The Momentary

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?

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

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art center!”

How will the Momentary interact with the local art community?

A lot of artists that live in this region are super excited about finally getting the living artists in the limelight. When you say museum, for a lot of people out there, not us in the arts, but for a lot of people in the larger community, art is about dead people. That’s what a museum still reflects for many people. A contemporary art space can actually reflect our community, our identity here in the heartland – whether we talk about Northwest Arkansas, or the wider region, or even nationally – but always with a strong focus on living artists. So it’s about commissioning, it’s about opportunities for the wider community to see how art gets made, who the people are that make art, what their story is, why they find a certain narrative important. We will invest more time and effort in having those touch points with the artists, making sure that when an artist comes here for a major show, people can really understand that these are current artists that tell the stories of our cities and our regions and that actually help us understand the world around us and the times we live in.

I think collecting is a process that not many people in the region are truly familiar with. We do not have art fairs here like Art Basel in Miami or Switzerland. There are no biennials like Prospect New Orleans or PS1 have biennials. So interaction with discrete, purchasable art objects is relatively low. As a curator in your past positions, as festival director, empresario, and now museum director, what has been your interaction with collectors as you helped lead these large scale art endeavors?

One of the things I really like is that idea of the conversation with the living artist in collecting. I don’t think that collecting art is the same as collecting stamps or collecting firearms or collecting sport memorabilia. Though, sport memorabilia, funnily enough, often are about the story as well. You getting that one

(Our full interview with Lieven Bertels is available at idleclassmag.com)

autographed baseball and it’s about you having had the connection with your hero. With art, it’s more layered. You want to have a relationship with a piece, it’s very hard to collect works you don’t actually like. It’s very hard to pretend in your collecting because you grow away from those pieces in your collection, so you will absolutely want to follow your gut feeling in collecting. But typically you also want to know about the artist behind the work. So, that’s where I hope something like the Momentary can play a role as a conduit. Of course, we’re only one part in the large jigsaw puzzle in an art ecosystem because, as you mention, biennials can be a part of that, major art fairs can be a part of that, galleries can be a part of that. Of course our arts sector is different in size from what major cities and metropolitan centers offer, but we have sometimes developed our own way of doing things in this region. That’s where 21c (Hotel Museum) comes in, that’s where building a relationship with artists when they are

very young comes in, and having a university with a strong arts curriculum would help with growing that.

And the Momentary will be a place for people to engage with that artist conversation?

Yes, we envision a place where visitors will engage with artists. It won’t be a place for passive art consumption. We hope it will also be a meeting place and we take that quite literally. In a museum there’s a certain set of rules and expectations. Typically the museum’s social spaces, like the café are separated from the museum proper: they’re like oil and vinegar. We want to mix that up. We want to allow you to come and work with your laptop in amongst contemporary art. We want you to have a conversation with your friends in amongst the artworks. We want you to come and hang out with your friends, or your family, grab a really great quality coffee, and then have an art fix. I think that’s another one of those unique things that we can offer.

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