On Saturday night outside Crystal Bridges—the Bentonville, Arkansas, museum founded by Walmart heir Alice Walton—I spotted a whole lot of security wearing dongle earpieces and five-point lapel pins. This wasn’t your normal museum gala security. That’s right: Secret Service.
Given the presence of the first family of American consumerism, the Waltons, and a number of high-profile guests expected to attend, the gala was always going to be well-staffed. After 64 years, the Waltons still have a controlling share of Walmart, which earlier this year cracked the trillion-dollar threshold on its market cap. That’s not to mention the art on the walls. Crystal Bridges has on view masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, Norman Rockwell, and Kerry James Marshall, as well as Kindred Spirits, the Hudson River School gem by Asher Brown Durand that many consider the most important American landscape produced in the country’s artistic infancy. Alice Walton bought it for a reported $35 million in 2005, when the work was deaccessioned by the New York Public Library. There’s a Georgia O’Keeffe that Walton bought in 2014 for $44 million and Jasper Johns’s Flag, bought the same month, for $36 million.
Since opening in 2011, Moshe Safdie, the building’s architect, has been quietly discussing with Walton the process of expanding the original scheme of pavilions. Five years ago he broke ground on an expansion to add a new suite of exhibition wings, and the new spaces are ready to open to the public at the end of this week. There’s a giant Keith Haring show focusing on his sculptural work, and the other wing is a custom-built cathedral for Walton’s incredibly thorough but personal collection of contemporary art: Mark Rothko, Julie Mehretu, Donald Judd, Amy Sherald, Cecily Brown, and Hank Willis Thomas, who’s on the board of the museum.
Saturday was my fourth time at the museum in 48 hours, because why not? Admission is free, so visitors can dip in and out as they please, treating the museum as an extension of the town, all of it connected by bike paths. But the museum closed early Saturday, and that’s when the Secret Service started crawling through installing magnetometers.
I was waiting to go through a metal detector when I saw President Bill Clinton and Secretary Hillary Clinton walk into the museum, right into the new contemporary wing, and marvel at Rothko’s No. 210/No. 211 (Orange) (bought from a Swiss collection in 2012 for a reported $25 million) hanging salon-style in a kind of incredible flex that’s hard to put into words. As they were talking, Arianna Huffington came up to chat with the two of them—she once quite publicly feuded with the Clintons, but that was back in the ’90s, and certainly they’re all friends now. The Clintons eventually made their way past work by Fred Wilson and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s famous Untitled (Fishing) painting, sold at Christie’s in 2012, consigned by photographer Patrick Demarchelier. Once they sat for dinner, Bill found himself right next to Alice Walton, at the top table.
But the Clintons weren’t the only prominent politicians in attendance. Current Arkansas governor and former Donald Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was also there, sitting not far from museum directors Michael Govan and Thelma Golden, the singer Jewel, and Martha Stewart.
