THE MOMENTARY
Crystal Bridges is set to change NWA once again with new performing arts center and gallery. Interview / Robin Atkinson Lieven Bertels is the Executive Director of the Momentary, the contemporary art center that is slated to open in February of 2020 in downtown Bentonville. Along with exhibition space, the Momentary will house three dedicated studio spaces for short-to medium-term artist residencies with studio spaces dedicated to traditional, high-tech/ multimedia, and 3D/sculptural art, in addition to public spaces to nurture collaboration. They envision studio and social spaces that provide artistic independence alongside an integrated art experience for guests that creates a holistic mix of art and leisure activities. Lieven discussed his vision for the Momentary with The Idle Class’ Publisher Robin Atkinson. RA / Contemporary art in Northwest Arkansas is a big step forward culturally. We had State of the Art at Crystal Bridges, which was Northwest Arkansas’s first foray into contemporary art. But in terms of the larger population here, an actual contemporary art museum is kind of a leap. So what are the strategies that you’ll take on to help people wade into that whole realm?
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LB / We are not going to be a museum, we’re going to be a contemporary art center. What’s the difference? We don’t feel that historical pressure to collect and represent art history. I think that’s very well reflected in the name, we want to be of this moment and we want to look at what is currently happening. We hope to be a small and nimble art center, but to have a backbone in an amazing museum collection. There’s only a handful of contemporary art centers in this country that have that luxury. Some of them have it more as part of their DNA, like [New York City’s] PS1 that can reference MoMA; some of them have a true partnership with nearby institutions like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, but they are few and far between and to have something like that in the heartland of the US, we think is pretty unique. What are some of the strategies you plan to employ to help the regional audience to engage in the contemporary conversation? I think the best approach is to not constantly get hung up on that regional aspect. We see ourselves as part of a national dialogue, which always will reference this place as our anchor point, but we want to aim nationally. That is true in the scope and scale of exhibitions, in the level of artists we want to work with, in the visitation we hope for, and that has been the same for Crystal Bridges, of which we are a satellite project. The current
presentation statistics for Crystal Bridges are positive whatever way you look at them. Half of our visitation is from here and half of the visitation is from an interstate and national audience. That’s beautiful because it means that for Crystal Bridges’ 600,000 visitors a year, half of those visitors come from the region. Knowing that Northwest Arkansas only has a population of around 500,000 people that means that 1 in 2 people from this region, including babies and elderly, come to the museum at least once a year. So, in terms of serving a community, you can’t do much better. Imagine you were to extrapolate that number to London or New York, that’s insane. That would mean 5 million people a year would go through a metropolitan museum. So that’s very positive, but it also means that we are bringing in an outside audience for the museum with the other half. Now of course, the Momentary is a smaller project, it’s a little more niche, it’s specifically geared towards contemporary art. But we would hope that kind of ratio will stay the same so we can serve whoever has an appetite for contemporary art. We hope to be a space where people can get an interest in contemporary art as part of a broader visit to the area. We want our visitors to say, “Hey, I can see Crystal Bridges, I can have an amazing dinner, I can stay in a really cool hotel, I can do some shopping, I can discover cool bike trails and I can go to this contemporary
