A Visit to Arkansas
Why Arkansas?
“To me, Passion Plays always seemed menacing. They make me picture peasants coming out of a Passion Play on Easter and chasing Jews down the street in a pogrom. But now that I see that they have one here, I’m thinking I shouldn’t be so down on them. I mean, it’s not like they have pogroms any more…”
That was me a few days before the end of our trip to Arkansas during Spring Break this year.
Why Arkansas? Sometimes it seemed like it was just to be able to tell people we were going on vacation in Arkansas. They would look like they were trying to remember something, and then say,
“Oh, you have family there?”
“Nope.”
Arkansas is one of those states whose location I have trouble remembering (just north of Louisiana, between Oklahoma and the Missisisppi River). My wife had been talking about going ever since she read about Crystal Bridges, the museum of American art that was built by a Walmart heir in the Walton home base of Bentonville, AR (population: 58,000 and growing). The building was designed by Moshe Safdie, famous for creating Habitat ’67, the apartment building of cantilevered cubes at the Montreal Expo, as well as the swimming pool in a giant surfboard sitting on three skyscrapers in Singapore. “They’re outbidding established museums in New York for works of American art,” my wife told me.
I liked the idea of a good art museum in Arkansas. It was a little different take on the state then what I was usually seeing in the newspaper. The state government there is run by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump Administration spokesperson and daughter of Mike Huckabee, a previous governor and current salesman for “quasi-medical products” and dietary supplements. Of course Bill Clinton had been governor also, and as recently as 2015 another triangulating Democrat, Mike Beebe, served as governor. Since then, Arkansas banned nearly all abortions, weakened laws to protect children from dangerous work, and responded to the recent uptick in shootings by weakening permitting requirements for carrying a concealed weapon. It almost goes without saying that Arkansas made laws restricting the freedom of transgender people when it comes to medical treatment or public bathrooms.
While researching a trip to Arkansas, my wife also investigated other things to see nearby (my proposed ad slogan: Vacation in Arkansas, Just a Stone’s Throw From Oklahoma!”). She found Eureka Springs, “a hippy vacation town up in the mountains where you can stay in a tree house”. We decided to check out Eureka Springs and also do a little hiking. The town was said to be a kind of artsy blue dot in a sea of red, with lots of art galleries, pretty Victorian architecture, left of center politics… and the Eureka Springs Passion Play center on the outskirts of town.
Arkansas Vacation: The City
The Crystal Bridges Museum is in a park in a stream valley, which it shares with some large public art and a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Our hotel was a few blocks from the park, and across a public square from the old Walton Five and Dime, arguably the beginning of the Walmart empire. It was a clear and cold mid-March day; I had hoped that leaves would be coming in but we were about a week too early. Besides the museum and Walmart headquarters, Bentonville has also set itself up as a center for mountain-biking, so the path to the museum through the park was criss-crossed by biking trails. Traffic in downtown Bentonville was pretty light, but we had to look both ways on the paths because every once in a while a biker would rocket across.
The museum had a Diego Rivera exhibition when we visited. It seemed ironic to see the famously leftist artist at an institution built by one of the most capitalist families in America. Then again, he had taken a project for John D. Rockefeller in the thirties, though it didn’t end well (Rockefeller Center destroyed the work because it included a portrait of Lenin). Actually my wife and I both thought that Rivera was “otherizing” and romanticizing the native people in the exhibition’s paintings. So that was interesting but a little deflating, at least for Rivera.
The museum had less of an emphasis on contemporary art than I expected. One painting of colonial Brooklyn looked very familiar and I realized it was in my high school history book. Crystal Bridges had bought it from the Brooklyn Museum of Art. I felt a little like Greeks travelling to London to see ancient Athenian vases. Given all the spoils in New York art museums, I guess that’s only fair.
I like old art, the kind with pictures of things, so I was happy. “It’s a nice collection, but a little conservative. It’s staying out of politics more than most art,” my wife said.
It did have some more recent stuff. We got to walk into a mirrored room by Yayoi Kusama (see photo). And they had a picture by Amy Sherald, whose painting of Michelle Obama sits in the National Portrait Gallery in DC.
The hotel we were staying in also had some interesting contemporary art, though I have to admit that what sticks in my mind is the Cadillac with $952 worth of change attached to the outside. I didn’t realize till later that the piece was actually a tribute to Walmart. Kind of like the bard singing praise of the king?
Arkansas Vacation: Eureka Springs
The town doesn’t look like much in Google Maps. But show the topography and you can see how dramatic the landscape is. Route 62 (aka Van Buren) follows a convoluted ridge top, with hotels and restaurants perched on the sides of the ridge. Route 23 (aka Main Street) heads northward from 62, plunging down 80 feet (over the course of about half a mile) to the center of town. Much of the town climbs up the slope of another ridge to the northwest of Main. Some streets rise gently with sharp turns at switchbacks; others march straight up the slope so steeply that I wanted to lean forward to make sure the car didn’t start flipping backward, hood over trunk.
A similarly steep rise on the other side of the valley is more residential, but at the side of one switchback there is a gazebo which gives a good view of the opposing side of the valley. The hill is crowned by the Crescent Hotel, an 1886 building that has had several incarnations, most infamously as a health resort run by an uncredentialed “doctor” whose treatment mostly consisted of drinking the water flowing from the springs that give the town its name.
We stayed at a hotel called Treehouse Cottages on Route 62. Technically it was a stilt house, but its location at the edge of the ridge put you at about eye level with the tops of the trees so in a sense it was a tree house. The decor was MidCentury Hobbit.
In its early days, Eureka Springs had several catastrophic fires, but the town seems to have gotten less combustible, because there are many quaint old buildings filled with art galleries and restaurants. Many stores had rainbow decals and signs announcing that all were welcome. At one point we stopped in to artist galleries further down Route 23 and started chatting with a glass blower we met there. He said the politics were pretty polarized in the town, mostly people “far to the left”, some people “far to the right”, and a few (including him, he claimed) more inbetween.
We eventually made it up to the Crescent Hotel, and in the evening looked out on the valley from the other direction. From there we could see “Christ of the Ozarks,” next door neighor to the Passion Play. The Ozarks’ Christ has an unusually large size, towering over the trees. It was around then that I was thinking about getting rid of my prejudice against passion plays.
Passion Play
“Maybe you can find a postcard in the museum. Just go in the gift shop and look.” We were parked outside the Eureka Springs historical museum.
In the gift shop, a museum guide was chatting to a couple of visitors. The guide was saying, “There’s just some things that people don’t want to talk about. Like the fact that the guy who founded the Passion Play was a raging anti-Semite.”
What??
He continued, “I understand they don’t want to dwell on it, but they should have something. I mean, the guy’s buried on the property.”
I couldn’t resist jumping in, “They could say that the founder was antisemitic but now they aren’t prejudiced against anyone.”
“Yeah, something like that,” he agreed.
“Assuming…” I went on after a pause, “assuming they aren’t anti-Semitic now! Do you know if there’s any evidence of that?”
“Well, we have the KKK headquarters in Harrison, so it’s hard to say.”
That wasn’t where I was expecting the conversation to go. “Harrison?”
“Yeah, it’s a town a few miles away. They have a billboard over there that says ‘It’s not racism, it’s white pride!’” I looked it up now, it’s about 40 miles east of Eureka Springs.
“That’s so weird,” I said. “I was just telling my wife that I had bad associations with passion plays, and that maybe it’s time to let those bad associations fade away. But from what you’re telling me, maybe not just yet…”