Crystal Bridges keeps a second set of hours: sunrise to sunset, every day, free. They belong to the trails — 4.7 miles of walking laced through 134 acres of Ozark forest, with outdoor sculpture set along eight named trails, from the half-mile Art Trail to the 1.4-mile North Forest loop. Time a walk to James Turrell’s “The Way of Color,” the freestanding stone Skyspace out on the Art Trail: an open oculus frames the sky, an LED sequence runs at dawn and dusk to shift the color around it, and you can sit inside it. On Tuesdays, when the galleries go dark, the trails stay open. That is how Bentonville meets its museum — on foot, in daylight, before it ever steps through a door.
Crystal Bridges holds five centuries of American art on free general admission, carried by a permanent endowment instead of ticket sales. Its wooded trails are free too. James Turrell’s Skyspace runs its light sequence out there at dawn and dusk, and a 1954 Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian house stands on the same trails, rebuilt here in 2015 after a piece-by-piece rescue from flood-prone New Jersey. The museum also funds studios and stipends for artists in residence, commissions backing underrepresented artists, and school visits at no cost to more than 300,000 children. The Wright house interior and some special exhibitions take a timed ticket.
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