Seeking U.S. Art All Over Map. Just Check GPS.
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Two men stepped out of a rental car here recently and walked up to a modest ranch-style house with a cat and a grapefruit tree in the yard, worried that the homeowner might mistake them for missionaries or salesmen.
They were neither. They were representatives of one of the world’s wealthiest art patrons, Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress and founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. And they had come all the way from there to the door of Monica Aissa Martinez, 51, hoping to discover nothing less than genuine, unheralded American art talent. The men, Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s president, and Chad Alligood, a curator, crowded into the artist’s small studio off her kitchen and quickly admired her work, a mix of Southwestern mysticism and anatomical precision that looked something like X-ray images as painted by Gustav Klimt. Then they bade her goodbye and hopped back into the car. They had reason to hurry. Preparing for a show that will inevitably be seen as a kind of heartland response to the Whitney Biennial, they had already logged 50,000 miles visiting 500 artists in 30 states, and they had almost 500 more artists to go.
The goal of their unusual art hunt — an old-fashioned, Kerouacian canvass of the country — is to find 100 underrecognized artists, culled from a list of more than 10,000, to feature in September in an ambitious show that will represent Ms. Walton’s first attempt to plant her institution’s flag firmly in the world of contemporary art.
Her museum, which has drawn more than a million visitors since opening in 2011, is a 21st-century version of Gilded Age collections like those amassed by Henry Clay Frick in New York and Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston. But Crystal Bridges is in a small city in the Ozarks, the first museum of its size to open between the coasts in more than a generation.
The Whitney Biennial, the much-argued-about barometer of the country’s art, helped bring artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons to prominence. Hoping to make their own discoveries of that caliber, Ms. Walton’s emissaries have looked high and low, sometimes literally.
During a trip to Portland, Ore., Mr. Bacigalupi was invited to an artist’s dark basement where she showed him a sculpture resembling a coffin and he momentarily feared for his safety. He and Mr. Alligood, a Harvard-trained curator who grew up in rural Georgia, have ventured to places so small the GPS has given up (a farm near the unincorporated town of Ponca, Ark.). They have seen art on a goat farm, in a soap factory, in a defunct pie factory. They interviewed one artist they were fairly sure was high on cocaine and another who was profoundly stoned.
“There have been times over the past few months,” said Mr. Bacigalupi (pronounced BAH-chee-ga-LOO-pee), a Brooklyn-born contemporary art specialist, “when I wake up and literally have no idea what city I’m in.”
While the Whitney many years ago broadened its focus beyond the United States, Crystal Bridges is building its show not only around the curators’ road trip but also against the all-American backdrop of the museum’s growing collection by artists like Sargent, O’Keeffe, Rockwell and Pollock.
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