Victoria Ramirez, executive director of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, eats her lunch at a desk inside the former grocery store that's serving as temporary headquarters for the Little Rock museum. The building is in a down-on-its-luck shopping center on Cantrell Road, an eyesore that's finally slated for renovation.
The subject of my visit isn't shopping centers. It's the magnificent transformation of what had been the Arkansas Arts Center, a project that has given momentum to development in downtown Little Rock. Granted, it's not the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville (few projects have Walton family money behind them). But it's still a landmark initiative that will give a state of three million residents two nationally known art museums.
"The project is ambitious," says Ramirez, whose hiring was announced in August 2019. "It will further move the needle when it comes to the arts in Arkansas. It's exhilarating to be part of a museum that sets its sights this high. There was a time when people would say, 'You can never do that in Arkansas.' Not anymore."
Ramirez, whose previous job was director of the El Paso Museum of Art, says the facility will complement Crystal Bridges and add momentum to what Alice Walton's vision already has done for the state.
"It's all about making Arkansas an arts destination," she says. "We want people who love art and love museums to come here and see everything this state has to offer. When I was approached by this museum, I learned it already had 14,000 works of art, an arts school and a performing arts program. And then there were the people behind it. I saw all that, and I couldn't say no to coming here."
In June, it was announced that the grand opening for the architectural gem in MacArthur Park will be next spring.
Ramirez' first day of work in Arkansas was on the day of groundbreaking for the expanded facility. Since that day, the AMFA Foundation has acquired 811 additional works, including pieces by such well-known artists as Andrew Wyeth and Hans Hofmann.
"These acquisitions, and 500 enamel works gifted by the Enamel Arts Foundation, were made possible thanks to the generosity of local and national donors whose support of the museum has been essential to its rebirth and future," says Little Rock financier Warren Stephens, who co-chaired the capital campaign along with his wife Harriet.
"This has been an incredible civic undertaking, enabled by the great success of our capital campaign, which continues to bring so many generous people together," Harriet Stephens says.
The city of Little Rock contributed more than $31 million generated by a hotel tax revenue bond. Private support from the likes of the Stephens family, the Windgate Foundation, Terri and Chuck Erwin, and the Winthrop Rockefeller Charitable Trust allowed museum officials to up their fundraising goal from $128 million to $142 million.
There were 29 donors who gave $1 million or more. An additional 92 donors gave between $100,000 and $1 million.
Last year, Icon magazine published a piece headlined "Architecture to Look Forward to in 2022." The list of eight projects included only one in the United States: the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.
"Another major cultural project for Jeanne Gang and her studio, the extension to AMFA provides a new public gallery and gathering space," the magazine noted. "The project ... also focuses on strengthening and clarifying connectivity with the broader AMFA campus."
Gang, a MacArthur Fellow and a professor in practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, heads Studio Gang. The firm does work around the world, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and the Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Ill. This is Studio Gang's first Arkansas project.
Studio Gang worked with the Little Rock-based firm Polk Stanley Wilcox. Internationally known landscape architecture firm SCAPE designed 13 acres of MacArthur Park surrounding the museum.
Studio Gang's design was honored with a Best of Design award from The Architect's Newspaper in 2019. The annual award honors exceptional architecture, design and building projects throughout North America.
"In working with Studio Gang and SCAPE, we're realizing the most contemporary ideas about museums and public spaces," Ramirez says.
"Studio Gang's design reshapes the experience of the museum through a mix of new construction and refurbishment of the existing structures built between 1937 and 2000, seeking to knit together the various elements within a cohesive new architectural identity," Andreea Cutieru writes for Archdaily.com. "The latter is achieved through a new central axis, a flexible atrium space that runs the entire length of the building, from which the various exhibition, education and performance spaces branch out.
"On both ends of this stem linking the different programs, the design features large public areas. The pleated roof complements this central atrium space and expands like a blossom to mark the museum's entry points. The renovated spaces have been adapted to meet the museum's programming aspirations. The most carbon-intensive structures have been kept intact, while others have been reconfigured. Studio Gang's design has brought back to life the original 1937 art deco facade of the Museum of Fine Arts designed by architect H. Ray Burks, which had been absorbed within the interior space."
The Arkansas Arts Center changed its name to Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts on Jan. 25, 2021. The original Museum of Fine Arts opened in MacArthur Park in 1937 and became the Arkansas Arts Center in the early 1960s. A new building opened in 1963 and underwent several expansions during the next five decades. The vote by Little Rock residents for the hotel tax bond came in 2016.
Warren Stephens calls the museum "a game-changer for our city and state, and the enthusiasm for the project has prompted us to think even bigger."
According to a museum publication: "Inspiration for the landscape is drawn from the region's unique ecologies--including the banks of Fourche Creek, the bluffs of Emerald Park and the agrarian landscapes of the Delta. SCAPE's design for the landscape relies on sustainable, native plants and incorporates more than 50 species of perennials, shrubs, native trees and ornamental grasses.
"Many of MacArthur Park's mature trees are preserved in the design and incorporated into a framework of new trees, which over time will create a canopy throughout the park to the south and west. Outside the south entrance of the building, dynamic petal-shaped garden beds mirror the form of the museum's roof and feature seasonally diverse plantings that grow between stacked slabs of sandstone quarried from the region. The stone slabs route stormwater runoff from the building's roof into a series of rain gardens planted with native species to attract pollinators and migratory birds."
The huge amount of money being spent on the museum is among several factors that have led to renewed interest in downtown Little Rock. Other factors include the nascent recovery of Capitol Avenue (new owners for the Regions Center and Bank of America Plaza, along with a committee appointed by the mayor to spur the revival of that corridor), plans by Lyon College to open dental and veterinary schools downtown, and an urban greenspace with tremendous potential that's being opened up by the 30 Crossing project in the River Market District.
"It was Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller who said we must have 'Arkansas' in the name to signify that we serve the whole state," Ramirez says. "We followed that when we changed our name to Museum of Fine Arts. A 21st-century museum must look outward. We're investing heavily in the state with this project. It's about more than the arts. It's about economic development. It's about tourism. It's about all of that."
We're less than a year away from the opening of what will be one of Arkansas' iconic structures for decades to come.
Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.