BENTONVILLE — School districts will have the opportunity to send thousands of students to visit Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art at little or no cost to schools thanks to a $10 million endowment by the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation.
The endowment will cover the cost of transportation, lunches, a substitute teacher and educational material.
A formal announcement will be made at 10:30 a.m. Thursday at Crystal Bridges.
“Subsidies such as these allow us to further our mission of being accessible to even our youngest visitors,” Don Bacigalupi, Crystal Bridges executive director, said in a news release. “The Walker Foundation gift removes the financial barriers for schools and will allow the teachers and students to benefit from all that Crystal Bridges has to offer.”
Mitch Terry, an art teacher at Central Park Elementary School in Bentonville, said the chance to bring students to the museum for free is spectacular.
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Crystal Bridges School Program
For more information, schools can email [email protected]. Complete information on the school program will be updated at www.crystalbridges.org
“My gosh, it is an opportunity of a lifetime for the students,” Terry said. “This is the greatest motivator — to be exposed to art at this level. Any child who has any inspiration whatsoever will just leap forward.”
Terry said there has never been an opportunity to expose students to art outside the classroom before now.
“You would have to go out of state or to Little Rock. The level that Crystal Bridges is going to provide is pretty amazing,” Terry said. “It is kind of hard to imagine the level of art we are going to see. I am anxious to see what will happen.”
Teachers will be able to choose a theme for their tours, each designed to tie in with curriculum in art, history, social studies, language arts, and science for a variety of grade levels.
“The Walker Foundation’s donation is a gift to schools all across the region,” Bacigalupi said. “Art is an important educational tool for teachers of many subjects, from art and literature to American history and social studies.”
The reality of seeing important works of art rather than just studying an abstract concept will have a significant impact on students, said Julia Bachelor, a seventh-grade language arts and English as a second language teacher at Lincoln Junior High School in Bentonville. She sees art as tying into literature in an important way.
“In our English classes, we don’t just study words, we also study the whole context of where a piece of writing comes from — the culture, the people, the artwork, the music of the same period,” Bachelor said.
During the visit, students and teachers will be served lunch at Eleven, the museum’s restaurant. They will also spend half an hour at the Experience Studio, a hands-on interactive gallery space.
The $10 million gift supports the museum’s Next Generation Fund, founded to address economic, social and cultural barriers to participation in the arts. To honor of the endowment, the large outdoor patio area at Crystal Bridges has been named Walker Landing. The patio, between the lobby and educational wing, is a multipurpose area to accommodate student lunches, public performances and presentations, according to the release.
The museum will begin taking applications for the program in spring 2012, and the visits will begin in fall 2012.
Crystal Bridges is set to open Nov. 11.