Collecting in Context: A Journey to Crystal Bridges

7/27/2025

Hector Chen

When I told my professor I was heading to Arkansas, he laughed and said, “You’re the first person I know going there for culture.” It was a good line, and we both enjoyed it. I knew Crystal Bridges was there, of course—but I didn’t expect it to exceed every expectation I had. What I found wasn’t just a museum with ambition, but a masterclass in how to build a collection: with clarity, conviction, and strategic purpose.

Crystal Bridges is a cultural powerhouse—and one of the most strategically built collections I’ve encountered—not just for what it holds, but for how and why it holds it. Few institutions today combine architectural ambition, curatorial clarity, and public commitment so deftly. What struck me most was how thoroughly everything had been considered—not just the individual works, but their placement, their pairings, and the spatial logic that governs how they’re encountered. There’s a kind of curatorial intelligence running through the museum that’s hard to fake and harder still to scale.

Crystal Bridges Museum, designed by Moshe Safdie

That sensibility begins with the building itself. Designed by Moshe Safdie, the museum spans a ravine and curves around two spring-fed ponds, linked by bridges and suspended galleries. The space invites movement, transparency, and reflection—both physically and conceptually. Natural light is modulated with care; the galleries aren’t rigid boxes but unfolding volumes. You’re never fully inside or outside, but always somewhere in between—crossing thresholds, adjusting perspectives. This openness mirrors the museum’s curatorial philosophy: one that resists fixed narratives in favor of layered ones, and prefers to let artworks echo across time and form.

It’s no surprise, then, that the collection reflects this same commitment to openness and clarity. The museum doesn’t attempt encyclopedic coverage. Instead, it focuses tightly on American art across five centuries—but within that framework, it takes meaningful risks. The first thing a visitor sees upon entering the permanent collection is We the People (Black Version) by Nari Ward, spelled out in shoelaces, the letters rendered in looping, partially obscured calligraphy. The material is humble, tactile, personal. The phrase—lifted from the Constitution—immediately pulls you into the stakes of the place. It sets a tone: that what’s familiar must be re-read, and that history will not be presented as settled, but as something to be worked through. Placing this work at the entrance is more than bold—it’s instructive. It tells you this museum isn’t here to affirm what you already know. It’s here to complicate it.

Nari Ward, We the People, 2018.

Throughout the museum, works aren’t arranged by school or strict chronology. Opposite We the People hangs a suite of portraits depicting “Americans” across vastly different times and traditions. A formal likeness of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart anchors one side—emblem of the founding myth, rendered in powdered hair and presidential calm. Nearby, Roger Shimomura’s Block Dance Break explodes with color and confrontation, its cartoonish energy pushing back against the racial caricatures imposed on Asian Americans, particularly during World War II. A third portrait, attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck I and painted around 1735, depicts Richa Franks, the daughter of Abigail Levy and Jacob Franks, prominent members of New York’s early Jewish community. Her image—poised, delicate, resolutely composed—is one of the earliest examples of Jewish portraiture in colonial America.

To see these three portraits—Washington, Shimomura’s unnamed dancer, and Franks—sharing the same wall felt quietly radical. They weren’t arranged as contrast, but as coexistence. The juxtaposition didn’t flatten their differences; it gave them depth. Shimomura’s piece moved me most, perhaps because Asian American stories have so often been invisible in this country’s art institutions. But it was the grouping as a whole that struck me: these portraits stretch the boundaries of who we picture when we say “American.” They don’t cancel each other out; they amplify. In their shared presence, they remind us that America was never a single image—but a layered, conflicted, and continually reimagined portrait.

Left: Roger Shimomura, Block Dance Break #1, 2006.

Middle: Thomas Sully, Colonel Samuel Boyer Davis, 1819.

Right: attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, Richa Franks, c 1735.

Similarly, in the next room, another unexpected grouping holds together with quiet force. On the left hangs Kindred Spirits by Asher B. Durand; on the right, Rothko’s No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange). Between them, mounted on the facing wall, is Amy Sherald’s Our Town, a large-scale portrait of Black American life rendered in her signature muted palette and unwavering gaze. The placement is precise, and the effect is striking. Durand’s romantic homage to friendship and landscape, painted in memory of Thomas Cole, once marked a high point in 19th-century American art—and in 2005, it marked a turning point for Crystal Bridges when Alice Walton acquired it for a reported $35 million, then the highest price ever paid for an American painting. But it doesn’t read here as a trophy. It holds one side of the room, a kind of grounding presence. Opposite it, the Rothko hums with internal energy—fields of red, brown, black, and orange stacked in contemplation. Sherald’s painting does more than bridge the two; it redefines the terms of the room. Rothko’s inward mysticism and Durand’s idealized wilderness find a contemporary counterpoint in Sherald’s direct engagement with race, presence, and American life. Together, the trio resists easy categorization. Their conversation is one of dissonance, but also of expansion. This is what it looks like to collect across time and tradition—not to smooth the edges, but to let them speak.

Left: Mark Rothko, No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange), 1951.
Middle: Amy Sherald, Our Town, 2017. (detail)
Right: Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849.

There are, of course, the installations outside—Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored infinity chamber nestled in the woods, a towering spider by Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE sculpture perched like a signpost on a hill. These works anchor the museum’s presence in the landscape, inviting visitors to think spatially and experientially before ever entering the galleries. There is, of course, the Bachman-Wilson House, a 1954 Usonian home by Frank Lloyd Wright, painstakingly relocated from New Jersey and rebuilt plank by plank on the museum grounds. The house embodies Wright’s lifelong pursuit of organic architecture, but it was the subtleties that struck me most. Every hinge opens a full 180 degrees, allowing doors to fold back flush into the walls. All vertical mortar joints have been filled in, leaving only the horizontal lines visible—an architectural sleight of hand that reinforces groundedness and flow. These aren’t decorative touches; they are structural principles. The house reads as a meditation on cohesion and restraint. And in the context of Crystal Bridges, it models a kind of collecting discipline—one where even the smallest decision serves a larger intention.

During my visit, a third of the museum—its new Foundations of American Art galleries—was still being installed. Wall texts were missing, some rooms fenced off, crates still open. And yet, the galleries were open. I found it thrilling. With the interpretive scaffolding stripped away, I had to look harder, make connections on my own, and ask why a certain work was hung high or low, centered or slightly off-axis. It made me more attuned to the labor of curating. And more than that, it made the collecting feel alive. That the museum would open an unfinished space to the public was beyond me — isn’t just a sign of confidence, it’s a gesture of transparency, of extending the work to its viewers in real time.

Th same ethos extends into the museum’s educational mission. More than 50,000 schoolchildren visit annually through a program that covers transportation, meals, and substitute teachers—removing the most common barriers to access. Lectures, performances, and teacher training fill the calendar year-round. A public-facing art reference library with over 50,000 volumes stands just beyond the galleries, open to all. Alice Walton once said, “To think that all the children growing up in this region have access to this as part of their education is probably the most fulfilling thing I have done.” In a time when so many institutions are scrambling to prove their value, Crystal Bridges has embedded that value in its very infrastructure.

Left: Frank Lloyd Wright, Bachman-Wilson House, 1954 (relocated and reconstructed 2015).
Middle: The Foundations of American Art Galleries, Crystal Bridges Museum, still undergoing the final touches yet fully open to the public.
Right: Robert Indiana, LOVE, 1999 (sculpture version).

For me, what Crystal Bridges demonstrates, above all, is that a great collection isn’t simply a set of objects—it’s a set of commitments. Commitments to story, to access, to risk. It offers a quiet but persuasive model for what strategic collecting can look like—one that serious collectors, advisors, and institutions alike would do well to study.

And the three takeaways I have for collectors?

Focus matters. Crystal Bridges doesn’t try to be encyclopedic. Its collection is tightly centered on American art across five centuries. But within that focus, it dares—elevating underrepresented voices, commissioning new work, and challenging conventional narratives.
Break the rules. Whether it’s hanging George Washington next to Roger Shimomura’s pop critique, or opening unfinished galleries to the public, the museum isn’t afraid of friction. A bold collection makes room for contrast and conversation.
Invest in the future. Education is not an afterthought here—it’s embedded into the architecture. From large-scale school visit programs to a public research library, Crystal Bridges understands that growing audiences and shaping discourse are essential parts of the collector’s long game.

The new Foundations of American Art galleries officially opened on July 19, 2025. A further expansion by Safdie Architects is slated for completion in 2026.

All photographs on this page were taken by Chen and may not be reproduced without permission.