Beyond the Crystal Bridges

Nearing its eleventh birthday in November, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art—a repository of some of our country’s most valuable and important artworks—has become more than just an art museum for its home city of Bentonville, Arkansas. Founder Alice Walton wanted to bring art to an underserved region, specifically Northwest Arkansas and nearby counties in Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. Looking at the region’s growth over the past decade, particularly in the realms of art and culture, reveals the impact of that aspiration. 

It is well-known that the Walmart retail behemoth is headquartered in Bentonville, where it began as Sam Walton’s (Alice Walton’s father) dime store on the town square in 1950, rapidly expanding twelve years later with the first official Walmart in nearby Rogers. In addition to this corporate legacy, a short drive south of Bentonville finds the headquarters of Tyson Foods in Springdale and J.B. Hunt Transport Services in Lowell—which hold, respectively, the slots of first and fourth largest companies in their industries.    

So, in what was once rural Northwest Arkansas, we now have the butcher, the trucker and the retailer, all of multi-billion dollar proportions. Chances are, two or three of these entities are responsible for those chicken strips and sausage links in your shopping cart. Naturally, with that level of international business, plus The University of Arkansas flagship campus in Fayetteville just thirty miles south, the market pegged as Northwest Arkansas has grown significantly in population. In 2021, the U.S. Census documented Bentonville’s population as 56,734; in 2010 it was 35,301—a a sixty-one percent growth. 

The new population is a decidedly young one. As a point of reference, the youngest major city in the U.S. per the Money Talks News is Salt Lake City, which  the U.S. Census Bureau lists as having a median age of 32.5 years.  Bentonville is actually younger, with a median age of  thirty two. So, it isn’t surprising that a college buddy and fellow boomer visiting from Dallas last October reported that when he and his wife stepped into the trendy Onyx Coffee Lab off the Bentonville Square, the average age in the room increased immediately.  

Has it been the Crystal Bridges museum driving the demographics?  In a way, yes, but even Alice Walton herself, in an April 2022 interview with Martha Teichner of CBS, offered an appropriate Ozark highlands metaphor.  

“I don’t really look at it like Crystal Bridges is responsible for this,” she told Teichner, “but what I do look at is if you were sitting around a campfire and someone had to light it, you have to have the spark.”

In addition to the employment opportunities offered by Walmart,  its vendors, fellow corporate giants, and incubated start-ups in the region—that spark has ignited, on a grand scale, a rise in initiatives within Bentonville’s art, cuisine and mountain biking sectors. The climate and natural, scenic surroundings are also contributing factors to the region’s draw; it’s an environment unexpected by tourists who, prior to their first trip to Bentonville, had never been to Arkansas. Many such visitors, who came to Bentonville to see the art, noticed everything else and returned home to pack a U-Haul.   

More than six million people have visited Crystal Bridges since its opening in 2011; three quarters of a million are expected this year alone. Long past are the days when the key reason to travel to Bentonville was to sell wares to Walmart. Visitors who have no notion as to why Bentonville was called “Vendorville” last century, are now soaking up the accoutrements of a re-invented community. 

A City of the Arts

The Crystal Bridges collection, plus sequential special exhibits, are a moving target; repeat trips by distant visitors will not disappoint. There are now over  3,600  works in the Crystal Bridges collection, twice as many as a decade ago, and all still American. There are the expected standards from Gilbert Stuart and Norman Rockwell and so forth, as well as modern-day works by artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Dave Chihuly. Two extraordinary pieces added since 2011 are a house and a piano. The 1956 Frank Lloyd Wright Bachman-Wilson house was transported from its flood-prone New Jersey site, rebuilt immediately south of the museum complex, and opened to visitors in November 2015. A beautiful Steinway grand piano previously owned by famed pianist Van Cliburn was donated to the museum in 2016 by his surviving partner Thomas Smith. Concerts in the museum’s Great Hall routinely feature the instrument.  

The Fly’s Eye Dome was created by designer, inventor, and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller. A fifty-foot model Fuller commissioned in 1981 was acquired by Crystal Bridges in 2016 after a meticulous restoration.  Not shown in the U.S. since the Fuller commission, it is now on the museum’s Orchard Trail.

Special exhibits flow in and out. We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy, on view through January 2023, showcases extremely rare original copies of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Emancipation Proclamation. The museum’s first exhibition centered on fashion, Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour, will be on view from September 10–January 30, featuring work from more than ninety designers and iconic American labels and explores the nation’s diverse fashion heritage. 

With so much art, there’s no possible way for it all to be on display at once.  To rectify that, to a degree, ground has been broken north of the contemporary gallery bridge. The new exhibit space will add 100,000 square feet—roughly the size of a Walmart Supercenter.

On the other side of town from Crystal Bridges is The Momentary, a sister facility for visual, performing and culinary arts, holding fort in a former 63,000-square-foot cheese factory. It opened in February 2020 and after some pandemic-related delays, is now fully operational with a varied calendar challenging what many would associate with a typical art museum. 

Spaces inside the repurposed complex carry names from its previous life: Fermentation Hall, Culture Column and the Hyrdration Column. Programs, exhibitions and events include outdoor and indoor concerts, rotating contemporary art exhibits, “sound bath” experiences from a yoga practitioner, pottery and fabric dying classes, and performance art. Serial artists-in-residence represent a wide scope:  choreography, digital space design, multi-media and music.   

Around town there are over 130 outdoor arts installations, including murals, neon art, and free-standing metal sculptures. My favorites are Todd Sanders’ “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” —the neon six-shooting cowgirl hanging by an iron-barred window of the old Benton County Jail—and Jason Jones’ mural evoking a disaster movie—giant octopus tentacles lifting up Sam Walton’s iconic red and white Ford pickup. Overlooking a farm-to-table produce business is another work of Jones’s : a whimsical, giant robot gathering up bunnies presumably to protect vegetables below.

The Mountain Biking Capital of the World

All around Bentonville you’ll see multiple bike racks protruding out of the backs of cars, trucks, and SUVs. The equipment is as common as a ski rack in Aspen, but year-round instead. Tall, black, windowless Mercedes Sprinter and Ford Transit vans—acting as part campers, part mobile bike garages— are indicative of serious mountain bikers investing near six-figures in hobby transport.

Currently there are over four hundred miles of bicycling trails in Northwest Arkansas, funded jointly by public and private entities, bringing the region to the forefront of U.S. mountain biking locations, especially considering its urban context.  

The Walton grandsons Tom and Steuart, avid mountain bikers themselves, are responsible for the growth of the trail system that supports Bentonville’s current self-proclaimed status as “Mountain Biking Capital of the World.”  The Slaughter Pen trail system includes over forty miles of paths traveling along the Razorback Regional Greenway and through the Crystal Bridges property. There’s also the Coler Mountain Bike Preserve, which features seventeen miles of diverse trails one would suppose were deep in the Ozark Mountains but are actually just two miles west of downtown.  

Somewhat like scanners at Walmart checkouts, the Bentonville Park and Recreation Department monitors the trails using an infrared counting system, which tallies all users on multi-use trails, distinguishing between pedestrians and cyclists. According to Visit Bentonville President Kalene Griffith, this allows the city to see which trails are used more often. 

A hub of activity is Phat Tire Bike Shop, found in the former lobby of a historic hotel near the Bentonville Square. Opened in 2007, it was the first mountain biking store in town. Now there are ten in and near the city, not counting guide and shuttle services, bike schools, and personal training consultants. Phat Tire alone has expanded to thirteen stores in Northwest Arkansas and Oklahoma, garnering a reputation nationwide in cycling circles. 

Per Phat Tire manager Josh Travis, Bentonville trails provide the whole family experience. Uniquely designed, conceived, and constructed by specific mountain biking trail companies,  trails rise up from the ground with all the bells and whistles mountain bikers like engineered in trails easily accessed from town.  Those bells and whistles include bridges, pitchy climbs, bumpy descents and tricks on breakaway single tracks. One feature, The Masterpiece, on the Slaughter Pen Trail immediately west of Crystal Bridges consists of wavy metal and wood and appears part forest trail, part steam punk adventure. 

There are famous mountain biking trails in the Rockies like Moab, Utah or Crested Butte, Colorado, but “They’re in the middle of nowhere,” Travis said, “the bonus in Bentonville is that you still have enough elevation to challenge yourself in trails that are easy to get to.”

The Home of High South Cuisine 

In 2005, there were 125 restaurants of varied sorts in Bentonville. Now there are over three hundred, including food trucks.  

Food choices include the expected of the region, as in steaks and barbeque. Venerable Fred’s Hickory Inn, where Sam Walton lunched with his vice-presidents last century, performs that category perfectly. 

Beyond such Southern tradition is the Ozarks “High South” cuisine movement—the term being used to describe the distinct flavor of sustainable, farm-to-table cuisine in Northwest Arkansas. A few of such purveyors, all touting award-winning chefs, are The Hive in the 21c Museum Hotel, The Preacher’s Son in a former church, and Tusk and Trotter American Brasserie located in Sam Walton’s first rudimentary distribution warehouse.   

The Preacher’s Son executive chef Neal Gray’s rustically elegant menu ranges from specially-sourced seafood—P.E.I. mussels for example—to fresh, local goods from farm-to-table partners. 

Likewise, Tusk and Trotter is proud of local supplier relationships, which are displayed on a blackboard in the main dining room. Brunch carrot cake waffles or lemon soufflé pancakes are heavenly. Dinner choices include Berkshire hog sirloin chops and applewood smoked Duroc ribs. House-made pork rinds have an airy crunch.   

Table Mesa is dominant on the southern side of the square, having expanded three times since opening in 2008. Owner Carl Garrett explains that everything is freshly made and is a lively blend of Latin cuisines, not just Tex-Mex. The fish tacos are my favorite.

Around the corner is a sister restaurant, Tavola, with authentic Italian dishes, deeply researched for authenticity, Garret said.  One example is deep-fried olives, prepared precisely like ones I once enjoyed dockside in Murano, Italy. 

8^th Street Market functions like a year-round food fair, hosting up and coming restaurateurs, along with the Brightwater Culinary School. Situated between The Momentary to the west and the expansive new Walmart Home Office campus currently under construction to the east, the school anchors the rear of the complex while at the front is Bike Rack Brewing Company, with an outdoor music patio and food trucks. In between are specialty storefronts offering everything from craft chocolates, gourmet ramen, and juices to textiles and yoga lessons. When complete, the Walmart campus—with a Marriott managed hotel—will fluidly connect via the trail system westward to the market, The Momentary and its outdoor music concert pavilion, and further north to downtown Bentonville and Crystal Bridges.  

In the April CBS interview Alice Walton repeated an early tenet of the museum : 

“My motivation to do Crystal Bridges was all about access,” she said, “Access for people that don’t have it, diverse people, rural people.”

To that diverse group add Louisiana folk with access just a day’s drive to the north. An ever-changing wonderland of art, food, and outdoors awaits. 

visitbentonville.com