Last Thursday, less than 10 full months since it opened, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art welcomed its 500,000th visitor. That’s pretty impressive. All those doubters who said it could not bring people to Bentonville, Arkansas, should now begin eating a little crow.
Ok, I know — the first is always the best, whether it’s a new museum or a new wing. But extrapolate that figure to 12 full months, and when Crystal Bridges hits its one-year anniversary, attendance may well have topped 600,000.
That’s well over attendance for many far more established museums — more than the Whitney, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins (if my memory serves).
Unlike the coast-centered art-lovers who do not believe great art belongs in the hinterlands, I’ve always applauded Alice Walton for wanting to bring American art to people who may not be able to travel to see it. So I’m more than pleased.
And here’s another reason for that: speaking the other day with Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s director (at right), I asked him to remind me what projections they’d given for the first year. “We didn’t,” he said. “We had no public projections,” and the staff prudently budgeted for a total between 150,000 and 250,000 — a classic case of underpromising so it’s easy to overdeliver. Not a bad policy (the underpromising, not the lack of disclosure).
“We’ve had to increase parking and add staff in things like food service,” Bacigalupi said. Most proudly, he said, the handbook — Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — has gone into its third printing. The first two, 5,000 copies and 4,000, respectively, have sold out. (It was priced at $60, but is available from both Barnes and Noble and Amazon for $37.50.) The next will be for 10,000 copies. “That’s unprecedented in my experience,” Bacigalupi said.
Most importantly, attendance is hitting the audience I most want for it: Using zip codes, the museum has tracked two-thirds of its visitors to the region — that it, those able to travel to, see and get home in one day. The other one-third is from “beyond,” of which 10% are from “touch states” bordering on Arkansas. So about 70% are coming from the fairly nearby. That’s a good thing.
As for the rest, they’re coming from the rest of the U.S. and abroad. Anecdotally, Bacigalupi reports a ripple effect — a group comes from a museum, say, and they are followed by others from that area — a fivefold increase, sometimes — who presumably learned of the museum’s merit by word-of-mouth. The word is spreading, he says, because “we’re not doing national advertising.”
Photo Credits: Courtesy of Glasstire (top), Smithsonian (bottom)