BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS — Bentonville is booming. There are more construction cranes per capita here than in any other town of comparable size. One of the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan areas, Bentonville has an annual median household income of $108,000, far higher than that of most states and the national average. The rush-hour traffic jams on its streets and highways are a source of constant complaint and quiet pride. Nearly 400 of the Fortune 500 companies and thousands of smaller suppliers have felt compelled to open satellite offices in what was once denigrated as a flyover region of northwest Arkansas.
They are not here for the biking—though Bentonville proclaims itself the "biking capital of America" because of its 70 miles of inner-city and 400 miles of wilderness trails throughout the Ozark Mountains, renowned for their wild, wooded splendor. Bentonville is boomtown U.S.A. because Walmart Inc., the world's largest retailer, is based here. Known for low wages for its 2.1 million employees worldwide and 1.6 million workers in America, its opposition to unions, dangerous and poor working conditions, and low prices for consumers, Walmart is the Godzilla of American retail. With 10,750 stores and clubs in 19 countries worldwide and 5,200 stores throughout the U.S., 90% of Americans now live within 10 miles of one of its stores. If you live in rural or even suburban America, it is hard to avoid a Walmart or corporate sister Sam's Club.
While Walmart may be the region's economic engine, Crystal Bridges, the museum complex celebrating American art and "the American spirit," has put what was once a dreary small town of some 61,000 inhabitants on the nation's cultural and culinary radar. Founded in 2011 by Alice Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune who is now America's richest woman, Crystal Bridges houses one of the nation's largest and finest collections of American art, which now attracts over 700,000 visitors a year. While Ms. Walton's aggressive acquisition strategy has had its critics, there is little doubt that her determination to buy her way into the ranks of top American museums, plus the recent donation of three major collections, have made Crystal Bridges one of the country's most impressive cultural institutions, and among the most accessible. At any one time, between 500 and 600 paintings are on display. Because of the Walton family's $1.2 billion endowment, admission to the museum and its myriad classes, lectures, and events is free. It only closes on Tuesdays.
It is hard to escape the ironies inherent in the financing of a major American art museum and the concomitant explosion of prosperity in its hometown by a company that has been criticized for decades for its exploitation of workers and the destruction of local retail and businesses in rural America. Nor has Bentonville itself escaped the hideous sprawl that characterizes most American cities and suburbs. Apart from the museum district and its tastefully renovated downtown square—a project championed by the grandchildren of Walmart's founder, Sam Walton—the city is a mess. Which makes the contrast between what is one of the nation's most architecturally stunning museums and its aesthetically depressing surroundings all the most striking.
The museum site is magnificent—thanks mainly to the architecture of Boston-based Moshe Safdie, whose 201,000-square-foot structure composed of glass, cement, and wood, and topped with a copper roof, is nestled in a ravine and surrounded by streams. Built on 120 acres of Walton family land, the museum seems to float on the twin ponds whose water bubbles up at over 100 gallons a minute. Natural light floods its buildings and the interior bridges connecting them. The surrounding five miles of trails and forest are studded with sculptures by renowned artists like Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell. There are weekly vinyasa yoga lessons, art lectures, and classes for adults and children, bird watching tours, and summer concerts featuring regional musicians.
Some museum aficionados contend that the light which pours into the museum poses a challenge to the more delicate art, which may partly account for Ms. Walton's decision to enlarge the museum and its gallery space by 50%, an expansion currently underway while its existing galleries remain open. In addition to new gallery space, the 100,000-square-foot expansion will feature more gardens, fountains, gathering areas and a boardwalk. The new complex, also designed by Safdie, will open in June 2026.
Safdie's design is a perfect blend of his distinctive contemporary architecture and the region's landscape. While Ms. Walton initially considered building the museum atop one of the rolling hills around it, Safdie told me that after they walked the terrain and visited more than a dozen other modern art museums at home and abroad, they agreed that the building should be built within the ravine to blend into the landscape,an aesthetically brilliant call. In his book about architecture, If Walls Could Speak, Safdie said that he also altered the building's original design to save two "magnificent trees, nicknamed 'Thelma and Louise.'" The "conversation between art and nature" is one of the museum's most stunning and successful features.
Long before opening Crystal Bridges, Ms. Walton was collecting art, mostly for her own collection. Advised by a board of artists, art experts, and historians, she has long been an anonymous fixture at auctions and galleries, known for paying top dollar for works she wanted for her museum—Gilbert Stuart's iconic 1796 portrait of George Washington ($8.1 million), Asher B. Durand's "Kindred Spirits," (a controversial purchase for $35 million from the New York Public Library) Norman Rockwell's 1943 "Rosie the Riveter" ($4.9 million), one of Jasper Johns' "Alphabet" paintings (priced at $11 million) and an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Dolly Parton and a Chuck Close triptych depicting Bill Clinton (prices unknown).
Initially criticized by art critics for avoiding work that is too radical or politically controversial, conservatives have more recently accused the museum of being too heavily focused on race, gender, victimization, social justice, and critiques of capitalism. This is especially true of The Momentary, the museum's contemporary satellite which opened in 2020 in a decommissioned 63,000-square-foot cheese factory. Founded by Olivia, Tom, and Steuart Walton, The Momentary is an arresting, multidisciplinary space for visual and performing arts, food and other festivals, and artists in residence.
"At Crystal Bridges and The Momentary," the latter's website states, "We recognize our role as settlers and guests in the Northwest Arkansas region. We acknowledge the Caddo, Quapaw, and Osage as well as the many Indigenous caretakers of this land and water. We appreciate the enduring influence of the vibrant, diverse, and contemporary cultures of Indigenous peoples. We are conscious of the role in colonization that museums have played. As cultural institutions, we have a responsibility to engage in the dismantling of historical and systemic invisibility of Indigenous peoples past, present, and future. We choose to intentionally hold ourselves accountable to appropriate conversation, representation, connection, and education to facilitate a space of measurable change."
Whatever its weaknesses, Crystal Bridges has been a boon to lovers of American art and a godsend to Bentonville. The museum has also diverted attention from the ongoing sins of its greedy corporate father, Walmart. The company itself is as cheap as the museum is lavish. My visit to Bentonville coincided with Walmart's version of "Shark Week." My hotel was filled with small-businessmen scheduled to pitch their products or ideas to the company. A friend who did so more than a decade ago recalled his 20-minute appointment with a Walmart executive. He and his partner sat for hours in a corridor on a row of fold-up chairs, awaiting their turn to meet ever so briefly with a Walmart buyer. The only amenity was a coin-operated coffee machine at the end of the hall.
Perhaps Shark Week is more gracious these days since Walmart has been expanding its own corporate headquarters in Bentonville. Under construction is a new, 350-acre "Home Office" campus that is being rolled out in phases throughout the year. Walmart says the expansion is intended to reshape company culture by creating what its website calls a community-focused environment with extensive amenities for its 15,000 employees in 2.4 million square feet of space. Walmart's new headquarters, unlike that of other corporate rivals, is not being built on the town's outskirts with little connection to its heart. The new campus is located within the city and is connected to the city's streets.
Whether the gigantic new environmentally sensitive headquarters will quiet the company's many critics is a separate matter. In 2024, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a private, nonprofit coalition of local and state labor unions and technical professionals that promotes worker health and safety, included Walmart as an "unsafe" employer on its annual "dirty dozen" list, citing cases like that of Janikka Perry, who died in a store bathroom after allegedly being pressured to avoid taking sick time. The list also criticized Walmart for failing to protect employees from workplace violence, citing the high number of shootings at its stores. In 2024, Oxfam America accused Walmart (and Amazon) of using surveillance systems to pressure employees to work at an unsustainable pace and giving them inadequate breaks. Because so many of its workers are paid below a living wage, hundreds of thousands of Walmart employees must work second jobs or rely on Medicaid, SNAP, and other forms of public assistance to make ends meet.
While Walmart and its defenders argue that the company enriches poor and middle-class families by offering them cheaper goods, saving them thousands of dollars a year, new economic research challenges even that defense. A study by social scientists Lukas Lehner and Zachary Parolin and economists Clemente Pignatti and Rafael Pintro Schmitt matched up two demographically comparable groups of people and charted what happened to them when Walmart opened a store near them but not the other. They found that in the decade after Walmart opened, the average household in that community had a 6% decline in yearly income—or about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn't have a Walmart near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses, the researchers found. Perhaps a future acknowledgement on the walls of Crystal Bridges or one of its satellites will one day acknowledge their plight.