4 min read
“Did you leave anyone back in New York?” my Uber driver in Bentonville, Arkansas joked last weekend. “Everyone I’ve picked up today is from there, and they’re all going to the museum.”
The museum is the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the institution founded by Walmart heir Alice Walton in the town where she grew up and where the retail behemoth her father created still dominates. Art-world VIPs from the coasts and beyond flew in for a gala celebrating the museum’s 15th anniversary and, even more significantly, an expansion that opens to the public on June 6. It adds 114,000 square feet of new galleries, educational spaces, and art-making studios to the campus, as well as a multipurpose courtyard terrace complete with a splash pad.
“It has gone from being a building to being a village,” said architect Moshe Safdie, who masterminded both phases of the museum, speaking during a public talk with Alice Walton. He explained that the ravine site strongly shaped his distinctive plan—a series of interconnected pavilions that border and bridge over stream-fed ponds—but he noted that the underlying ethos was very much about creating “a place of community.”
Jared Sorrells
Crystal Bridges’s expansion adds 114,000 square feet of new galleries, educational spaces, and art-making studios to the campus.
For her part, Walton, who has ensured that admission to Crystal Bridges remains free to all visitors, added, “Everybody deserves great art. This had to be world-class.”
Safdie’s new buildings largely match the existing materials palette—exterior walls of pale concrete ribboned with cedar, expanses of glass, variously arched and swooping copper-clad roofs lined on the inside with warm southern yellow pine. But he added a twist in what is arguably the expansion’s centerpiece, a 14,000-square-foot column-free gallery with nearly 20-foot ceilings dedicated to temporary exhibitions. Here, the architect devised a sawtooth-style roof with a skylight and louver system that enables fine-tuning of the natural illumination across the space.
Jared Sorrells
“Keith Haring in 3D” is the inaugural show in Crystal Bridges’s new 14,000-square-foot column-free gallery dedicated to temporary exhibitions.
The gallery’s inaugural show is “Keith Haring in 3D,” a spirited survey of the ’80s downtown star’s sculptures and painted objects. On view through January 25, 2027, it includes numerous rarely exhibited objects, from a playfully decorated I-beam that was once in Haring’s studio and a painted crib that was in his first-ever gallery show to his fashion collaborations and his towering totems embellished all over with his distinctive hieroglyphic-like patterns.
The impetus for Crystal Bridges to expand was driven, in part, by the museum’s success, attracting upwards of 800,000 visitors annually, including some 80,000 school children. The aim is to grow those numbers, while also displaying much more art, especially works from its expanding collections of American contemporary art, Indigenous art, and craft.
Jared Sorrells
The exterior of the temporary exhibition gallery, with its sawtooth-style roof.
A significant number of the recent acquisitions are gifts from Dallas collectors Candace and Michael Humphreys and from Olivia and Tom Walton (he is Alice’s son, she is the museum’s board chair). The Humphreys donated 200 wide-ranging works—the largest gift ever made to the museum—from the first quilts to enter the collection to paintings by Mary Cassatt and Jacob Lawrence to a massive Ivań Navarro neon-and-mirror installation on one of the bridge galleries. The Waltons, meanwhile, donated 18 works by women artists, including Alice Neel, Betye Saar, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
That Crosby work now presides over one end of the spacious new contemporary gallery, where art from the past several decades is arrayed in loose, non-chronological groupings. Large abstract paintings by Julie Mehretu and Joan Mitchell make a striking pair, for example, while a radiant Donald Judd “Stack” sculpture and a moody Mark Rothko canvas frame geometric compositions by Josef Albers. Anchoring the heart of the gallery is one of Yayoi Kusama’s trippy and ever-popular mirrored “Infinity” rooms.
Jared Sorrells
The new contemporary gallery, where art from the past several decades is displayed in non-chronological groupings.
Some works, like the Judd, hadn’t been on view for years, notes curator of contemporary art Alejo Benedetti. “One of the things that’s been especially fun working with the collection,” he says, “is rethinking how we’re telling these stories and putting works in dialogue with each other.”
Benedetti recounts how artist Fred Wilson, in town for the gala, responded to seeing two of his recently acquired Othello-themed pieces—a darkly baroque mirror and chandelier—next to a large Louise Nevelson sculpture that has been a collection mainstay for years. “He told me, ‘I feel like I’m like looking at my work in a slightly different and interesting way because of this pairing,’” the curator says. “And there’s like no higher compliment than to hear that from an artist.”
Jared Sorrells
One of the new bridge galleries, with a cedar ceiling.
The art at Crystal Bridges continues throughout its public spaces, including in the revamped entry, where the Haas Brothers just installed a fantastical bronze tree sculpture with blown-glass fruits and leaves composed of millions of Venetian glass beds. It also extends outdoors, across 134 wooded acres interspersed with five miles of walking trails and dotted with dozens of sculptures and installations, including a James Turrell Skyspace and a Buckminster Fly’s Eye Dome, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian house.
It’s all part of the “art everywhere” philosophy of Crystal Bridges, which is now among the largest museums in the U.S. “We’d like to be the most important museum between the coasts,” Olivia Walton has stated. It’s a big ambition for an institution in this small but fast-growing town of roughly 65,000 people.
Jared Sorrells
Crystal Bridges owns 134 wooded acres of land, with walking trails peppered with sculptures.
During a quiet break from the weekend’s activities, Safdie spoke about the evolution of Crystal Bridges, including how the original buildings have gracefully aged, the cedar weathering to a silvery gray, the roof copper darkening to a burnt umber. The architect noted that the copper’s eventual transition to verdigris has been a bit slower than expected, due to the lack of pollution, but he admits he might prefer the brown hue as a contrast with all of the surrounding greenery. He also conceded that seeing the expansion complete makes him feel nostalgic. “You know,” he said, “the museum has been a quarter-century of my life.”
ELLE Decor features director Stephen Wallis has spent three decades covering art, design, and culture. He was previously the consulting features editor for Galerie and held top positions at Architectural Digest and Departures. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, T magazine, WSJ magazine, Esquire, Town & Country, Veranda, and Cultured. He is the author of Fontainebleau, a history of the iconic Miami Beach hotel, and Jim Thompson: Beyond Silk, Beyond Thailand.