{"id":1752,"date":"2016-04-01T09:56:09","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T14:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2016-04-01T14:19:56","modified_gmt":"2016-04-01T19:19:56","slug":"world-class-museum-in-land-of-walmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/world-class-museum-in-land-of-walmart\/","title":{"rendered":"World-Class Museum in Land of Walmart"},"content":{"rendered":"

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BENTONVILLE, ARK. \u2014 This is a company town, the birthplace of Walmart \u2014 now the world\u2019s 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\u2019s retail centers pretty much looking like the one down the road \u2014 or across the country. Many downtowns are coming back, thank goodness, as city boosters realize they\u2019re vital to a community\u2019s health.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> farmers. As I looked out the windshield, I saw signs for Best Buy, Home Depot, Kohl\u2019s and Target. I could have been back home in Longview, except just past Best Buy the signs were in Spanish.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We are here not to praise or peruse the Walmart Museum, located on the square in Sam Walton\u2019s original 5-10. The irony of Mr. Sam\u2019s 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 \u2014 anybody remember Perry Brothers? \u2014 is not lost on me.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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<\/em> put it, a \u201cworld-class museum in the land of Walmart.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than 2 million visitors to the museum since opening attest to its attraction. We saw paintings by Edward Hopper, one of Gilbert Stuart\u2019s portraits of George Washington, a version of Jasper John\u2019s \u201cFlag,\u201d and pieces by Thomas Hart Benton. (Interestingly, the town is named after the \u201cother\u201d Thomas Hart Benton, who was a senator from nearby Missouri. Why, I\u2019m not sure. The town\u2019s original name was Osage.)<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip.\u201d That exhibit, well worth the ten-spot, includes work by Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyeroitz \u2014 all fine documentary photographers whose work I discovered in graduate school.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s greatest artists.<\/p>\n

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Print this entryBENTONVILLE, ARK. \u2014 This is a company town, the birthplace of Walmart \u2014 now the world\u2019s largest retailer. Like grackles, most folks either love or hate Wally World. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[51,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-51","category-columns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1752"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1755,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions\/1755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}