Crystal Bridges Museum opens in Arkansas
After more than six years of planning and tens of millions in stealthy and sometimes controversial art acquisitions, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton is unveiling the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., on Friday.
The museum, which already has received wide attention for the family fortune behind it, features a building by star architect Moshe Safdie and is neighbored by forest, ponds, walking trails and the Ozark mountains. The collection of roughly 900 pieces (about half of which are on display) includes works by Thomas Moran, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Thomas Hart Benton, John Singer Sargent, Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jenny Holzer and Walton Ford.
Admission to the permanent collection is free (“sponsored by Wal-Mart”), though special exhibitions in the future could carry an entry fee.
If the museum’s backers have their way, Crystal Bridges will put its corner of northern Arkansas on the map for tourists. But the location is a challenge. Bentonville, home to Wal-Mart’s headquarters, has about 35,000 residents and about 2,100 hotel rooms. It is served by Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA) and gets service from many major cities, including New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Houston but not Los Angeles. Bentonville is about 125 miles east of Tulsa, Okla.; 210 miles south of Kansas City, Mo.; and 220 miles north of Little Rock, Ark.
Museum officials are forecasting about 250,000 visitors in the first year, said spokeswoman Alice Murphy.
The museum’s high-profile acquisitions include the 2005 million purchase of Asher Brown Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” from the New York Public Library for about $35 million, a move that drew complaints from New Yorkers angry that the library gave up a painting familiar to longtime patrons.
Alice Walton’s husband, Wal-Mart founder, Sam Walton, died in 1992. In May, the museum announced a