UA LITTLE ROCK ART STUDENTS TAKE ON BENTONVILLE

On Apr. 15, around 40 art students, faculty and staff crowded into a charter bus at 7:30 in the morning. Their mission? To romp around Bentonville and see some art.

I’m being hyperbolic. Really, the trip was to visit the many art museums Bentonville offers. Namely, the iconic Crystal Bridges and its sister museum, The Momentary.

The trip was funded by the Windgate Foundation, the same organization that helped fund the Windgate Center of Art and Design on campus. The Windgate Foundation graciously paid for transportation and museum admission to Crystal Bridges temporary Diego Rivera’s America exhibit.

Their donation towards the trip was a part of an effort to make the arts more accessible to UALR art majors. A trip to Bentonville and back can be costly for a student— Hello gas prices!—so the Windgate Foundations funding of the trip was a big help to the many art students without access to proper transportation or funds to pay for gas or admission.

Crystal Bridges is an absolute behemoth of a museum, with the property spanning 120 acres of Ozarkian nature. Though the main museum, designed by the world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie, is its main appeal, there are a multitude of other things to see. There are a number of outdoor art pieces, trails, a library and even a house built by the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright that museum goers can tour.

Although admission to the main museum is free, there are, of course, a plethora of other ways to spend your money there. The temporary exhibits can only be entered if you pay a fee and like any other museum, there are plenty of gift shops to go around.

The museum was pioneered by Alice Walton, heiress to the Walmart fortune. It is a non-profit organization that opened on November 11, 2011. The Crystal bridges permanent collection contains American art that spans five centuries, and the museum’s mission is to provide a broad range of American art from artists of different backgrounds and cultures.

The students had about three hours to walk around the museum. Though that may sound like quite a long time, one would realize it’s not once they enter the museum. There’s so much to see, from classical to contemporary art, that it felt like a race to see everything.

The next museum that the students visited was The

Momentary, a sister museum that opened its doors in 2020. Interestingly enough, it was a former decommissioned cheese factory but is now a multidisciplinary space for visual and performing artists.

Whereas Crystal Bridges is more honed into traditional art such as paintings, sculptures, drawings, etcetera, The Momentary is more focused on installation and performing arts. At the current moment, there were three exhibitions being held at The Momentary.

Yvette Mayorgas’ exhibition What a Time to Be will be displayed until Oct. 15, 2023. It is an absolute delight of painting, sculpture and confectionary techniques. Mayorga primarily uses acrylic piping to create overwhelmingly pink sculptures that are reminiscent of the intricate piping you’d see on an expensive birthday cake.

Her work primarily focuses upon nostalgia and the historical canon of art. Many of her pieces mirror the composition of seventeenthcentury rococo paintings and yet subverts them with her bright pink style depicting her family members.

The second exhibition, To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19º36’16.9”N 72º13’07.0’’W,

42º21’48.762’’N 71º1’59.628’’W, 36° 22′ 0.1848” N94° 12′ 8.64” W) by Firelei Baez, will also be staying at The Momentary until October 15th, 2023.

Baez’s exhibition is absolutely massive, massive walls precariously lean to the side, crumbling apart. The walls are painted in a rich indigo and white pattern reminiscent of West African indigo painting. Barnacles and rocks creep up the work surface, reaching up the tilted surface.

Above the walls is a canopy of Cobalt blue tarp with organic, tear drop-esque shapes adorning it. From there, the light shines down onto the walls, creating a flurry of light that dances around the exhibit. It is almost as if the viewer is underwater, examining the ruins of a lost civilization.

In To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction, Baez reimagined the archaeological site of the Sans-Souci Palace in Haiti. Baez discusses the cultural dialogue between Europe, Africa and the Americas in its crumbling walls and vivid paintings.

The next museum the students visited was the 21c Museum, Hotel and Restaurant. The museum section of the building has both indoor and outdoor art, sculptures, paintings, drawings and even a short film.

The piece that many of the students congregated around and even took pictures in front of was The Garden by Portia Munson. It is a mixed-media installation that resembles a bedroom cluttered with various 70s, 80s and 90s ephemera.

Dresses are sewn together like a quilt and cascade from the ceiling. A mountain of stuffed rabbits crowd the bed. Faux flowers line the room, drooping out of their containers as if trying to escape.

The work is overwhelming to look at, to say the least. It is a flurry of pinks and florals. It provides a broad and telling range of products that are marketed towards women, made gaudy by their crowded placement.

It invites the viewer to dissect campitalism’s view of femininity, of how the world continues to create aggressively feminine products for women whilst annihilating the planet.

After a long day of art-viewing, the students, staff and faculty crowded back into the bus for a sleepy drive back to Little Rock. Though overwhelming due to the amount of art present in all three museums, it was undoubtedly an unforgettable learning experience.

BY SKYLAR BOONE

BRIDGES