Nearly twenty years ago, Walmart heiress Alice Walton shocked the art world when she won the $35 million auction bid in May 2005 for Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits, a Hudson River School masterpiece owned by the New York Public Library. Her controversial idea of transplanting such a prized artwork to Bentonville, Arkansas, far from the madding crowds of New York City and Washington, DC, where both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art were vying for it, outraged many. And little was known in those East Coast metropolises about Bentonville, where Walton planned to exhibit Kindred Spirits and other top paintings, except that it was the headquarters of Walmart.
The groundbreaking of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a Moshe Safdie-designed monument to American art, signaled a seismic shift in the small city’s artistic sensibilities. On the cusp of the museum’s opening in 2011, The New Yorker mused that [Alice Walton’s] “goal is to make Crystal Bridges a necessary site of pilgrimage for art enthusiasts.”
Now over a decade later, Bentonville has indeed been transformed into a notable art destination that still feels like a well-kept secret. Anchored by Crystal Bridges to the north, a contemporary art space called The Momentary to the south, and the bespoke 21c Museum Hotel at the center, with large-scale installations and murals throughout downtown and along woodland trails, Bentonville ensures that the art museum experience is accessible—and free—to all.
Easily reached by direct flights from 23 American cities, Bentonville is the perfect art-focused weekend getaway. Here’s what you can’t miss in the charmingly cool Ozarks city.
Sleep in style at 21c, a boutique hotel in a contemporary art museum
Bentonville’s best stay is at 21c Museum Hotel, an art-filled oasis just a block from Bentonville Square and a picturesque, leafy stroll from Crystal Bridges’ grounds. The 21c Museum Hotels group boasts the largest collection of 21st-century art in the US, under the direction of 21c Museum Director and Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites. Each of the group’s eight hotel properties is open to the public 24/7 to allow exploration of their permanent collection and latest exhibits.
The 104 guest suites are spacious and luxe, outfitted in neutral tones and decorated with framed photography by 21c’s owner, Laura Lee Brown. Coming later this year will be a site-specific art installation hotel suite called Nightwatch by renowned artist Chris Doyle. The custom décor of the room was inspired by Fantasia, Disney’s famous 1940 animated musical anthology film, and the suite offers a unique and whimsical guest experience.
21c Bentonville’s current exhibit, Fragile Figures: Beings and Time, is open until January 2025. Displayed throughout the hotel’s lobby and gallery spaces is a curation of contemporary paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video art by internationally acclaimed artists, including Zanele Muholi, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Yvette Mayorga, and Marc Fromm. The works both celebrate and question the power and meaning behind portraiture. Through the lens of the artists’ own experience and culture, iconic pieces by Francisco de Goya, Michelangelo, Balthus, Francois Boucher, John Singer Sargent and Rene Magritte are referenced.
Standing guard throughout the museum are four-foot tall penguin sculptures made of recycled plastic that are the iconic motif of the 21c Museum Hotels. Designed by Cracking Art, an Italian art collective founded in 1993, the penguins were discovered by 21c’s founders at the Venice Biennale and are produced in a different color for each hotel property (Bentonville’s are green).
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Set outside of 21c is one of the museum’s permanent exhibits: Monica Mahoney’s Making Change. A 1962 Fleetwood Cadillac is covered in $952 worth of nickels, dimes and pennies, approximately how much Walmart reports it saves an American household per year.
Discover art and architecture in nature at Crystal Bridges
The Israeli architect Moshe Safdie designed Crystal Bridges based on the pillars of art, architecture and nature. The interconnected pavilions of the museum were engineered to blend into the surrounding rests and the natural Crystal Spring-fed courtyard ponds, one of which is dotted with Dale Chihuly’s colorful glass orbs Niijima Floats.
Inside the light-filled galleries, Crystal Bridges’ collection is exhibited to reframe the narrative of 500 years of American art. In the first gallery, opposite Nari Ward’s 2015 We the People installation with the preamble of the Constitution crafted out of shoelaces is Gilbert Stuart’s iconic 1797 portrait of George Washington. Subsequent galleries feature significant Hudson River School landscapes, such as Kindred Spirits and Albert Bierstadt’s Sierra Nevada Morning. Nearby, a temporary exhibit titled Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art examines the Indian Space Painters movement of the mid-20th century.
Further on is a salon-style display of genre paintings, from still lifes to interior scenes. The galleries culminate in the modern wing, with Abstract Expressionist canvases by Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, along with artwork by Pop Art phenomenons Roy Lichtenstein, Yayoi Kusama and Robert Rauschenberg.
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Crystal Bridges currently is in the process of a massive expansion that by 2026 will increase the footprint of the museum by 50% to add more galleries, educational spaces, and an outdoor plaza. One impetus behind the expansion is to spotlight Craft and Indigenous arts, for which the museum has hired dedicated curators.
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Crystal Bridges’ 120 forested acres also include over five miles of paved walking trails that are lined with exceptional modern and contemporary artworks such as James Turrell’s Skyspace: The Way of Color. On a visit, Turrell declared this installation the standard bearer of his Skyspace series. A few steps further, the iconic Louise Bourgeois’ Maman spider hulks over a peaceful creek, and Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Garden glimmers with silver mirrored balls. Art and architecture meld into nature at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House, which was relocated in its entirety from New Jersey to Crystal Bridges in 2015 and exemplifies Wright’s Usonian architecture.
Enjoy contemporary art exhibits and live music at The Momentary
The contemporary branch of Crystal Bridges is The Momentary, which made its debut in 2020. Housed inside a former cheese factory, The Momentary draws top art exhibits and a host of cultural offerings, live music performances and food festivals. From a grandstand and lawn for large performances to the more intimate Rode House for comedy and acoustics shows, The Momentary is revolutionizing the contemporary cultural scene in Bentonville.
One of the current exhibits, titled Mystic Parallax, is dedicated to Awol Erizku, the Ethiopian-American artist whose work spans photography, collage, sculpture, and multimedia. Parked outside of the museum is Erizku’s Ask the Dust, a red Porsche transformed into a garden with flowers blooming out of the hood of the car. This is the same car Beyoncé posed atop when she announced her pregnancy on Instagram in 2017.
This summer, The Momentary’s Live on the Green concert series has already hosted big names, such as John Legend and Portugal the Man, with Deadmau5, Shaggy, TLC, Patti Labelle, and Kaskade performing in the next few months.
Explore plein-air art throughout downtown Bentonville with OZ Art NWA
A short walk around the historic downtown district of Bentonville promises a collection of artistic treasures. A George Rickey sculpture spins in the garden of private members club Blake Street House, across the street in Osage Park lies a 50-foot paper airplane made of metal by LA-based artist Griffin Loop, and spanning a full wall off of Bentonville Square is a mural of blooming peonies, dogwoods, and butterflies by Louise “Ouizi” Jones. Even a back alley is surprisingly revived as an open-air gallery with Kevin Lyons’ Monster Alley Monsters, nine colorful and cartoonish creatures. This concentrated initiative of public art began in 2017, when the Walton-funded venture OZ Art NWA was founded to incorporate large-scale sculptures and mural art into downtown Bentonville.
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One of the newest commissions for downtown Bentonville is Lakes and Rivers by Austrian artist Stefan Sagmeister. Two enormous smallmouth bass, composed of small stainless steel disks shimmering in the sunlight and breezes, are situated outside the concrete garage of the Ledger, a six-story bike-able coworking space. The captivating installation was designed as a visual record to show how many people participated in activities on American waterways, a number that tripled from 6 million in 2006 to 18 million in 2020.
Athletic and artistic pursuits also meet at Coler Mountain Bike Preserve, where Bentonville earned its moniker of the “Mountain Biking Capital of the World.” OZ Art NWA has featured a selection of sculptures and installations that bikers and hikers can appreciate as they traverse over 17 miles of wooded trails.
Savor elevated cuisine in the presence of extraordinary art
The sophisticated culinary scene in Bentonville also reflects the city’s artistic leanings. The Hive, the restaurant at 21c Bentonville, was reimagined as a work of art itself, an installation entitled BuzzKill. Johnston Foster, a Nova Scotia-based artist, designed the convivial interior of The Hive out of repurposed materials to mimic the structure of a beehive. The restaurant is helmed by Chef Micah Klasky, whose delicious cuisine emphasizes local Northwest Arkansas produce and is inspired by his Southern roots.
Related: Culinary Antiques: The Art of the Restaurant
The Preachers’ Son, a restaurant housed inside a former church, was re-envisioned with airy, beamed ceilings and stained glass windows by local Arkansas artist George Dombek. A painting by Eamon Ore-Giron faces the dining room, on loan from OZ Art NWA.
And at Lady Slipper, a speakeasy-style tapas lounge tucked away from Bentonville Square, Kehinde Wiley’s massive Saint George and the Dragon painting overlooks the bar, another loan from OZ Art NWA.
The James Beard Awards have also spotlighted Bentonville in recent years. Chef Matthew Cooper, nominated for Best Chef South in 2024, runs Conifer, a farm-to-table, gluten-free restaurant inside a space that resembles a chic greenhouse, with a wood-hewn common table and potted plants, all overlooking the greenery of the city park across the street. And at 8th Street Market, a curated collective of shops and restaurants, is Yeyo’s, a Mexican street food taqueria by Chef Rafael Rios, a four-time semi-finalist for Best Chef of the South by the James Beard Foundation.
The shops at 8th Street Market also echo the city’s arts and design focus. At Hillfolk, an arts and crafts store, locally made candles, quilts and yarns are on display, as well as its own branded craft kits for needleworking and felting. The store also hosts art classes. Nearby is chocolatier Markham & Fitz, which produces homemade artisanal truffles, sea-salt caramels and chocolate bars. The stylish ramen shop, CO-OP, which was designed by Marlon Blackwell Architects, was awarded for its architecture in 2021.
Bentonville’s artistic wonders never cease. The city takes aesthetics seriously and nurtures a spirit of creativity and a sense of community. Thoughtfully developed and easily walkable amidst verdant nature, Bentonville encourages up-close and meaningful encounters with masterpieces by America’s most important artists in the friendliest of atmospheres. Come now to discover this special place that is poised to become the country’s next great art hub in America’s heartland.
Start planning your visit to Bentonville here.
