Crystal Bridges

This past weekend my friend Jeremy and I went on a road trip to check out the new Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Below are some of my crappy pictures with captions. Enjoy!

Downtown Bentonville was having a lovely farmers market. It also has these giant pink snails all over the place. I don't really know why, but they're a lot of fun.

The museum is a set of connected buildings in a valley. They cross over this pool of a creek. Visitors descend several storeys to get to the entrance. 

This is where the museum's name comes from--it's supposed to look like crystal bridges over the creek.

In better weather this pool would be full, and there would be waterfalls under the restaurant building. 

One benefit of putting your museum in the middle of nowhere? The surrounding landscape is gorgeous.

You can tell it's a new building built for this purpose. Even the ceilings and lighting are aesthetic.

The designers anticipated large crowds; the galleries are huge and open. 

Looking out from the modern gallery to sculpture and trees.

The collection is so large, and arranged in a chronologically-ordered forced path, that they break up the flow with mini-libraries and transition areas with nothing but pretty views out the windows.

I don't know if it's a distaste for abstraction or just that it's at the end of the journey, but the contemporary gallery was the least populated.

The museum expects a lot of visitors with little art museum experience. When you enter the first gallery there's a guard who explains the basic rules over and over again. However, almost nobody used the iPod guided tour. I found this surprising and refreshing.

Even the gift store is lush and roomy. It's probably the fanciest museum gift store I've seen.

And oh yeah, they have art. So much art. The collection is comprehensive and thorough. So many pieces, almost all of them paintings. So many! This is one of the first you see, and one of the most famous. 

This was probably my favorite picture there. It's a large and subtle portrait of Anne Page, whoever that is, by Dennis Miller Bunker, whoever that is. I want to learn more about this painter.

I won't be the first to mention the collection's more quirky elements. This is one of a series of paintings on pallets, taking advantage of the hole in the center.

Hello, beautiful. They have a few Sargent portraits,  and a few similar paintings from other artists of the same period.

Adding fuel to the "Wal-mart Museum" reputation, there was quite a crowd around this Norman Rockwell "Rosie the Riveter" piece. The man in front of me kept assuring his companion that this is not the original.

This Stuart Davis piece, "Rue de l'Echaude," is the other standout for me. This photo doesn't do justice to the colors of this thing.

The contemporary gallery doesn't shy away from race issues, including this huge Kara Walker piece.

And here's my friend Jer, remarking on how much the cafe looks like a European train station.