Crystal Bridges

Small Bentonville, Arkansas, has a jewel of an art museum.  Alice Walton and other benefactors have created Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art  in Walmart's Ozark hometown.  It is a lovely museum, right sized for a single visit or dozens of return visits.... as certainly we shall return as often as we can, as it is only a few hours from the Joplin area, where we live.  I believe the setting will be beautiful in the cooler fall months. This was the highlight of a mini-break we took to the Arkansas Ozarks I wrote about here.

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The museum's glass-and-wood design by architect Moshe Safdie (Boston, MA) and engineer Buro Happold (New York, NY) features a series of pavilions nestled around two creek-fed ponds. We simply made a 3 hour walk around the galleries on this trip, as the day was hot, but the grounds are beautiful and when we come back with DD2 I would like to walk around the grounds. 
The admission was free and the collection was rich.  It is American art and artists from colonial times right to modern.  John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassat to Thomas Hart Benton to Norman Rockwell to Andy Warhol.  I enjoyed myself thoroughly. 

I regret not making it back to the RV to get the camera, so I lifted the pictures, but hopefully given credit where credit is due.  We actually saw deer walking the grounds out of the same window above.  The grounds seem so peaceful, the architecture so grand.