What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1437828
Editor's Note: We like to look back this time every year at the stories that we think best captured the state of the arts in Northwest Arkansas and the River Valley. This year, we're trying a new format. Each of us on the What's Up! staff has selected her three favorite stories from 2021. We'll reprint them as they ran previously, with an update on what's happened since then. This week, those three stories focus on the 10-year anniversary of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; a Northwest Arkansas food influencer making his mark on Instagram; and a multi-award winning documentary about Fort Smith's "Hanging Judge." This story originally appeared July 11 in What's Up! JOCELYN MURPHY NWA Democrat-Gazette When Crystal Bridges opened Nov. 11, 2011, staff anticipated 200,000 to 300,000 yearly visitors for the region's first American art museum. Far exceeding that expectation, more than 5.6 million people have since stepped through the museum's doors, proving that sending artistic treasures to the "wilds" of Arkansas maybe wasn't such a bad idea after all. It was the vision of art collector, philanthropist and heiress Alice Walton — Walmart founder Sam Walton's youngest daughter — to "bring art to as many people as possible," then- executive director Bob Workman told the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2007. Two years earlier, on land owned by the Walton family near the downtown Bentonville square, plans began for a monumental structure where anyone who entered could find some connection with the art or nature surrounding the space. "Early on in our life, there was a lot of criticism about who would come to see art in Arkansas, and a lot of discrediting the quality of the experience or where it was. It's good to look back on that now," Rod Bigelow, executive director and chief diversity and inclusion officer, told NWADG reporter Jocelyn Murphy in 2019. "When we landed on the scene, we were labeled a disrupter," he goes on, noting the label was bestowed with both positive and negative connotations. "I think that's part of our DNA and our culture, is that we want to continue to disrupt these discussions and have a bit of a different perspective in the field." "If people made assumptions about Crystal Bridges, it probably had more to do with vague ideas about its connection to Walmart, through Alice Walton. Would the museum be aimed at a big, broad audience, and if so, would curators be unwilling to or discouraged from taking risks?" suggests Philip Kennicott, an art and architecture critic with The Washington Post who has written about the museum several times over the years. "I think once people saw that Crystal Bridges was ambitious and would host shows like the ['Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of] Black Power' exhibition, it very quickly got on everyone's radar. I certainly would love to come back often, and am limited only by travel budgets." Expanding Narrative A permanent collection of 1,555 has grown to more than 3,500 pieces. Conscientious effort has gone toward acquiring and sharing significant works by women, people of color and under recognized and marginalized artists. Crystal Bridges' curatorial team have also grown their internal scholarship with exhibitions organized in-house to then travel across the country, including a first-of-its-kind exhibition, "Crystals in Art: Ancient to Today." "A lot of museums are really saying, how does our collection, or how does it not, in some cases, reflect the diversity of American art history?" shares Alex Greenberger, senior editor of ARTnews, the most widely circulated art magazine in the world according to its site. "I think that Crystal Bridges is an unusual institution in that their collection really does reflect the diversity of American art history. And that is something that I would say they've been really trying hard, maybe even a bit longer than other recent U.S. institutions, to show." Crystal Bridges is a different establishment than the one that opened its doors in 2011, Bigelow reveals. The initial pursuit to tell an American story and celebrate the American spirit still drives every decision and action, only now, the community itself prompts so much more of the dialogue than it did a decade ago. "We are considering our community members, and we're really thinking about what is relevant to their lives. Where can we meet them where they are, and how do we let them influence the work that we're doing and the stories and narratives that we're talking about?" Bigelow says. "It's amazing to see the trust and the support and the commitment and interest and pride from this community." A visitor to Crystal Bridges in those early years would have been greeted with a relatively chronological telling of the "American" story throughout the galleries. The quotation marks serve to denote the staff's recognition of the fairly narrow piece of the narrative presented in those days. The impressive and important collection of masterpieces Walton had built across mediums covered centuries of American history, and represented women artists at a higher rate than had typically been historically demonstrated in such spaces. Yet, Chief Curator Austen Barron Bailly admits the primary orientation of much of that original collection expressed a conventional, "canonical American history" — that of American (read: white, primarily male, Euro-American) exceptionalism. So as the museum approached its fifth birthday, the pursuit of a more inclusive curatorial mission manifested in a redesign of the Early American galleries. Modern sculpture work, colonial portraiture, pre-1400s Indigenous found objects and more intersected to more accurately reflect the complexities of American art and history. "It's one thing to be able to provide visitors with temporary exhibitions that are able to explore certain topics or artists in great depth, but this is our way of making sure our own collection galleries stay just as relevant and exciting as our temporary exhibitions," curator Mindy Besaw said at the time. A chronological to thematic re-imagining of the Contemporary Gallery also came in the museum's first decade, instigated by inspiring new acquisitions. DECEMBER 19-25, 2021 WHAT'S UP! 3 See CBM Page 4 YEAR IN REVIEW Labeled A 'Disrupter' Crystal Bridges overcomes stereotypes with its collection "I think the group of artists in this exhibition are some of the most important American artists who ever lived, regardless of race," Lauren Haynes, director of artist initiatives and curator, contemporary art, at the Momentary and Crystal Bridges, said ahead of the "Soul of a Nation" Arkansas debut. "I know there are a lot of artists who are coming up today, regardless of their race or background, who are very much influenced by artists in this exhibition. The impact that they had, and continue to have, is really amazing." Pictured is "Black Unity" by Elizabeth Catlett. (NWA Democrat-Gazette File Photo/Charlie Kaijo)