Crystal Bridges posts bright 1st year

Project started with blank canvas, naysayers, finishes in the pink

Sunday, November 11, 2012

— Soon after word began to spread that Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton was building a world-class art museum in her hometown of Bentonville, doubters began to squawk.

“There was a kind of overt skepticism about what was happening here,” said Don Bacigalupi, director of Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

That incertitude playedout in the national media and among art critics on both coasts. When Walton hired Bacigalupi from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio in 2009, Bacigalupi said his colleagues told him he’d “lost his mind.”

“Some people were committed to the idea that wewere going to fail or that we would not be what we hoped to be, that it would be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.

The undercurrent of negativity reverberated throughout the tightknit community of museum professionals.

“We were all aware of that happening,” said Rand Suffolk, director at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa.

“I’m not entirely sure they knew what to expect,” he said of the naysayers. “But I will tell you, I don’t hear those concerns anymore.”

Since Crystal Bridges opened a year ago today, roughly 600,000 visitors have crossed the museum’s threshold. That’s more than twice the number officials anticipated for its inaugural year.

The Philbrook charges $9 for admission and the Thomas Gilcrease Museum, also in Tulsa, requires $8. Admission to Crystal Bridges is free, thanks to a $20 million gift from Wal-Mart. However, there is a fee for nonmembers for some special and traveling exhibitions.

As of late October, the museum had enlisted nearly 7,300 member households (homes with at least one paying member), more than double its first-year goal.

“For all of the planning and all of the predicting that we had to do for budgeting purposes, for staffing and everything else, none of us, no one in the world, could have predicted the level of success that we’ve enjoyed in terms of visitation, participation,” Bacigalupi said.

But officials use more than numbers when measuring success. Bacigalupi said the museum aims to be a wellattended and well-respected institution, and the two goals go hand-in-hand.

A colleague of Bacigalupi’s from a big museum on the East Coast recently commented that the museum is not just a success but “a phenomenon,” based on the participation and enthusiasm levels.

“The way people are talking about the museum has been incredibly gratifying,” Bacigalupi said. “My deepest hope was that over a period of years, we would become perceived as a success - as a credible, respected, greatinstitution - but to go from success to phenomenon in a year, that’s a wonderful compliment.”

VISITORS AND NONVISITORS

Visitors to Crystal Bridges in its first year came mostly from around the state.

Roughly 70 percent were from Arkansas; 15 percent were from the “touch states” of Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas; and 12 percent came from the rest of the country, mostly from Florida, California and New York. The remaining 3 percent were international travelers, mostly from Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany.

“No matter where they’re from, they can’t wait to tell their friends,” said David Wright, director of guest services at the museum.

“We have people come here from all walks of life,” Wright said.

Many are either first-time museumgoers or folks who said they’re not art people or museum people. A smaller number are well-versed in the nation’s marquee art institutions.

Regardless of their background in art, they have one thing in common.

“They seem changed when they leave,” Wright said. “It’s a level of excitement that is just constant, and it starts with the silver tree [by artist Roxy Paine] out front.”

And, there were tens of thousands more who enjoyed the museum without setting a foot on its clear red-oak floors.

An audio tour of Crystal Bridges, a free iTunes application called CBMuseum, has been downloaded by more than 55,000 users in 63 countries. Outside the United States, most of the downloads came from China.

“We don’t have a lot of visitors who are coming from mainland China to the museum, but they’re hearing about us,” Bacigalupi said. “They are listening to our audio tour and engaging with American art at Crystal Bridges.”

The mobile application, developed in-house with a small staff and budget, recently received a bronze MUSE Award from the American Association of Museums. The awards recognize “excellence in museum media and interactive programs.” The digital audio tour features the voices of the museum staff to guide patrons through works in acasual, conversational way.

“We wanted to have any of our guests be able to eavesdrop among a variety of staff,” Bacigalupi explained. “So it might be a groundskeeper talking to a conservator or a registrar talking to an educator, but you get to listen in on these unscripted dialogues.

“And they’re rich because of the different perspectives people bring and the unique ideas,” he said. “It’s also a kind of subtle way of suggesting that the visitor - regardless of your background, your profession, your experience or lack thereof with art - your voice matters too, and we welcome your voice.”

Last month, a half-hour documentary titled The Art of Crystal Bridges premiered at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Created by Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Larry Foley and narrated by actress Mary Steenburgen, the film depictsthe museum’s journey from construction to completion. The documentary was commissioned by the museum as a marketing tool, with airings expected on AETN.

LEVEL OF ENGAGEMENT

While Bacigalupi is thrilled over the number of first-yearvisitors, he’s even more carried away by how engaged and connected they are.

“We have a lot of museum colleagues visiting us to see what we’re doing, and they marvel at the amount of time people are spending actually looking at works of art, reading labels, sitting in our reflection areas and reading books, and going to our library and coming to talks,” he said.

“It counters the usual trends in museums.”

When Walton, the Crystal Bridges founder, is in town, she and Bacigalupi walk the galleries together.

“We marvel at the breadth of our audience, the fact that ‘all-comers’ are coming, that it isn’t just the expected museumgoers that look like museumgoers in every other community,” Bacigalupi said. “It’s people across the board, all ages, all generations, all backgrounds. And there’s a kind of ‘come as you are’ sense, that people will come comfortably.

“Alice likes to say, ‘I’ve never seen so many coveralls in a museum,’ and it’s true, and it’s wonderful because they’re curious enough to come. They’re here because they want to be here and they want to explore, and we’re thrilled about that.”

Though the attendance numbers are high and anecdotal evidence points towidespread success, is the Crystal Bridges’ success sustainable?

Katie Luber, the Kelso director of the San Antonio Museum of Art, says: “Yes.”

“It will just grow. I personally have been three times, and every time I go, I seesomething new I haven’t seen before,” Luber said. “I have a different appreciation for the way the architecture interacts with the landscape and nature around it and with the collections inside.”

It never goes stale.

“It’s not like riding a roller coaster, where you’ve done it once and that’s it,” she said. “Your knowledge changes, you grow. You become more fulfilled with every visit.”

MEMORABLE MOMENTS

Last year’s opening on Nov. 11, 2011, was a highlight of Bacigalupi’s career at Crystal Bridges. With a videotaped greeting from former President Bill Clinton and a rousing welcome from Walton on the Bentonville Square, “the extraordinary outpouring of excitement was so palpable,” Bacigalupi said.

Other memories have stayed with the director, as well.

Drew Barrymore dropped by the museum unannounced one day and saw a postcard of her favorite Georgia O’Keefe painting in the museum store. The actress, whose husband’s parents Bacigalupi knew as collectors in New York, grew up studying the watercolor piece, Evening Star No. II (1917), and had tried to re-create it in paint.

The museum owns the piece, but it was not on display at the time (nor is it now), so Bacigalupi took Barrymore into the vault to see it.

He said: “She stood there and cried because it was the most deeply-rooted memory of a work that she had from her childhood and something that she had always wanted to experience.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/11/2012