“Let’s start at the very beginning,” suggests The Sound of Music’s Maria von Trapp, arguing that’s a “very good place to start.”
But is it?
A European art museum, for example, that arranges its collection chronologically is liable to make a visitor who begins at the very first gallery wonder, before even arriving at the Renaissance, two things:
1. Why does Baby Jesus so often look like former New York City mayor Ed Koch?
and
2. How many more of these Madonna-with-child portraits do I have to get through before I can see some blurry lily pads?
Museums devoted to American art face a different but related problem if they opt to line up their pictures by date of creation. For a stretch there, especially in the 19th century, American artists were very into showcasing (and often romanticizing) the grandeur of their young country’s landscapes.
Confronted with a long parade of these leafy canvasses, a museumgoer can grow numb to even the majesty of the Catskills. Too many viewings of Dirty Dancing can have a similar effect.
Because of a strict adherence to chronology, the risk of landscape fatigue was the primary drawback at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, from the facility’s opening in 2011 to its recently completed revamp.
The museum began as the somewhat improbable pet project of Walmart heir Alice Walton, whose deep pockets and ravenous art collecting helped turn a once-sleepy town in the Ozarks into a cultural hot spot.
The big headline of Crystal Bridges’ latest chapter is an expansion, completed over the summer, that has added 114,000 square feet of space, enlarging the museum’s existing footprint by more than 50%.
But for visitors, the more notable improvement is that the entire approach to displaying the permanent exhibition has been rethought.
How existing spaces at Crystal Bridges have been reimagined
The museum's old chronological walkthrough has given way to a looser thematic vibe that invites visitors to discover connections and differences across five centuries of American art. (New York–based studio Callaghan Horiuchi partnered with Crystal Bridges to transform the interior design and guest experience for the project.)
The new strategy allows for livelier, more diverse perspectives throughout all the museum’s galleries—whereas the previous canonical chronology tended to muffle the voices of women, people of color, and other demographics at least until the last few decades or so.
Plus, easing up on a strict timeline lets the museum engage more meaningfully with the nonlinear flittings of human thought and doesn’t force curators to sequester crowd-pleasing works in separate historical enclaves.
To these ends, the former Early American galleries at Crystal Bridges have been reborn as Visions of America, with art from various eras grouped together by broad themes such as portraits, nature, and more intangible notions like national identity and aspirations.
Norman Rockwell’s monumental, World War II–era Rosie the Riveter has been moved to Visions of America from an original location deeper in the museum. That makes the popular painting easier to find.
And stationing the muscular, Mein Kampf–trampling Rosie near other large-scale works, such as Kerry James Marshall’s Our Town (1995)—an idyllic depiction of a low-income housing project—has the effect of putting varying representations of American ideals in stimulating conversation with each other.
Kindred Spirits (1849), Asher B. Durand’s majestic vision of the Hudson River Valley, is still a must-see in the nature section. But the museum also counters some of the Eurocentric bias in 19th-century American art with prominent displays of pieces by Indigenous creators such as Raven Halfmoon and Jeri Redcorn.
For visitors who still prefer a rough timeline, another reimagined gallery, now called Foundations of American Art, is designed to supply an overview from the 18th century to the middle of the 20th. But even here, the curatorial sensibility is far from rigid. Instead, it foregrounds variety and playfulness wherever possible.
Gilbert Stuart’s 1797 George Washington portrait—of one-dollar-bill fame—is here all right, but it hangs in its augustness right next to a folksy, highly idiosyncratic take on Washington that was painted in 1987 by the self-taught Howard Finster.
Other artists with work nearby—Georgia O’Keeffe, Winslow Homer, David Drake, Maria Martinez—reflect a refreshingly democratic idea of which paintings, sculptures, pottery, and crafts can be considered foundational to American art.
An expansion that brings the story up to date
Obviously, this sort of thought-provoking jumble is made possible by the breadth and depth of the collection as well as the chutzpah and ambition of the museum and its backers.
Those same features characterize the Crystal Bridges expansion, which encompasses new galleries, studios, a café, and outdoor spaces, all designed, as the original structures were, by Safdie Architects with the same elongated, wood-and-concrete halls topped with rounded, copper-clad roofs meant to recall the surrounding Ozark hills. (I still think the museum looks like a gathering of giant millipedes.)
The expansion’s new galleries include enormous, airy spaces for temporary exhibits as well as the Contemporary American Art Gallery, an extension of the permanent exhibit that covers creations from 1960 to the present.
That period hasn’t always been the museum’s strong suit, but the expansion rectifies that with bright and splashy pieces by A-listers such as Theaster Gates, Kiki Smith, Nam June Paik, and the late Yayoi Kusama, whose Infinity Mirrored Room—My Heart Is Dancing Into the Universe (2018) puts gallery-goers in a small mirror-lined chamber filled with colorful, polka-dotted paper lanterns that seem to stretch into eternity.
Among the exterior additions unveiled with the museum’s expansion are a central plaza with a splash pad for kids.
But the 134-acre site’s primary outdoor attractions remain its forested trails that pass streams, plants, flowers, an arboretum’s worth of trees, and, of course, top-notch outdoor art, including a whole Frank Lloyd Wright house transplanted to the grounds in 2015.
The museum regards the appreciation of nature as a core part of its mission, and the facility’s quiet, wooded, gently rolling setting makes it easy to join that mission, even if you’re prone to landscape fatigue after facing a bunch of nature on canvas.
Snobs used to scoff at the idea that Arkansas deserved a world-class art museum, but once you’ve seen the natural beauty of the state, you might decide Arkansas itself outshines most artistic output. (As somebody who grew up there, I’ll concede I could be biased.)
With its expansion and thoughtful makeover of existing spaces, Crystal Bridges proves to be not only a standout in the region but also one of the best American art museums, full stop.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is located at 600 Museum Way in Bentonville, Arkansas. General admission is free (ticketed temporary exhibits cost extra). For operating hours, driving directions, and other info, go to CrystalBridges.org.