We continue our Year of Months on Valentine's Day.
Alice Walton (the only daughter of Sam, and the "wild" child) build the art museum Crystal Bridges in 2011 (opened 11.11.11) for about $1.2 billion, and has filled it with her own art. The museum sits on 150 acres of the old Walton family backyard in Bentonville, AR, and is, quite frankly, beautiful.
But, as always, we started in on a United flight out of Houston. This time a small Embraer that is an easy plane to get to like. (If you can wrangle an emergency exit row)
The airport serves Bentonville, Fayetteville, and Springdale in Northwestern Arkansas. It was a little father from the hotel than I had thought it would be, but our Uber driver did give us a tour of the area, driving us by all the new Walmart properties (with our permission, of course). Truly astounding.
The hotel, called the 21C Museum Hotel, part of a small chain, was a very short walk from the museum property.
View from our hotel
We dropped off our (very limited) luggage, and walked over to the museum.
There were plenty of interesting sculptures on site, one of which was this pig. You may recall (or scroll down) that we saw a real pig in Washington on the Brazos, so perhaps pigs may be a theme on these various trips.
The weather was chilly, but nice:
Doreen with Pig
There is a James Turrell Skyspace on site (you need to show up at dawn of dusk to see the show. We have one in Houston on the Rice campus. This one has a sign saying "Closed for Repairs"
James Turrell Skyspace
but the rambling path soon took you to the museum itself.
This is really beautiful. Designed by Moshe Safdie, and constructed by some real artisans, it is stunning.
Crystal Bridges
While the art is still being collected by Alice and her crew, they do have some recognizable pieces.
Rosie the Riveter.
George Washington
As far as we can tell, the "bridges" are these two structures (Called "silver armadillos" locally) that cross the dammed Crystal Creek. (we had a big discussion as to the local etymology of small waterways. "Creek" "Crick" "Stream" "Rivulet" and so on.)
Here you can see Doreen twice in the same photo. Amazing!
Doreen times two
A big Buckminster Fuller sculpture called the "Fly's Eye"
Bucky!
and a big spider sculpture from Louise Bourgeois
Maman.
This is inside the Turrell Skyspace
Turrell
Since this was Valentine's Day, Doreen made reservations at the swankiest place in town - The Hive at our hotel. But before that, we had tickets to a sound and light show at the museum called "North Forest Lights" We had timed tickets (10:00 PM!!!) but we learned from the front desk at the hotel that they weren't checking the times on the tickets. Good thing for us! It was very cold, and we had dinner reservations.
So we got there at 7:00, and really enjoyed the show:
There were various light installations in different groves of trees:
We got back to the hotel (very cold) about 9:00, and proceeded to have a great dinner.
The best thing on the menu was a crab and celery gratin. I never would have ordered it in a million years, but Doreen did, and we split (I had Arkansas Paddlefish Caviar. The gratin was better).
The next morning we enjoyed a leisureliness breakfast in our room, and then proceeded to wander about the small, car oriented town of Bentonville. We started with the town square, and were greeted by Second Lieutenant James H. Berry, who, we are assured, was beloved of Arkansas, a soldier and statesman who performed every duty to an eye single to the public welfare.
The same square has the world's original Walton Five and Dime, which included a small museum. It was nice, but I guess not too photogenic, as I took no photos.
But we did take a LONG walk to the Peel Mansion, just near the Walmart Home Office.
There was a log cabin on the property:
As well as an 1875 mansion built by Colonel Peel after the war for his poor wife. (who had 11 kids, and build five different dry storage bins in her house to stave off the hunger she felt during the Civil War. Bentonville was razed - only three buildings remained after the war. Such is the price of treason.
We then ambled down to a food court near an old cheese factory.
We had Filipino food at the 8th Street Market!
It was delicious.
Then we headed back to the museum. We had a 2:30 guided tour of a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian house that had been moved to the Crystal Bridges from New Jersey.
I always wondered about this:
The house cost something like $30,000 when it was built in 1956. I think they spent $2 million and two years moving it to Arkansas.
It is darned sweet, though:
Doreen would like to live in a place like this:
For dinner Saturday night, we ate at a place that I though was called the Tuscan Trotter. Sounds good, right? Italian pork is that I was thinking.
It was really the Tusk and Trotter, a local gastro pub. It was really delicious, especially the pork rinds!
Doreen is inside Bucky's Fly Eye for scale:
Then we went back to the hotel. This chain uses these big penguins as their familiar. Each hotel has a different color.
Ours was green.
They floated around the hotel, so we grabbed on to watch while we were checking out.
You can see Doreen here in her Crystal Bridges T-shirt with the Big Penguino.
I sat down with fellow as well.
But then he was ready to go:
I didn't talk much about the hotel, but there was a lot of art there, as well.
Also, poetry. This is by Derek Walcott:
and it refers to these boats, installed nearby:
There was also this little sand dune maker.
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