Here in Little Rock for my last night before I blast out toward Oklahoma City tomorrow solo (Will is on a boys trip in Austin!).
After getting in to town late last night, Will and I walked around our neighborhood toward the river this morning... a whole lotta nothing. We saw the most people at the coffee shop, a fairly popular spot with friends gathered to chat and remote workers on their laptops (one of which was streaming Barbie in between editing documents).
Later, when I walked to "SoMa" (South Main) from our Airbnb, I got some weird looks from strangers who were definitely confused by my presence and/or the fact that I was walking as a means of transportation.
The SoMa area where The Root Cafe is located (where I met Hannah's sweet grandparents for lunch!) has a little cluster of popular restaurants, a few cute antique shops, an ice cream parlor, and the ESSE museum + store. ESSE is a great little purse museum started by Hannah's grandma's cousin! It's small, but boasts probably over 100 purses, organized by decade and displayed with the historical context of what items would have been inside each purse at that time. A lot more interesting than what you think a purse museum would be.
I spent the early evening wandering around the galleries at the AMFA (Arkansas Museum of Fine Art), which recently reopened in a beautiful new modern building that looks like something Santiago Calatrava would have designed.
The galleries host a medium-sized collection of art in an ongoing exhibition, plus some special exhibitions. I really enjoyed the portraiture + found object sculptures depicting imagined lives of Black folks in the community as well as the immersive installations honoring escaping slaves during the Civil War.
Finally, downstairs in the gallery next to the studio art classrooms, there was a great little exhibit of prints by a woman who employs woodcutting techniques to print onto paper, then treats the paper, then cuts and prints that treated paper onto the main paper in compositions to create a sort of collage with the treated paper adhering to the main paper. The art school has a ton of regular classes and drop-in activities including woodshop, ceramics, printmaking, other arts and crafts, and lots of programs for kids. And there's a theater where they screen films! Overall, a great asset to the community with something for everybody.
The next morning, I made the last-minute decision to forgo the hike I had planned in a nearby state park and instead take a detour up to Bentonville, AR. Situated in the NW corner of the state, Bentonville is home to two significant things: Walmart HQ, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (founded by the daughter and heiress to the Walmart empire, Alice Walton).
The museum building itself is a stunning masterpiece, designed by Moshe Safdie, that sits atop a literal bridge over a lagoon and takes you through the museum's collection of American art through the centuries. I found myself not needing a map to explore the collection because the temporal direction of the galleries was so intuitive.
From John Singer Sargent and Norman Rockwell to Georgia O'Keeffe and Yayoi Kusama, the museum's collection spans mediums and art movements and features a significant gallery on contemporary art, including Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room.
Over the course of an afternoon, I watched students on their Friday field trip soak in art history from the late 1700s as well as a college art class engage in discussion with their professor in front of Our Town by Kerry James Marshall. Crystal Bridges lives up to the hype and should be a stop on any art-lover's list (another bonus: it's free! thanks Walmart!).