Walton-backed museum sends ripples across USA

BENTONVILLE, Ark. -- Strip malls and office parks line the landscape of this northwest Arkansas city at the foot of the Ozark Mountains.

Its downtown square has two eateries, a jewelry store, a courthouse and a statue of a Confederate soldier. Chain restaurants far outnumber locally owned ones.

At first glance, Bentonville — population 35,000 — seems an unlikely setting for a world-class art museum. But in a wooded ravine not far from the square, workers are putting the finishing touches on what will be one of the world's most important museums of American art.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is set to open here in November. It will be infused with an $800 million endowment by the family of the founders of Wal-Mart — four times that of the renowned Whitney Museum in New York.

It's the brainchild of Alice Walton, 62, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and an heiress to the Walton family fortune.

Alice Walton's acquisition of some of the country's most important pieces of American art, and the fact that they soon will hang in this rural corner of middle America, have rattled the art world.

Walton's backers say that legendary paintings such as Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter, now part of the Crystal Bridges collection, deserve to be seen in rural America, not just in big cities such as Boston, New York and Los Angeles.

"Some people cannot process the thought that fine art and Arkansas can go together," Bentonville Mayor Bob McCaslin says. "Obviously, they can."

Wal-Mart, headquartered in Bentonville, is the world's largest retailer, with 8,400 stores worldwide and annual sales of more than $405 billion. The museum is just 2 miles and a five-minute drive away from Wal-Mart's sprawling world headquarters on Southwest Eighth Street.

Sam Walton started the retail empire with a small five-and-dime store in the downtown square in 1950. (Today, it's the Wal-Mart Visitor's Center.) Alice Walton grew up playing in the nearby woods.

Critics of the new Crystal Bridges Museum, such as author Rebecca Solnit and Ned Cramer, editor of Architecture magazine, argue that Walton — the third-richest woman in the world with an estimated worth of $21.2 billion, according to Forbes.com — has used her wealth to poach paintings that should remain in their home cities.