Making Art About How Walmart Is Funding the Art Department

Of Art And Nature: A model shows i of the iii ponds that will surroundings Crystal Bridges. The museum got its proper noun from the 2 galleries that volition actually serve as bridges over the ponds. Architect Moshe Safdie says his design is meant to assist blend the experience of the museum'due south art with that of its natural surroundings. Aker Imaging hide caption

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Aker Imaging

The American art world's biggest event in decades is happening this week — but it's not where yous'd expect it to be.

Bentonville, Ark., is dwelling to Wal-Mart headquarters and, starting Nov. xi, it will also exist home to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and what some critics are calling one of the earth'southward best collections of American art.

Crystal Bridges is the brainchild of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton. While it'due south non as vast as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Fine art or the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the museum is set to showcase an impressive drove of American art, including well-known pieces by Alexander Calder and Devorah Sperber.

Bringing The Art Earth To Bentonville

Crystal Bridges is often referred to as "the Wal-Mart museum," but the corporation has footling to do with the art. If y'all become looking for an actual Wal-Mart museum in Bentonville, the closest you'll go is the Wal-Mart Visitor Center's Wal-Mart gallery.

Inside Crystal Bridges, galleries will characteristic colonial, 19-century, modern and contemporary artworks including Alexander Calder's sculpture Trois noirs sur un rouge (center). Danny Johnston/AP hibernate caption

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Danny Johnston/AP

Inside Crystal Bridges, galleries volition feature colonial, 19-century, mod and contemporary artworks including Alexander Calder's sculpture Trois noirs sur un rouge (heart).

Danny Johnston/AP

The company's headquarters employs more than than xi,000 in Bentonville, simply it isn't exactly a thriving metropolis. Information technology has a minor town square, and the rest is pretty much strip malls.

Monica Divis and her mother, Rita Divis, sit down outside a eating house on the square. Monica, who has worked for Wal-Mart for 22 years, says people from all over the world visit Bentonville — and even move to the city — to do business with Wal-Mart.

"If you sit out hither long enough, you're going to hear several languages spoken," she says. "We were just in the visitor'due south eye, and there was a lady from People's republic of china buying things to accept dorsum because we have a Wal-Mart in China. At that place'due south Wal-Mart in Japan. So it is condign an international destination."

Withal, co-ordinate to Rita Divis, fine art is something Bentonville could employ more than of.

"In this part of the world," she says, "we need that desperately."

Walton has said she wants Crystal Bridges to tell the story of America through fine art, so visiting the museum is like taking a tour not just of slap-up art simply of American history and culture. There are portraits of George Washington and 19th-century works by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent. In that location's an middle-popping abstract piece from African-American artist Romare Bearden, and an Andy Warhol homage to country music star Dolly Parton.

According to museum director Don Bacigalupi, Crystal Bridges will also have interactive classrooms, ane of which will be used to aid kids bring out their inner creative person.

"It's a kind of drib-in place for children and families to try their mitt at things," Bacigalupi says. "So if they get excited by watercolor, they can go and take a watercolor form side by side-door."

A model shows a view of the Crystal Bridges pavilion some museum staff refer to as "the armadillo" because of how its curved, copper bands resemble the fauna's vanquish. John Horner/Crystal Bridges Museum of Art hide explanation

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John Horner/Crystal Bridges Museum of Art

A model shows a view of the Crystal Bridges pavilion some museum staff refer to as "the armadillo" because of how its curved, copper bands resemble the animal'south trounce.

John Horner/Crystal Bridges Museum of Fine art

Harnessing Fine art And Nature

From the outside, the museum building itself is a work of art. With its curved, copper roof, it looks like an enormous beast nestled in the woods of Bentonville.

Moshe Safdie — the architect responsible for Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Heart and the Kaufman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Mo. — designed Crystal Bridges. He says his goal is to create a dynamic environment for visitors to explore the heritage of America.

"It's a rugged mural," Safdie says. "We're harnessing nature, and the idea is to experience fine art with nature together."

Located in Arkansas' Ozark Mount region, the museum grounds accept 3 1/2 miles of walking and biking trails. The promise is that the presence of nature volition lure people who might non otherwise be interested in fine art.

"I call up the museum is richly accessible to audition members [and] potential audience members," says museum director Bacigalupi.

Separating The Museum From The Company

Between the collection, the building and the trails, Crystal Bridges was a massive undertaking. The project has been bankrolled by, among others, the Walton Family unit Foundation, which gave $1.2 billion for an endowment, and the Wal-Mart Foundation, which gave $xx million so that admission to the museum could be costless.

But non everyone who works at Wal-Mart is excited about the project.

Jerome Allen works at a Wal-Mart in Fort Worth, Texas. The day before the museum's media preview, he and about 150 other Wal-Mart employees from around the country came to Bentonville hoping to schedule a coming together with Wal-Mart CEO Mike Knuckles. He says he hadn't heard virtually the new museum, merely since he didn't get the meeting he wanted, he'll be back.

"We're non getting the respect nosotros deserve as employees," Allen says. "When I return — and we will render — I might end in the art museum."

A visit to the museum is out of the question for Ernest David, who works at a Wal-Mart-owned Sam'due south Club in St. Louis, Mo.

"I have no interest in a museum because it might be full of lies," David says.

While it isn't articulate yet how distrust of Wal-Mart might rub off on Crystal Bridges, Bacigalupi insists at that place'southward no connexion between the 2.

"I don't experience aligned with the corporation at all," he says.

According to Bacigalupi, nobody at Wal-Mart is involved with Crystal Span's daily operations — Alice Walton invested her own coin into building the museum. Of course, her fortune is built on Wal-Mart stock.

"Fifty-fifty if it's not called [the] Wal-Mart Museum, it is Wal-Mart's money," says Lorraine Millot, a author for the French newspaper Liberation who visited the museum for the media preview.

Millot praises the museum for its beauty. She says Crystal Bridges represents something very unlike from what Wal-Mart stands for.

Alice Walton is the daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. This year, Forbes magazine named her the tenth richest person in America. April Brown/AP hide explanation

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April Chocolate-brown/AP

"Information technology'due south a place of pure beauty. It'due south just the opposite of what Wal-Mart's doing," Millot says. "The focus of the museum is American fine art, whereas Wal-Mart stores focus on inexpensive imports from China."

The Politics Of Philanthropy

There'due south no denying the contributions wealthy fine art patrons accept fabricated to America'south cultural institutions. Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie used his fortune to establish Carnegie-Mellon University in 1904. Industrialist Henry Clay Frick opened his New York dwelling and fine art collection to the public when he died in 1919. That aforementioned year, man of affairs Henry Huntington turned his ranch, library and art collection into a nonprofit educational trust known today as The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

Before becoming Crystal Bridges' curator of American art, Kevin White potato was a curator at The Huntington. He says people don't boycott museums just because the companies that funded them might have had unfair practices in the past.

"Practise people not go to The Huntington because Henry Huntington was a railroad baron, was discriminatory in his practices and treated workers unfairly?" he asks. "I don't call back people don't go."

Perchance non, but to get to Crystal Bridges, people will still have to get to Bentonville, and many volition demand more than than a museum to describe them in that location. There'due south hiking in the Ozarks, or a side trip to the sometime 19th-century resort boondocks of Eureka Springs, Ark.

And, if visitors aren't opposed to it, there'due south always the existent Wal-Mart gallery.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/11/08/142019716/wal-mart-heiress-brings-art-museum-to-the-ozarks

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