KUAF Public Radio Gets Crystal Bridges Officials’ Response to Kevin Murphy’s CultureGrrl Lament

After I published Kevin Murphy‘s candid appraisals (here and here) of his frustrating stint as American art curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, I invited the museum to respond.

I received no reply. But Sara Burningham of KUAF, the Fayetteville, AR, public radio station, did get the museum’s reaction, as part of her “Ozarks at Large” segment today about A Year of Mixed Headlines for Crystal Bridges, in which she interviewed Rod Bigelow, the museum’s executive director, and Mindy Besaw, its new curator.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early in her 18-minute interview segment, Burningham hit Bigelow and Besaw with this:

Kevin Murphy…told ArtsJournal blogger Lee Rosenbaum that he was “still recovering from the post-traumatic stress of that place.” He found it “hard…to acclimate” to life in Fayetteville. My facebook feed was filled with people talking about this—people who I don’t think read the ArtsJournal on a regular basis. [Of course they do!]

Bigelow’s response to Murphy’s blunt critique was this:

Everyone has their own opinion about where they live or what they do, and I’m proud of Northwest Arkansas and the arts and cultural scene here….Crystal Bridges is just one exciting note, along with the Walton Arts Center, TheatreSquared and others that have been doing amazing work in Northwest Arkansas. [Links are mine.]

Besaw added that one thing that had attracted her to Crystal Bridges was “the impact on a national scale—a different perspective, perhaps, than Kevin’s.” She added that she is now rethinking the installation of the permanent collection, to “highlight some different stories.” She will be Crystal Bridges’ coordinating curator for its showing of From Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic: Landscape Painting in the Americas (Nov. 7-Jan. 18), an exhibition organized by the Terra Foundation, Chicago; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil.

Successful from an attendance standpoint was State of the Art, the Crystal Bridges-organized national survey of recent contemporary art (closing tomorrow).

Bigelow noted that the reinstallation of the collection will include “some fantastic new acquisitions, both inside the museum and out. We’re not going to announce them today. Sorry!”

Might this be among them?

Crystal Bridges could certainly use an O’Keeffe of this importance (but the O’Keeffe Museum should never have disposed of it).

One new acquisition expected to be on view at Crystal Bridges beginning this summer is Frank Lloyd Wright‘s 1954 Bachman Wilson House, rescued by Crystal Bridges from its flood-prone site in Millstone, NJ, and now in the process of being reassembled on the Bentonville museum’s grounds.

“We just poured the wonderfully luscious red concrete as the floor of the building,” Bigelow informed Burningham.

If they can get the place to look as it did when I visited its original site, as part of an architecture bus tour that I took several years ago, it will indeed be luscious!