Surreal is a good word to describe how I feel working for the Bentonville Convention and Visitors Bureau these days.
Why you ask? Well, in just five short months I will be just blocks away from the works of Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Wyeth, Asher B. Duran, and John Singer Sargent to name a few.
These are the guys that I fell in love with in my Art History 101 class my freshman year in college, and now, some of the actual paintings printed in my college text book will be feet away from me as I stroll through the galleries of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
On November 11, 2011, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will open its doors to the public, changing the face of Bentonville and the state of Arkansas forever.
Nothing of this caliber has ever been built in a setting like Bentonville, AR, so there really is nothing to compare it to as far as what it will do to the area in regards to the economic and cultural impact.
It’s really a wait and see game at this point, but what a fun game it is.
The anticipation has been exponentially lingering for the past couple of years as the opening was postponed due to environmental challenges (building a museum in a rock layered ravine over a body of running water can be a bit tricky).
This gift of time has given the community the opportunity to sufficiently prepare for the arrival of a new kind of tourist, the leisure traveler. I equate the postponement to taking two weeks to study for a final exam as opposed to the night before. In other words, we are well prepared to entertain and amaze the leisure traveler whereas had the museum opened in 2009 as originally predicted, we would have been cramming for finals.
Over the past several years the city of Bentonville has undergone a great transformation including renovations to and additions of public parks, gardens, paved urban trails, city streets, wayfinding signage, curbing, decorative street lamps, re-bricking of key intersections and the downtown square to name a few of the updates.
There is even a burgeoning culinary scene with cafes, bistros, and evening hangouts that have popped up in the city center. Our downtown has a pulse and energy about it that it has never had before, in my experience.
One of the beauties of the museum is its location. It is rare for museums of this caliber to be built anywhere other than urban centers like New York or Los Angeles, but think about how lucky Middle America is to have such a jewel within driving distance.
People that may not have had the means to travel to such large urban centers to visit the Met or the J. Paul Getty Museum will now have access to some of the most famous and celebrated works of American art.
Come November 11, 2011, I will be a tourist in my own town.
The surreal will become very real as I walk the halls of Crystal Bridges and admire the masters and their works, works that I never thought I’d be able to view on a daily basis.
How lucky we are to be given such a gift.
