BENTONVILLE — A recent art initiative tested in Bentonville has inspired organizers to expand it to the rest of the country.
More than 8,000 Bentonville elementary school students were asked to interpret one of Walmart founder Sam Walton’s three basic principles — respect, service and excellence — through drawings last year.
At A Glance
Brendan O'Connell
One of Brendan O'Connell's paintings, "The Art of Retail", is on display in the Walmart Heritage Exhibit Gallery at the Walmart Visitor Center in downtown Bentonville. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, however, has not purchased any of O'Connell's work, he said.
Source: Staff Report
On April 20, 2012, children filled the Tiger Athletic Center with their drawings. The art was collected and converted into a mural called “Wal-Art.” The mural is displayed on the side of a building at the southeast corner of Main Street and Central Avenue downtown.
The project’s purpose was to spark creativity and show virtually anyone can be an artist, said Brendan O’Connell, a professional artist from Connecticut who spearheaded the effort.
O’Connell wants to build on the Bentonville project by getting at least a million children from across the country to participate in a national art event.
“The goal is to get a million kids to collaboratively interpret the idea of something they’re thankful for, and crowd-source creativity,” O’Connell said. “But from a larger perspective, we’d like to build this tribe that has an ongoing relationship with creativity.”
The event is planned for November. O’Connell’s organization, Everyartist.me, is building a downloadable kit that will allow parents and teachers to register and become local event coordinators. The kit includes instructions for staging an event, group lesson plans on drawing, stickers and other incentives for the participating children.
O’Connell envisions projecting each child’s work of art onto a national landmark, such as the Washington Monument.
“We’re designing this app where teachers and moms or kids themselves can upload their art to our databank, and then we will have the million drawings online,” O’Connell said. “Then we will project them. There are a number of options on how it could be done.”
O’Connell’s identity as an artist is entrenched in Walmart. That helps explain how Bentonville became the testing ground for his idea.
O’Connell has become known for painting scenes from the inside of Walmarts. He has painted everything from a display of peanut butter jars to a line of checkout stands. This artwork has sold for tens of thousands of dollars. It also has earned him appearances on television shows like “The Colbert Report” and he has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker and The Boston Globe.
O’Connell noticed any time a painter set up an easel, children were fascinated by it.
“My wife is a landscape painter, and we’ve noticed kids get engaged in the magic of it all the time. It’s just fascinating. The kids want to see the magic of art on a page,” O’Connell said.
That led to his idea for the massive art project he orchestrated in Bentonville. He contacted Alan Dranow, Walmart’s senior director of heritage and marketing. Dranow put him in touch with Daniel Hintz, director of Downtown Bentonville Inc. Hintz connected him with Mary Ley, director of communications for the Bentonville School District.
O’Connell gave a presentation on his project at a conference last month in Atlanta, where he described Bentonville as a “small town on steroids.”
“We had 30 busloads of kids over a five-hour period delivering their drawings to the indoor football field of the local high school,” he told an audience at the conference. “It was just a magic day. It was amazing to see what happened.”
O’Connell said he never drew when he was a child. He taught himself to draw when he was 21 and living in Paris.
“If I could teach myself to draw, I believe I can teach anyone in America to draw,” he said.
Ley serves on the Everyartist.me Advisory Board, a diverse mix that includes actor Alec Baldwin.
When Ley first talked to O’Connell, he asked about the possibility of getting 200 students to participate in the Bentonville project.
“I said, ‘We ought to involve every first- through sixth-grader,’” Ley said.
Numerous business and organizations helped make the event happen. Crayola, for example, gave the district 25,000 markers, Ley said.
Ley will be involved in the national initiative as well. Everyartist.me is flying her to Houston on June 27 to participate in a meeting with school officials there.
“It’s cool that Bentonville is the seed that got this going,” she said.
Wal-Art debuted about the same time that the pink snails — a public art initiative sponsored by the 21c Museum Hotel — popped up around downtown last year. Hintz said those two projects represented Bentonville well.
“You’ve got this amazing stuff coming here from all over the world,” Hintz said. “But then we’re also a small town that looks to its kids as a resource, that really engages its young people. The indelible legacy is, I still see kids coming down and pointing to their artwork. It’s engaged young people and families in an incredible way.”
The mural likely will stick around for a while.
“As of now, I’ve not heard of any plans to take it down,” Hintz said.
Web Watch
Visit Everyartist.me to learn more about the organization's national collaborative art event.