Walton sets goal for museum

Founder tells students she wants it to transform the world

Alice Walton (right), founder of Crystal Bridges of American Art in Bentonville, talks with Northwest Arkansas Community College art student Jenny Wilson after participating in a forum on leadership Monday at the Shewmaker Center for Workforce Technologies on the community college’s Bentonville campus.

Alice Walton (right), founder of Crystal Bridges of American Art in Bentonville, talks with Northwest Arkansas Community College art student Jenny Wilson after participating in a forum on leadership Monday at the Shewmaker Center for Workforce Technologies on the community college’s Bentonville campus.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

— The goal for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is not to transform Bentonville, or Northwest Arkansas, or even America. It’s to transform the world, Alice Walton told a group of business students in a lecture Monday.

The museum’s founder spoke at Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville as part of its Students in Free Enterprise Jack Shewmaker Business Lecture Series. Joining Walton was Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s executive director.

“American art has not historically been viewed as important worldwide,” said Walton, who lives in Texas. “One of the things we hope is that we bring more recognition and help bring more scholarship to American art worldwide.”

That’s already begun to take place, Bacigalupi noted.

In November 2010, less than a year before Crystal Bridges opened, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts launched its Art of the Americas Wing. In January, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artre-opened its American art gallery, he said.

Yet most telling of all, Bacigalupi said, is the decision by the Musee de Louvre in Paris to feature one of its first exhibitions of American art, “New Frontier: American Art Enters the Louvre,” which debuted in January and includes works on loan from Crystal Bridges. The Bentonville museum announced in December that it had entered into a four-year art sharing partnership with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago.

Previous to the opening of the “New Frontier” exhibit, American art had rarely been seen at the Louvre. It has just a handful of American works in its massive permanent collection, he said.

“Arguably, the greatest museum in the world has paid significant attention [to Crystal Bridges],” Bacigalupi said. “There is a direct correspondence between Paris and Bentonville. I invite you all to either go to Paris to see it now or wait until May when it comes here.”

Both Walton and Baci-galupi beamed when talking about the numbers of people who have visited and gotten involved with Crystal Bridges since it opened Nov. 11. There have been 160,000 visitors to the museum since its opening, which Bacigalupi termed “unbelievable.”

“And, importantly, we may hit 6,000 members today - and maybe most importantly, over 1,000 volunteers,” Walton said.

The lecture was informal, with Walton and Bacigalupi seated and taking questions from the community college’s vice president for public relations and development, Wyley Elliot. He asked both Walton and Bacigalupi the same questions, and they often elaborated upon the other’s responses.

Much of the session dealt with the history of the museum, dating as far back as Walton’s childhood interest in painting landscapes in watercolor with her mother. Walton is the youngest child and only daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and his wife, Helen.

Around 1990, Alice Walton said she began to get more interested in art history and has made a serious study of it for the more than two decades since. Bacigalupi labeled her a “wonderful amateur scholar,” and said their travels around the world to see art together have often left him inspired.

In May, Walton will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Arkansas atFayetteville during its spring commencement.

“I have no greater pleasure than standing in front of a work of art than [with] Alice Walton,” Bacigalupi said. “It is an inspiring experience. Alice is completely absorbed in works of art.”

Bacigalupi was hired as Crystal Bridges’ executive director in October 2009. Asthen-director of the Toledo Museum of Art, he initially was not interested in the position. But he wanted to meet Walton and talk to her about the mysterious developments in Bentonville that had the art world buzzing.

When they met, they discovered their visions for an art museum were identical. What Walton and Bacigalupi share, Walton said, is “a love for art with your feet on the ground.”

“It was not more than 30 minutes [after the meeting] that I went, ‘This is the person I’ve been looking for,’” Walton said. “It had to do with a commitment to peopleand education.”

Bringing aboard someone like Bacigalupi, a highly regarded figure who believed in the transformative power of art, was critical to the museum’s success, Walton said. So was filling the staff with like-minded people: executives who believe in what the museum is trying to do and have the expertise to do it.

“I can dream all I want, but if the execution were left to me, it wouldn’t have been successful,” Walton said. “I had to have people that believed and wanted to go to the same place as me and had more experience in how to make that happen.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/28/2012