Peering over the rooftop’s edge, I’d barely taken in the city view before the silhouettes of two giant glimmering fish on a concrete wall stole my gaze. Watching the sunlight bounce off their silvery scales, clearly designed to waft with the breeze, felt strangely hypnotic. It was an unusually warm Sunday morning in early October, and I was four floors up on top of a shiny glass building called the Ledger, which I’d cycled up to, along wide ramps that wrapped around it. I was counting art installations and tower cranes. And so far, I’d spotted six of each.
The Ledger is one of the latest developments in Bentonville, an art-filled city, also known as a mountain biking centre, located on the fringes of the Ozarks in northwest Arkansas, an unsung US state sandwiched between Tennessee, Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma. The fish, as I later discovered, were two smallmouth bass – an art installation by Stefan Sagmeister called Lakes and Rivers in a nod to Arkansas’ abundance of wildlife. It forms part of the NW Oz Art trail of ‘museum quality art in surprising places’ scattered around the north-west of the state. And the cranes? I’d read Bentonville was often dubbed America’s fastest growing city and at one point home to more per capita than anywhere else in the country and wanted to see for myself.
The boom is attributed to superstore chain, Walmart, founded in 1962 by Sam Walton here in Bentonville, where the billion-dollar-company headquarters are still located, and the Walton family continues to invest. This includes the Walmart Home Office, a 140-hectare campus in the spotlight and attracting newcomers, the vast Crystal Bridges Art Museum, and the Razorback Regional Greenway, 36-miles of bike trails I was spending the day exploring the city on by e-bike. They connect the city’s 11 communities, and Bentonville with funky college town, Fayetteville in the south, home to the Razorback college football team – go hogs!
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Not, however, before a trip to the offbeat Walmart Museum Heritage Lab downstairs in The Ledger, the Walmart Museum’s temporary location while it…
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