World-Class Museum in Land of Walmart

Print this entry

BENTONVILLE, ARK. — This is a company town, the birthplace of Walmart — now the world’s largest retailer. Like grackles, most folks either love or hate Wally World. I am planted firmly in the middle. I regret what big box retailers like Walmart have done to homogenize America, putting hundreds of thousands of small business owners out of business. It has turned downtowns into ghost towns, sparking a retail movement that has one city’s retail centers pretty much looking like the one down the road — or across the country. Many downtowns are coming back, thank goodness, as city boosters realize they’re vital to a community’s health.

A reporting trip to Chihuahua City, Mexico last year really brought this homogeneity home. We stopped at Starbucks before heading into the desert to interview ejido farmers. As I looked out the windshield, I saw signs for Best Buy, Home Depot, Kohl’s and Target. I could have been back home in Longview, except just past Best Buy the signs were in Spanish.

I do shop at Walmart, especially for groceries and toiletries. The company has vastly improved its offerings of organic food, for one thing. And it can be a convenient way to buy groceries, a pair of gym shorts and batteries, for example. Whenever possible, I use locally owned stores, such as the corner grocery near our house with its superb meat selection, and the hardware store next door to it, with an excellent and eclectic selection.

We are here not to praise or peruse the Walmart Museum, located on the square in Sam Walton’s original 5-10. The irony of Mr. Sam’s five-and-dime preserved on the square while his concept of lower prices and vast selections helped spur the demise of similar stores across America — anybody remember Perry Brothers? — is not lost on me.

Rather, while on a college visit down the road in Fayetteville, we drove the 28 miles to Bentonville on Easter Sunday afternoon to tour likely the greatest legacy of the Walton fortune — Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Nestled on 120 acres of woods the Walton family bought over time just outside Bentonville, the museum opened in 2011. Crystal Bridges was designed by Moshe Safdie with a wonderful use of native lumber in the ceilings. It curves around a lake so that visitors essentially travel in a rough circle throughout the exhibits. The grounds include more than 3.5 miles of trails, which in a few weeks will be resplendent with spring blossoms. But the hardwood trees had not yet begun blooming in Northwest Arkansas, and it was raining the afternoon we visited. A hike through the trails was not an option.

While a walk through nature would have been nice, there was a surfeit of art to be viewed inside. Alice Walton is the daughter of the late Sam Walton and reportedly the third-richest woman in the world. A few years back, a leading art magazine named her one of the world’s top ten art collectors. The Crystal Museum is her baby. It was funded from her personal wealth and the Walmart Foundation to the tune of $800 million and is the first major museum built between the East and West coasts in a generation. It is, as a laudatory review in the New York Times put it, a “world-class museum in the land of Walmart.”

More than 2 million visitors to the museum since opening attest to its attraction. We saw paintings by Edward Hopper, one of Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of George Washington, a version of Jasper John’s “Flag,” and pieces by Thomas Hart Benton. (Interestingly, the town is named after the “other” Thomas Hart Benton, who was a senator from nearby Missouri. Why, I’m not sure. The town’s original name was Osage.)

Thanks to yet another grant from Walmart, admission is free to all permanent exhibits. We paid $10 each to view a compelling photography exhibit titled “The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip.” That exhibit, well worth the ten-spot, includes work by Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyeroitz — all fine documentary photographers whose work I discovered in graduate school.

Northwest Arkansas is a picturesque part of the country, nestled in the Ozarks. Recreational activities remain the primary reason folks come to visit. The Crystal Bridge museum is making Bentonville a major destination point for art lovers. Just the other day, the foundation announced plans to open a contemporary art museum in an abandoned Kraft cheese plant downtown.

I still wish Walmart paid its workers better. It is hard to survive on $8.81 an hour, the average wage. But I am grateful the family is spending at least a portion of its wealth to provide folks in the South a wonderful venue for viewing works by some of America’s greatest artists.

Print this entry