Days 7: KC to Bentonville, Bentonville

Day 7:  Kansas City to Bentonville, April 12

FOTD: The "Royals" name originates from the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, and rodeo held annually in Kansas City since 1899.

Pics:  Crystal Bridges including shots of our co-leaders, Evans and DB, the 21C Museum Hotel and art collection; Turrell skyscape

Weather:  NO Rain! Clear! Sun! in the high 50s

Short FitCtr, long wait for cereal, 3.5 hrs in the bus to Bentonville and arrival at Crystal Bridges Museum, designed by Moshe Safdie (he also did the Kauffman Center for Performing Arts, which we just visited).

The museum is notable for its architecture, primarily four interlocking buildings surrounding a small lake with the dining area forming one side of the square over a dam that allows water to flow from one portion of the lake down to another. The museum focuses on American art, and flows from one end of the dining area through the three other buildings to the other end of the dining room. It opened on 11/11/11 and has been a huge success, bringing well over a million people to a relatively obscure part of Arkansas (well, not obscure if you know that Bentonville is the headquarters of Walmart and the museum’s benefactor is Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton.

Lunch in Eleven, the museum restaurant (see opening date) and THB has shrimp and grits (very good), iced tea and cookie, then a tour of the museum, where art is arranged in oldest to most recent. The featured exhibition is Norman Rockwell, almost everybody is using the guide (i-touches) except THB, who, not enamored at all by Rockwell, speed walks the exhibit and rests up outside on a patio beside the lake in the interior of the main buildings (see pic of our co-leaders also resting up).

We’re staying at the 21C Museum Hotel, a few minutes walk from the museum (though a 10 minute drive to circle around to downtown Bentonville). It’s full of contemporary art from the last decade, and fascinating. We get a mini-tour, the current exhibition is “hybrid” so there are many mash-ups and things that look like one thing and are made of another; excellent!

We are going to see another James Turrell skyscape around sunset; it is a short walk to the piece (a small stone building), set between the hotel and the main part of Crystal Bridges, so we have an early dinner in the bar of the hotel: burger and fries for DB and Evans, “butcher” plate for DB (very good), wine and beer, $90.

The Turrell is his standard hole in the ceiling and led light show with one significant improvement: the “bench” is heated!! Time to retrofit all those other installations worldwide. THB and DB have seen quite a few, including sleeping in a Turrell house in Japan.