{"id":838241,"date":"2026-06-02T03:41:31","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T03:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/838241\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T03:41:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T03:41:31","slug":"inside-the-crystal-bridges-museum-of-american-arts-major-expansion-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/838241\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s major expansion – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art<\/a> is the centrepiece of a 134-acre campus in the small town of Bentonville, Arkansas\u2014the birthplace of Walmart. One of the company\u2019s heirs, Alice Walton, opened the museum in 2011 with the goal of marrying art and architecture with nature and wellness. Designed by the Boston-headquartered firm Safdie Architects, the museum consists of a series of concrete and glass structures linked by \u201cbridges\u201d over a natural ravine shaped into ponds and surrounded by woods and trails. <\/p>\n

On 6 June, a new segment of the museum will open downstream, adding 114,000 sq. ft to allow more space for its growing collection and art-and-wellness programming. The expansion, also designed by Safdie Architects and estimated to cost over $100m, will add 50% more space\u201429,000 sq. ft of it dedicated to galleries displaying pieces by artists including Mary Cassatt<\/a>, Theaster Gates<\/a>, Jun Kaneko and Kiki Smith<\/a>. A total of 200 works from the museum\u2019s permanent collection not shown before will now be on view, including a number of newly acquired pieces.<\/p>\n

Also new will be ceramics and digital-art studios and a \u201chome-like lounge for gathering with family, friends and community members\u201d, according to Crystal Bridges. And outdoors, there will be the new Ozark Discovery Canopy providing a playscape for kids, designed by the Philadelphia-based landscape architect Bryan Hanes.<\/p>\n

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The newly reinstalled Foundations of American Art Gallery \u00a9 Tim Hursley, courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art<\/p>\n

\u201cCrystal Bridges decided to expand, because our impact and the demand for what we offer outgrew our original footprint,\u201d Austen Barron Bailly, the museum\u2019s deputy director of curatorial affairs, tells The Art Newspaper. \u201cRecord\u2011breaking visitation from local and national audiences, along with significant growth in the collection (especially in craft and Indigenous art), made clear that the museum needed more space to thoughtfully support our mission of providing access to art to all.\u201d Last year, according to The Art Newspaper’s annual survey of museum visitor figures, attendance at the museum exceeded 800,000 people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“The inauguration of this second phase marks the culmination of a two-decade collaboration\u2014an evolving dialogue between architect, patron and institution\u2014that has shaped not only a building, but a shared vision for what a museum can be,\u201d the architect Moshe Safdie said in a statement. \u201cBeyond broadening its programme, the expansion extends and deepens the museum\u2019s connection to nature\u2014embedding new spaces for community, learning and the display of art within an architectural language shaped by the region\u2019s terrain.”<\/p>\n

Inside the museum, all the galleries have been refreshed with new lighting, colours and large-scale graphics. Some of the works on display are iconic Americana\u2014like Norman Rockwell<\/a>\u2019s Rosie the Riveter (1943) and Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s Jimson Weed\/White Flower No. 1 (1932)\u2014while others are more experimental. For example, the new exhibition Keith Haring in 3D<\/a> (6 June-25 January 2027), focuses on the New York artist\u2019s sculptural work, clothing and masks, skateboards and boomboxes, and a delightfully painted 1963 Buick Special.<\/p>\n

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A new gallery with installation view of Keith Haring in 3D \u00a9 Tim Hursley, courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Keith Haring artwork: \u00a9 Keith Haring Foundation<\/p>\n

\u201cKeith Haring<\/a> believed art should be accessible, engaging and part of everyday life\u2014values that align perfectly with the mission of Crystal Bridges,\u201d says Victor Gomez, an assistant curator of contemporary art at the museum. \u201cHis bold, familiar imagery draws people in right away, making the show feel welcoming to all kinds of guests.\u201d The works fit in aesthetically and physically as well, he adds: \u201cThe scale and colour of Haring’s works are ideally suited to the expansive and luminous new gallery with its natural light and 17ft-high ceilings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Museum lab<\/p>\n

While Crystal Bridges continues its mission at its newly expanded space in Bentonville, its sister organisation, the Art Bridges Foundation<\/a>, has been reaching out to museums across the US to help develop and fund their own projects related to art and wellness. About a dozen museums are currently participating in a special two-year programme through which they can borrow works from Art Bridges\u2019 art-sharing initiative, the Partner Loan Network, which encourages museums to take works out of storage and lend them to other institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuseums get a selection of artworks to incorporate some of their art and wellness initiatives around,\u201d says Anne Kraybill<\/a>, the chief executive of Art Bridges. \u201cThey also get $50,000 to implement these art and wellness ideas within their institutions.”<\/p>\n

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A sculpture by Marisol in one of the new gallery spaces, with a view of a campus nature trail \u00a9 Tim Hursley, courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art<\/p>\n

To help shape their programmes, the selected museums were invited to attend workshops at Art Bridges headquarters in Bentonville. Institutions in the first cohort that met in October include the Baltimore Museum of Art<\/a>, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico<\/a> in San Juan, Allentown Art Museum<\/a> in Pennsylvania, El Paso Museum of Art in Texas, Frye Art Museum in Seattle and North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have been advancing several wellness programmes on our own,\u201d says Museo de Arte director Mar\u00eda Cristina Gaztambide, \u201cbut having received the invitation to submit a proposal for this allowed our team to really think about what we could do in a more integrated manner.\u201d She adds that her museum was able to address \u201cnot only the topic of wellness but also access and inclusion\u201d. The target demographic for new programming includes the elderly and at-risk youth\u2014specifically, boys in correctional facilities.<\/p>\n

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Exterior view of the new bridge gallery \u00a9 Tim Hursley, courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art<\/p>\n

Annie Y. Salda\u00f1a, the director of the San Juan museum\u2019s Creative Community Development Center, says that Art Bridges\u2019 \u201cwellness toolkit\u201d has been especially helpful. \u201cIt talked about the four different areas that we can impact through art and wellness\u2014emotional, social, cognitive and physical well-being\u2014and helped us to design our activities, to make sure that we’re aligning our programming to measure that data.\u201d She adds it has also been valuable \u201cto network and be with other museum professionals and see what they were doing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, the Allentown Art Museum\u2019s accessibility team has been promoting social connections and emotional well-being with programmes for dementia patients and their caregivers, and field trips for homeschoolers and their families. The latter \u201cis a programme that involves artmaking as well as a tour of some of the works in our collection\u201d, says Margie Makowski, the manager of museum accessibility in Allentown.<\/p>\n

Some of these programmes are test trials, and Art Bridges plans to collect progress reports from the museums. \u201cWe want to look at the impact of some of these things that we could then scale,\u201d Kraybill says. \u201cThis is all new for us, too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is the centrepiece of a 134-acre campus in the small town…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":838242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,297557,59730,1033,171,329147,10158,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-838241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-building-projects","tag-crystal-bridges-museum-of-american-art","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-museum-expansions","tag-museums-heritage","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116678446544529810","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}