "State of the Art" that could be a game-changer. The museum is sometimes mocked by critics from outside the region for its location and Wal-Mart connections — its permanent collection was funded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton — but the new show represents a serious effort to introduce contemporary art to a mainstream audience far from the rarefied galleries of hipster neighborhoods and urban centers.

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Founded by Wal-Mart heiress, Alice Walton, in 2005, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas was the target of an email hoax that went public on Wednesday. The email stated that the museum would be closed on Black Friday to stand in solidarity with the Wal-Mart workers who are planning demonstrations over the Thanksgiving weekend. The email used fake quotes by Walton including one that said, “We have decided to stand with the workers of Wal-Mart, the source of my family’s fortune, in their Black Friday strikes, walkouts and pickets.” A spokesperson for the museum said that all information stated in the email is false and that the museum will be open on Friday.

The demonstrations held on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, will allow Wal-Mart employees to voice their unhappiness with their powerhouse employer. Many claim that the retail giant enforces unfair labor practices and disregards workers’ requests for better pay, fair schedules, and affordable health care. It is widely known that Wal-Mart has been wary of a unionized workforce in the past.

The email hoax also stated that the Crystal Bridges Museum would host a temporary exhibition on labor in American art starting on Saturday, November 24. There is no such show expected to be on view at the museum.

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By just about any measure, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened last month in this small town in northwest Arkansas, is off to a running start. The dream-come-true of Alice Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, it is characterized by people both inside and outside the museum as a work in progress, with plenty of room for improvement. But there it stands, a big, serious, confident, new institution with more than 50,000 square feet of gallery space and a collection worth hundreds of millions of dollars in a region almost devoid of art museums.

Much more than just a demonstration of what money can buy or an attempt to burnish a rich family’s name, Crystal Bridges is poised to make a genuine cultural contribution, and possibly to become a place of pilgrimage for art lovers from around the world.

It came into being in record time: it was only in May 2005 that Ms. Walton announced the selection of the Israeli-born Boston architect Moshe Safdie to design the museum and ruffled feathers along the Eastern Seaboard by buying a landmark of Hudson River School landscape painting, “Kindred Spirits,” by Asher B. Durand, from the New York Public Library for around $35 million. The purchase came early in an extended shopping spree that rattled nerves, aroused skepticism and stimulated the art market.

Today Crystal Bridges has a spacious and comfortable, if rather coarsely detailed, home set into a beautiful ravine carved by the Crystal Spring, from whence comes the name. (The land was once part of the Walton family property in Bentonville, where Ms. Walton’s father, Sam Walton, opened his first five-and-dime in 1951.) And it has a collection, spanning colonial times to the present, substantial enough to merit the use of the word “masterworks” in the title of its opening exhibition. This display of more than 400 paintings, sculptures and works on paper includes efforts by revered artists like Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Cole and Thomas Eakins and is especially outstanding in its representation of early-20th-century Modernism, with wonderful clusters of paintings by Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis and two fabulous canvases by Arthur Dove.

The museum also has the beginning of a distinctive mission, which is to tie together American art and history and the immediate experience of nature in a compelling and accessible way, one that still keeps the art very much in the foreground.

This mission seems built into Mr. Safdie’s design, which consists of eight linked pavilions that border or span two large pools that are fed by the spring (and that unfortunately were empty and still being worked on when I visited this month). In a way that seems slightly confused, the arrangement evokes aspects of the Getty’s hilltop campus in Los Angeles, of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in western Pennsylvania and of a fancy theme park, minus the rides.

But there is an undeniable brilliance to this physical dispersal; you are never far from the outdoors, never cocooned by a maze of galleries. Moving through the building becomes something of a tour of its remarkable setting.

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Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville announced Thursday that it won't charge admission for patrons to see what's promised to be one of the best art collections in the nation.

The museum will replace that revenue with a $20 million grant from Bentonville-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which will provide the money over five years. The museum had planned to charge $10 per person.

The museum is funded by the fortune of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton and has been outbidding top museums for acquisitions that will go on display to the public on Nov. 11.

Wal-Mart President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Duke said the world's largest retailer made the donation so its workers and the rest of the community could regularly enjoy the museum.

Crystal Bridges Executive Director Don Bacigalupi said the gift enables the museum to "become a daily resource in our community."

"One of the greatest challenges for museums today is finding ways to remove barriers to community participation, including admission charges," Bacigalupi said.

The museum and grounds, designed by architect Moshe Safdie, are expected to attract visitors from around the world.

Arkansas Parks and Tourism Department Director Joe David Rice said the free admission will help generate tourism from state residents and the larger surrounding area. Bentonville is in the far northwest corner of Arkansas, and Rice said free admission will help draw repeat visits from people on day trips from Tulsa, Okla., Springfield, Mo., southeast Kansas and other communities.

"We're trying to figure out exactly how big this is going to be up there," Rice said.

The Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock turned the city's formerly desolate downtown into a thriving area with new hotels and office buildings, loft apartments, galleries, nightclubs and museums.

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