Crystal Bridges Museum Brings Schools To Art

A program offering free school tours of the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville is booked solid for the fall and will begin taking applications Oct. 1 for a summer season that will include a major Norman Rockwell exhibit.

The museum offers the tours four days a week thanks to a $10 million endowment from the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation. Up to 120 students per day can be accommodated, and that number is expected to rise to 240 during special exhibition tours such as a Norman Rockwell exhibit March 9 through May 28. That exhibit will display 42 original paintings and 323 Saturday Evening Post covers.

The School Visits Program reimburses schools for the cost of travel and substitute teachers and provides a bag lunch to all students and adults on the trip.

The museum offers six one-hour tours, each focusing on only five paintings to give students and tour guides time to discuss certain paintings in-depth, though self-guided tours led by teachers can be done afterwards.

According to Anne Kraybill, school programs coordinator, “What we’re trying to do is really guide them in how do you look at artwork, identify with it and then start to interpret it, and then how do the ideas that you share with your classmates spark new ideas?”

Four of the tours are aligned with the Common Core State Standards, a new set of educational standards that is in the process of being introduced in Arkansas.

Those tours use art to reinforce lessons learned in four grades: grade two – “The Wild West”; grade five – “America in Conflict”; grade 8 – “Reflecting on America,” which considers how an artist might interpret history differently than a newspaper would; and grade 11 – “Emerging Modernism.”

The tours are intended to engage students so that they think critically about the subjects they are seeing. For example, “War News from Mexico,” an 1848 painting by Richard Caton Woodville, depicts a group of white men reading a newspaper story about the advent of the Mexican-American War while a woman and shabbily dressed African-Americans hover along the painting’s background. The painting gives students a visual depiction of women’s and civil rights during the mid-1800s while also offering a chance to consider contemporary issues.