Reciprocity Perk of Membership

Top Regional Museums’ Holdings Complementary With Crystal Bridges

By Tracie Dungan

Posted: November 5, 2011 at noon

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BENTONVILLE — Some patrons who become members of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will have an incentive to explore other museums in Arkansas and beyond through a national reciprocal program.

Those who buy a membership to Crystal Bridges at the $250 annual “associate” level or higher can receive benefits at museums throughout North America, such as free or reduced admission and museum shop discounts.

The North American Reciprocal Museums program is an association of 511 member arts and cultural institutions in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Bermuda and El Salvador, according to its website, sites.google.com/site/northamericanreciprocalmuseums.

Its members also include the South Arkansas Arts Center in El Dorado, as well as 45 museums in the bordering states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

Kathryn Roberts, Crystal Bridges’ director of member and guest services, said the museum will be listed as a participant on the reciprocal group’s website sometime after its opening date.

Offering this benefit will help Crystal Bridges provide incentives for gaining memberships by helping its members broaden their art experiences elsewhere, she said.

“Our members are going to be able to become engaged with art in other parts of the world,” Roberts said. “We think art enriches life.”

The North American Reciprocal Museums website provides a link to the websites of its participant museums. Here is a sample of the offerings at some of the museums in Arkansas and surrounding states.

Memphis Brooks Museum

Across the Tennessee state line is the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

“We’ve been actively collecting and mounting education programs for almost a century,” said its director, Cameron Kitchin.

“Memphis Brooks Museum is an encyclopedic museum, meaning it runs from antiquity to contemporary, all cultures and all periods,” he said.

Kitchin said of the museum’s permanent holdings: “We’ve collected over 9,000 important works of art.”

In all, Brooks’ permanent collection of paintings includes Italian Renaissance and Baroque, British, French Impressionism and 20th-century art.

Visitors will find some overlap among American artists between Brooks and Crystal Bridges. Brooks’ collection of works by Americans include Winslow Homer, Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Henri and Childe Hassam.

Other areas in which Brooks has made inroads include its 19th- and 20th-century sculpture and decorative arts, such as period textiles and furniture and its “global survey” of art from ancient Greece and the Mediterranean, the ancient Americas and Africa.

Crystal Bridges is an example of a museum with a focus, “whereas we present the broad survey of art history,” Kitchin said.

He said his museum has had only informal discussions with Crystal Bridges about loaning one another art.

“We in Memphis look forward to have a great colleague in Bentonville,” Kitchin said. “I will be one of the first to visit the museum in Bentonville and certainly will support the project.”

In Northwest Arkansas, residents are about a two-hour drive from two museums in Tulsa that got their starts in the early to mid-20th century thanks to the desire of two oil magnates to collect and share art with the public.

Philbrook Museum

The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa opened to the public in 1949.

The effort began in 1938 when oil magnate Waite Phillips, brother of Phillips Petroleum founder Frank Phillips, and his family joined with the Tulsa Art Museum to create the city’s first private, not-for-profit art museum.

Housed in a 1927 Italianate villa surrounded by gardens on a 23-acre site, its collection covers 12,000 objects from a wide range of genres, and it describes itself as a “general fine arts museum” covering a broad range of periods and cultures.

This includes Italian painting and sculpture as well as American and European painting and sculpture from the 14th century to the present.

But lovers of African, Asian and American Indian art also will find collections, as will those who appreciate Southwestern art and the decorative arts of America and Europe.

The Philbrook also has prints and drawings spanning five centuries and a small teaching collection of antiquities dating from predynastic Egypt to the early Christian era.

The Philbrook has already been a sharing partner with the Bentonville museum.

Last November, Crystal Bridges announced that the Philbrook was among museums around the country to which it had loaned artworks for display.

The Bentonville museum loaned four works: Martin Johnson Heade’s Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle, circa 1875-1890; Fairfield Porter’s October Interior, 1963; Benton’s The Steel Mill, 1930; and Everett Shinn’s A French Music Hall, 1906.

The works went on display at various times last year.

Gilcrease Museum

In 1949, Tulsa oilman Thomas Gilcrease founded the private Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.

The museum is known for its comprehensive collection of art of the American West and its rare Western Americana.

David C. Hunt, a curator at the Gilcrease from 1965-72 and an author, said after a lecture at Little Rock’s University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service earlier this year that the museum’s period of Western art covers roughly 1820-1940.

Many of the genre’s artists chronicled America’s push west through paintings, sculptures, watercolors and lithographs during a time before movies and television had arrived, and indeed, still cameras weren’t around to help with this during the first half of the 1800s, Hunt said.

In the year before his Tulsa museum opened, Thomas Gilcrease acquired the estate of landscape painter Thomas Moran, including 2,000 works of art. Among them were “many exquisite watercolors of the Yellowstone region of Montana and Wyoming” and archival material that detailed Moran’s creative process, according to the website.

Gilcrease also ventured beyond his original focus by acquiring notable paintings by American artists such as Homer, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler — which may prove of interest to those tracking Crystal Bridges’ acquisitions.

The Gilcrease’s galleries and vaults display and store more than a quarter-million artifacts of the aboriginal people of the Americas.

On the shelves of the Gilcrease’s library sit some 100,000 rare books, manuscript and archival material.

Gilcrease’s interest in Spanish and Mexican influence on American history meant that he also acquired more than 100,000 pages of Hispanic source material. This included documents concerning the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas and explorers such as Hernando de Soto and Christopher Columbus.

In 2008, the city of Tulsa and the private University of Tulsa created a partnership that the Gilcrease terms “historic,” in which they pledged to preserve and advance the museum.

Arkansas Arts Center

The Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock has an extensive collection of drawings.

When Todd Herman came on board as the museum’s new executive director earlier this year, he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that these drawings are what sets it apart from Crystal Bridges.

“Drawings are the closest you’re going to get to an artist,” Herman, who specializes in 16th-century Venetian paintings, said. “It’s their first thoughts.”

Its website, arkarts.com, describes its collection of “unique works on paper” as covering primarily American and European artists from the Renaissance to the present.

Its collection includes some crossover with artists covered in Crystal Bridges announced acquisitions.

Overall, the Little Rock museum’s collection includes works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Peter Paul Rubens and Alison Saar.

Masterworks include paintings by Diego Rivera, Francesco Bassano and Odilon Redon, sculptures by Henry Moore, Roy Lichtenstein and Louise Nevelson, and prints by Albrecht Durer and Whistler.

Herman has said he hopes to work with Crystal Bridges on making arts in Arkansas more visible.

This article was previously published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on July 24, 2011.

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