Northwest Arkansas: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Other Attractions

My husband and I drove to Northwest Arkansas last weekend, just to get away from home for a few days. Our primary objective was to re-visit the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

We’d been there in May 2012, but hadn’t spent a lot of time at the museum, which had just opened in November 2011. On that trip, we had my mother-in-law with us, and we had other places we wanted to stop on our circuit of Southwest Missouri and Northwest Arkansas.

I do recall a special exhibit in 2012 of older American art featuring artists of the Hudson River School that I really enjoyed, though much of the museum focused on modern art. But on that trip, we didn’t explore the trails and sculpture around the museum.

This time, we spent two days at Crystal Bridges. Granted, they were short days of about four to five hours, and those hours included lunches and snacks. But we saw a lot more of the museum and its premises and enjoyed it.

The first day, we went through the galleries in the museum proper. I prefer 19th century art to modern art, and the museum does lean toward modern American art. Still, there were many pieces I liked, and the museum’s architecture and location are designed to bring light into the buildings and to capture the beauty of the valley where it is located.

On our second day at the museum, we toured the Frank Lloyd Wright Bachman-Wilson House on the premises. The house was built for a couple in New Jersey in the 1950s, then reconstructed on the Crystal Bridges grounds in 2015, so it was not there when we toured the museum in 2012. This was the first Frank Lloyd Wright house my husband and I had been in, and we loved how it was situated to make the house a part of the forest around it. But I didn’t like the dark, narrow hallways—my focus these days is on ADA-compliant housing, and this house certainly was not that.

After lunch that second day, we walked along the North Forest Trail through the museum grounds, where we encountered many sculptures. There were a few pieces by Chihuly, as well as a melange of hanging canoes (I wish I’d noted the name of that sculpture).

We could have spent a third day at Crystal Bridges, but instead we went to a few other museums off the beaten path. One was the Reilly P. McCarren Railroad Museum in Springdale. My husband, who is a model train afficionado, struck up a conversation with one of the volunteers and learned about the history of the Missouri Arkansas Railroad. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take one of their rail trips through the Boston Mountains.

A few blocks from the McCarren Railroad Museum is the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, which presents a thorough history of Northwest Arkansas. And our final stop of the day was at the Daisy Airgun Museum in downtown Rogers. This would not have been high on my list of priorities, but as a boy my husband had (and he still has) a Daisy #25 pump action airgun.

There were many other things we could have done in the region, but we filled our time well and enjoyed the long weekend. And Crystal Bridges is undergoing a huge expansion, so perhaps we will have to return when it is finished.

What was the last good weekend trip you took?