A6 Tuesday, October 4, 2011
The Iola Register
www.iolaregister.com
From the home of Wal-Mart, a world-class museum
BENTONVILLE,
Ark.
— On Interstate 540 near
Bentonville, a billboard
shows what appears to be a
wild circus costume, or an
outlandish party dress for
someone who stands about
eight feet tall. It is a Soundsuit, a work by the contemporary African American
artist Nick Cave, famous for
his distinctive fabric sculptures covered in strange
geegaws and decorative exotica.
It is also an advertisement for Crystal Bridges
Museum
of
American
Art, the most-talked-about
new museum in the United States in a generation.
Opening Nov. 11 in the
corporate home town of
Wal-Mart and a bedrock of
Middle America, the museum has ruffled feathers,
challenged stereotypes and
raised expectations as this
country’s newest major cultural institution. That it is
announcing its debut to a
presumably conservative
local audience not with a
classic Western landscape,
or a meticulous portrait of
a Founding Father, but with
a work of contemporary
sculpture, is a sign of its
larger cultural ambition.
“Going against type is a
big part of it,” says Crystal
Bridges Executive Director
Don Bacigalupi, who has
been helping the fledgling
museum beef up its con-
“ It is unprecedented what she is doing.
— Julian Zugazagoitia, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Mo., of Alice Walton’s museum
“
By PHILIP KENNICOTT
The Washington Post
temporary art collection.
As the museum prepares
for a deluge of foreign and
national media coverage,
it’s easy to anticipate the
ready-made story line: The
oddity of a world-class art
museum rising in Arkansas, with reflexive condescension about its focus on
American art and its origins in the Wal-Mart corporate fortune.
But as workers put the
finishing touches on the
new building and curators
oversaw the installation of
art collected over decades
by founder Alice L. Walton,
a visit to the museum made
it clear that Crystal Bridges
intends to be taken seriously well beyond northwest
Arkansas. It has not only
gathered a synoptic view of
American art, it will feature
contemporary galleries and
an extensive library, and its
leaders profess no squeamishness about embracing
all aspects of the canon,
including the experimental
and the controversial.
Endowed by the Walton
Family Foundation with
$800 million, Crystal Bridges instantly joins the ranks
of the richest museums
in this country, and it has
been using its extraordinary resources to assemble
a collection of American
art that may rival in quality, if not quantity, anything available to museum
visitors in New York, Washington, Los Angeles or Chicago. It has aggressively
pursued some of the most
prized and iconic pieces of
American art to come on
the market in the past five
years, leading some observers to detect an impact on
prices that they call the
“Walton effect.”
The museum, designed
by blue-chip institutional
architect Moshe Safdie and
nestled in a thickly forested
basin near the main square
of Bentonville, is Walton’s
legacy project. Walton,
61, is the daughter of WalMart founder Sam Walton,
who died in 1992. She is
also “media shy,” a major
contributor to Republican political candidates, a
horse lover and, in the rare
interviews she has given
over the years, unabashedly patriotic and sentimentally devoted to the rolling
Arkansas landscape she
grew up in. Married and
Register/Terry Broyles
Humboldt High’s royal court
Humboldt High School Homecoming candidates are, from left to right, Austin
Coy, son of Tonya Coy Hurst; Michaela Bartlett, daughter of Richard and Yolanda
Bartlett; Keifer Rutledge, son of Jon and Kelly Rutledge; Hannah McCall, daughter
of Travis and Mindy McCall; Michael Zimmerman, son of Dewayne and Lori Zimmerman; Kindahl Young, daughter of Anthony Young and Frank and Sheila Coronado;
Jeremy Setter, son of Mike and Pam Setter; Taylyn Wells, daughter of David and
Soni Wells. The 2011 King and Queen will be crowned during half time ceremonies
of Friday night’s game.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Architect Moshe Safdie designed the new Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville,
Ark., which will be free to the public thanks to $20 million from Wal-Mart.
divorced once, she lives on
an immense ranch in Texas
and has been known to bid
on art by cellphone while
riding one of her beloved
horses.
WHILE MILLIONAIRES
and billionaires before her
have created museums,
Walton’s Crystal Bridges
— with its mix of contemporary and classic art,
and its origins in the frugal, self-made ethos of the
Wal-Mart empire — feels
decidedly different from
the museums of the Gilded
Age, or the boomtown art
collections of mid-century
Texas. There is no anxiety
about the status of American art, no looking to Europe for validation. There’s
no embarrassment about
the immense fortune that
made the museum possible,
no old-fashioned cultural
money-laundering in the
manner of Carnegie or
Mellon. Nor is there any
worry about whether the
art is too conservative or
too edgy. It is a mature, serious, relatively progressive
museum launched at a time
when increasing numbers
of people consider themselves socially tolerant and
fiscally conservative. It is
a museum for people who
are as comfortable with art
as social experiment and
provocation, as they are
with untrammeled, winnertakes-all capitalism.
The museum’s wealth,
and its connection to the
Wal-Mart fortune, has also
led to a remarkable amount
of hostility in art world
circles, where there is an
assumption that it is too
rich, too conservative and
too reflexively American in
its focus to be a serious new
player. The leaders of Crystal Bridges acknowledge
the grumbling, mostly detectable in the blogosphere,
but also aired publicly as
it became clear that a 2005
Arkansas law specifically
designed to exempt the
museum from taxes could
cost taxpayers millions
of dollars of lost revenue.
They point out that Crystal
Bridges is hardly unprecedented, that virtually all of
this country’s museums began with a collection, and
a fortune, assembled by a
wealthy art-loving member
of the nouveax riches.
The museum, when it
opens, will be free to the
public (thanks to a $20 million gift from Wal-Mart),
with a vigorous public education program and a serious scholarly and curatorial agenda. Crystal Bridges
is doing everything right,
by the standards of contemporary museum practice.
And while it is a beneficia-
ry of Walton’s largess, it is
also an independent nonprofit and not a Wal-Mart
proxy.
“It is unprecedented
what she is doing,” says Julian Zugazagoitia, director
of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo., the
closest major art museum
to Bentonville. Zugazagoitia says his museum expects to benefit in a spike of
visitors as patrons drawn
to Crystal Bridges explore
regional options. “I hope
for a Bilbao effect” in Bentonville, he says, referring
to the Guggenheim outpost
that opened in Spain in
1997, transforming a littleknown Basque city into a
major cultural hub. He says
Crystal Bridges is already
a good neighbor, planning
collaborations with his museum.
Employee
of the Month
Brian Silcox
is the employee of the month for
October 2011.
Brian has been an
employee at Gates
Corporation since
2006. His hard
work, dedication
and ability to be a
team player is
what makes him a
valuable asset to
the company.
GATES
CORPORATION
A Tomkins Company
Iola, Kansas
Caring for Gene rations
Coffey County Hospital
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