text: The Crystal Bridges Museum Brings Art to the Ozarks | Marvels - WSJ.com WSJ
  Crystal Bridges Museum Call the Ozarks "middle America" if you have to, but don't call it middlebrow. The gob-stopping $1.2 billion Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opens next Friday in Bentonville, Ark. Funded by the Walton Family Foundation and stocked by Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart's founder, the place is heaving with works by artists from John Singer Sargent to John Baldessari. You can take all those MOMAs, I'm happy here. Set among the hickory and tulip trees on 120 acres of woodland, Crystal Bridges is an impious, spiriting place to find A+ art. "Physically, we're not a big white neo-classical temple on a hill," Don Bacigalupi, the museum's rail thin and whip-smart director, told me during a sneak peek. "You discover the museum in the ravine here, not above your head." Sophisticates gripe, of course. They say such a top-drawer collection should be more accessible. What they mean is, it should be more accessible to them. But why should art be sandwiched in cities? City folk may go to more opening parties, but they're no more culture hungry. Often less. In the meantime, talk here in the local bar is all about the new museum. Wal-Mart itself has just pledged $20 million to it, making admission free for all. (The company seems to like experiments—the new Wal-Mart Labs, its e-commerce ideas team, is based in Silicon Valley.) People knew Ms. Walton herself was stealthily collecting great American art from the Colonial era on, but they didn't know how great. Here is Warhol's Dolly Parton, Chuck Close's Bill Clinton, Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter. Over there is Devorah Sperber's "After the Last Supper," made of 20,736 spools of thread and viewed through a crystal ball. And at the entrance is my favorite: "Yield," Roxy Paine's giant steel sculpture of a neuron, taller than the trees. There's also James Turrell, Kara Walker and Louise Nevelson. It's like going to your reunion and liking everyone. The building is 200,000 square feet by Moshe Safdie. Just the restaurant makes you grin. Its roof resembles an upside-down suspension bridge, with Arkansas pine beams arching across it like long yellow ribs. The builders had to invent new tools to secure them. And we haven't even talked about Asher Durand's $35 million "Kindred Spirits," painted in 1849 in honor of Thomas Cole and the majestic Catskills. About the work's idealized country appeal, curator David Houston winks: "As you know, New Yorkers can be very provincial—they don't leave town." Here, sorry, nobody much cares what New Yorkers do. The point of this place is to lure locals (though art lovers from afar are already planning pilgrimages). Northwest Arkansas is home not just to the biggest retailer in the world, but also Tyson and J.B. Hunt. It's adding 1,000 residents a month, and has been for a decade. These numbers may not deliver a cultural audience "at scale," at least not yet. But who cares. Art affects individuals. "There's a tradition in the Ozarks of craftsmen working with their hands—potters, carvers, basket weavers—but, until now, no institutional example of a visual arts culture," said Mr. Bacigalupi. "We all know that exposure to art, early and often, affects academic performance." Programs such as San Diego's "School in the Park" have found that students exposed to art did 17% better on academic tests than those who weren't. They do better on empathy, too—learning through observation and imagination how to fathom different views. If we don't give kids art, we are robbing them. That's as true in Arkansas as in New York or London—or Oklahoma. A few hours west of Bentonville, at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is another mind-blower. Since the director, my friend Ghislain d'Humieres, started four years ago, student visits per year have jumped from 3,000 to 15,000. Folks here put their money where their mouths are, too. A sleek new $13 million addition, the Stuart Wing, housing the $50 million Adkins Collection of Native American and southwestern art, opened two weekends ago. The homecoming football game was the next day but former senator and Rhodes Scholar, David Boren, now O.U.'s president, didn't focus on pigskin in his speech. Instead, he said: "We can not hold ourselves out as a great university if we don't have a great fine arts program." Then he named all the major local donors to the museum. I lost count.