In Arkansas, Annie Leibovitz’s Latest Retrospective Is Celebrated at Crystal Bridges
Bentonville, Arkansas is in the midst of an unprecedented boom, driven by America’s favorite one-stop-shop, Walmart, which is headquartered in the town of just over 56,000 residents. It’s visible in the many construction sites seen on the outskirts of what was once a town of just a few square blocks. Bygone relics, like a sign touting CocaCola for 5 cents, remain, but in the last decade, its population has doubled, and over the next decade, it’s expected to double again. New homes, roadways, parks, hotels, shopping centers, and even a private members health club seem to have sprung up overnight, catering to a breakneck influx of new residents across cultural, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds attracted to the ecosystem surrounding America’s largest retailer.
Hand in hand with this influx comes the fostering of culture—a city needs a soul. This is the hypothesis of Alice Walton, the daughter of the late Walmart founder Sam Walton, who, in 2011, opened the doors of Crystal Bridges. The hulking Moshe Safdie-designed 120-acre campus houses some 2,373 rotating artworks and plays host to special exhibitions, artist talks, and community programming throughout the year and remains free to all visitors. In 2022 this included “Fashioning America,” a symposium and exhibition exploring the American fashion landscape. Its debut was celebrated with an inaugural fundraiser that raised $2 million, fulfilling the museum’s mandated requirement to receive a portion of its yearly funding from the public as a 501(c)(3) organization.
For this year’s exhibition and fundraiser, the focus was on one woman: Annie Leibovitz. Simply titled “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” the show is a sweeping retrospective of 300 photographs taken by Leibovitz throughout her illustrious career. The works on display range from celebrity portraiture to images from the pages of Vogue and Vanity Fair to indelible moments in history like the Apollo 17 launch and Watergate. In one room, a table piled high with photo books is paired with a set of cheeky Polaroid snaps of policemen who have ticketed Leibovitz over the years for driving too fast in her ’63 Porsche on California’s Highway 5. With the prints pinned up on the first two sections of gallery walls in a strikingly relaxed format, the show feels akin to a tour of her studio.
Still coming to life is a set of 30 new portraits, which was previewed exclusively with Vogue, commissioned by Crystal Bridges depicting the likes of Brittney Griner, Amy Sherald, Stacey Abrams, Stormy Daniels, Kim Kardashian, Keanu Reeves, Michelle Yeoh, Lil Nas X, and Alice Walton, who was photographed at her family’s Arkansas residence. “She was just a hoot and you couldn t keep up with her," Leibovitz recalled with a laugh. “She took us out to her lake house and drove us around in her boat. She loves to go into the 12-degree water to swim. I probably should have photographed her driving the boat, but I picked a picture of her where she s more reflective in the family house for the show.” A forthcoming portrait of war photojournalist Lynsey Addario, which Leibovitz hopes to produce on the front lines in Ukraine, will later be added, as well as four additional subjects, the names of which are being kept under wraps. “It’s a funny animal because my shows have really been based on my books, and I do a book first and then the show grows out of that, but this is like working for a magazine,” Leibovitz explained of the commissioned project.
These new portraits are interspersed with earlier works and shown across three ceiling-height screens facing inward toward each other, where a dialog between them comes to light. There’s Salman Rushdie before and after his 2022 attack, which resulted in the loss of his right eye. Former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams is shown alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, who is shown alongside former female presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton. "I thought about this a while ago, that I ve done this for my career, for my life, and there s not too many people doing this and I m just going to go out doing this,” Leibovitz mused, gesturing widely to the unmistakable works surrounding us in the gallery. “It s a little corny, but I feel responsible to that.”
On Thursday evening, during a celebration marking the show s opening, Leibovitz could be found engulfed by admirers. Hailing from all corners of the world to the American heartland were Hank Willis Thomas with his parents in tow, Camilla Belle, Jeremy O. Harris, and gala co-chair Awol Erizku. A healthy contingent of Walton family members was on hand too. The museum is, after all, built on land that was once the family’s playground. "This is the extended backyard of where Alice and her big brother Jim grew up,” Olivia Walton, the board chair of Crystal Bridges, told guests as they took their seats for dinner. “This is where they went searching for crawdads for years and years growing up.”
