Regional museums partner up

Cultural exhibits displayed at Crystal Bridges draw visitors

Monday, February 4, 2013

— The Rogers Historical Museum saw a 77 percent increase in out-of-area visitors last year, partly due to its wall display of regional museum attractions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

“It was a mix of the things we were doing ourselves to market the museum more, but also that impact from having a presence at Crystal Bridges made a difference,” said Gaye Bland, director of the Rogers museum.

The Rogers museum, along with five others, were featured for a year in recessed glass display cases along the south corridor linking Crystal Bridges’ temporary exhibition galleries to the Great Hall and south lobby.

“That’s sort of an underlying current to all this,” said Diane Carroll, public relations manager for Crystal Bridges. “This is our second time doing this, and all the partner museums [featured in the first year] saw a bump in their business.

“It’s hard to attribute it specifically, but they had good successes,” Carroll said.

Officials recently swapped those displays for six new ones in an exhibition titled People and Places: A Collaborative Regional Exhibition.

Artifacts, photos and reproductions of photos from the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Okla.; the Eureka Springs Historical Museum; the Daisy Airgun Museum in Rogers; the Ralph Foster Museum in Point Lookout, Mo.; University of Arkansas Special Collections; and The Clinton Library in Little Rock can be viewed through Jan. 6, 2014.

Crystal Bridges assistant curator Manuela Well-Off-Man collaborated with the regional partners to pick historical items and compelling photographs that would demonstrate the uniqueness of the region and its people.

Some gems from the regional exhibition: a saxophone that belonged to former President Bill Clinton, Willie Nelson’s platinum record of “You Were Always on my Mind” and sketches and photographs of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as it was designed by Fayetteville native Edward Durell Stone.

These lesser-known objects among hundreds of major artworks are the centerpieces on loan from regional museums.

“It’s really about promoting each other,” Well-Off-Man said of the relationships. Two museums - the Ralph Foster Museum at College of the Ozarks and the Daisy Airgun Museum - created or redesigned brochures for the occasion.

The museum does little to draw attention to the cases; patrons might not even know they’re there if they don’t wander beyond the temporary exhibition galleries. But those who do are delighted with the displays, Well-Off-Man said.

Each regional display refers visitors to correlating pieces in Crystal Bridges’ permanent collection. For instance, the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum case holds a small replica of Chuck Close’s 2009 triptych of Clinton, not currently on display. And the Ralph Foster Museum display includes a small copy of Andy Warhol’s portrait of Dolly Parton (Foster’s Ozark Jubilee television show helped launch Porter Wagoner’s career; he and Parton often performed together).

MIGHTY MARKETING

The Eureka Springs Historical Museum is renovating its first floor, maybe more, in anticipation of additional visitors resulting from its spot in the wall at Crystal Bridges. With some 13,000 visitors coming to Crystal Bridges each week, “we’re hoping that some of them will want to come here,” said Steven Sinclair, director of the Eureka Springs Historical Museum.

Fundraising is ongoing - “We’re shooting for the moon,” Sinclair said - to install additional walls and create all-new exhibits. The plan is to redo the second floor next, with help from donors.

“In a way, this display that’s at Crystal Bridges is, in fact, advertisement for the whole city of Eureka Springs,” he said.

The Cherokee Heritage Center display at Crystal Bridges includes an early 19th century cast iron spider pot used by Native Americans along the Trail of Tears. The center has others, but to be able to share this particular piece with Crystal Bridges is well worth creating a hole in the collection, said museum curator Mickel Yantz.

“They do get more visitors than we do, and to be able to share something from such an important time in Cherokee history was definitely worth it to us,” he said.

Yantz said the center expects to see more visitors, but the larger goal is to bring more awareness and education about the Cherokee history and culture to people in Arkansas.

Allyn Lord, director of the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale, said she has no hard evidence that having case space at Crystal Bridges drove additional traffic to Shiloh when it was featured last year, “but anecdotally, we at least got some visitation from that.”

“Some visitors over the year mentioned it,” she said. “I think if we were to have requested that information, we might have found that there were more.”

Even before the Crystal Bridges opened, Lord said she was often asked if she was concerned about competition from its architectural marvel to the north.

Never, she said.

“Museum visitors are museum visitors. So if they’re art museum people they like to go to science and history museums and vice versa,” she said.

Visitors coming from farther distances are also more likely to take in as much culture as they can once they’re here, even if they’re coming with Crystal Bridges at the top of their list of attractions.

“There are more cultural tourists coming to the area, and what’s bringing more cultural tourists to the area primarily is Crystal Bridges,” said Bland.

She said she is interested to see whether her facility experiences a drop in traffic now that Crystal Bridges has replaced its display.

“We’ll kind of track that over the next year,” she said, “and I’m sure the museums who are putting their things in there will be looking, too, to see how much impact that has for them.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/04/2013