A museum that transformed Bentonville, Arkansas, when it opened in 2011 is about to change the city’s identity even further. Bentonville was primarily known for being Walmart Central—it’s where the store’s massive 350-acre corporate campus is located.

The World’s Wealthiest Woman And Her Vision

Now, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art with its treasure trove of works by Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell and Mark Rothko, among others, is opening a 114,000-square-foot expansion designed by Safdie Architects, the firm behind the original building. The campus is ingeniously tucked into a hill, blending with the Ozark streams, trees and wildlife that surround it. The addition, which opens on June 6 and 7 with a roster of events, expands the museum’s footprint by fifty percent.

Visitors will be pulled deeper into the campus’ 134 acres with its nearly five miles of trails that connect three new pavilions. Topped by sloping roofs, the structures’ slanted wall windows are warmed by exposed yellow pine beams that curve overhead.

Alice Walton, the only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, is the visionary behind the museum. With a net worth of $134 billion, Walton ranks as the wealthiest woman in the world, according to the Forbes World’s Billionaires List. Since opening fifteen years ago, the museum has brought an extraordinary collection of art and educational programs to a largely culture-deprived area.

A Singular Keith Haring Exhibit

First up in the new galleries is Keith Haring in 3D, a rare look at the artist’s three-dimensional work: totems, painted boomboxes, skateboards, clothing, sculptures and a 1963 Buick Special. The exhibit highlights the famed 1980s artist’s lesser-known career as a sculptor. Crystal Bridges bills the assemblage of work as “the first exhibition to highlight Keith Haring’s work in three dimensions.”

One of Haring’s 3D works not included in the exhibit is especially noteworthy: a carousel built for Luna Luna, an amusement park in Hamburg, Germany that operated in the summer of 1987. Relaunched in 2023, the outdoor park was reimagined as Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, an interior touring exhibit with the original and restored carnival rides created by Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Salvador Dali, David Hockney and others.

Haring’s Luna Luna carousel, instead of horses, had three-dimensional versions of his Pop-Art figures as seats that children could ride. Haring also created massive, hand-painted tarps for the Luna Luna park.

Crystal Bridges’ Haring exhibition “feels both fresh and revealing,” said Austen Barron Bailly, the museum’s deputy director of curatorial affairs. “Even for audiences who think they already know his work.”

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room has proven to be a sure-fire draw for many museums. No surprise, then, it’s also included in Crystal Bridges’ new galleries, along with Teresita Fernández’s Manigua (Mirror), a Caribbean landscape created from layers of black sand and charcoal.

Two new galleries connect via a bridge that doubles as a display space for pottery and sculpture, adjacent to a new 40-seat cafe, Quartz + Honey. The eatery’s windows overlook the natural setting: five acres of gardens, streams and a newly installed 15,000-square-foot pond. There are also hands-on aspects: a creative space that houses ceramics studios, an artist-in-residence quarters, a digital art lab, a community lounge and maker spaces.

A Reimagined, Thematic Collection

With the expansion, Crystal Bridges took a new direction when it reorganized nearly all of its permanent collection that encompasses five centuries of American art. Rehung during the expansion, the artworks were thematically arranged, allowing works from different traditions and eras to speak to each other.

It’s an innovative non-linear approach, which, when done at other institutions, has been called daring; major museums traditionally arrange their collections encyclopedically.

The thematic approach was most notably premiered by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the May opening of its David Geffen Galleries, a $724 million building that spans Wilshire Boulevard. There, the rotating permanent collection is organized around four major bodies of water: the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. The arrangement reflects how people and cultures of those oceanic nexus points interacted.

Crystal Bridges chose five thematic sections titled We, Dreaming, Nature, Making Our Mark, and We the People. The groupings take visitors on a journey that includes “the power of dreaming and artistic imagination, our relationships with nature and its materials, the objects that shape our spaces and cultures, and the unfolding story of America,” according to a website description.

Bailly called the thematic schematic “an intentionally unconventional interplay of objects, materials and artists’ voices.” She added that with the expansion and reorganization, first-time visitors are no longer “bound by expectations of what a museum experience should look like, which inspires us to think differently about how we present art.”

About 200 new Indigenous artworks are included in the expansion, including Kent Monkman’s “Saving the Newcomers,” a monumental painting that turns on end the first contact between Indigenous peoples and European settlers on Turtle Island (North America).

The ‘Bentonville Effect’

When philanthropist Alice Walton opened the museum in 2011, Bentonville, Arkansas had a population of about 37,000. Her ambitious vision would be encapsulated into what’s become known as the “Bentonville Effect.” The cultural infusion into the wholly Walmart-identified city put the area on the global map. The move attracted younger talent and a host of new restaurants and boutique hotels, as well as a cycling culture and a foodie scene. Crystal Bridges’ downtown contemporary art satellite, the Momentary, also contributed to the area’s reinvigoration envisaged by Walton.

Bailly calls the city’s transformation “a shared sense of pride and possibility,” one that has expanded to the entire region.

Crystal Bridges has a free admission policy, enabled by an endowment, which has helped to attract about 15 million visitors since its opening.