The Momentary: A Big City Cultural Hub In Little Bentonville, Arkansas

It’s always a shame when the nation’s great industrial past gets erased, when an old factory or warehouse that would make great a community space gets erased for gigantic generic condos. Well, Bentonville is doing it right. The Northwest Arkansas town has hit it big in developing an adaptive reuse project dubbed The Momentary, a satellite cultural hub of the city’s already celebrated Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

And fortunately, it smells just fine inside, considering that this is a massive former Kraft Foods cheese plant that operated from the postwar era until as recently as 2013. Having opened literally days before the pandemic broke out, The Momentary is hitting its stride now as a big city venue in a smaller-sized city. Its 63,000 square feet are impressive enough, but it’s all about its huge menu of creative ventures in music, art and food. Eat your heart out Brooklyn.

With it lying just south of the Bentonville historic district in this bike mad city, you can follow—pedal- or biped-style—a section of the Razorback Greenway to get there. The Momentary has good neighbors too: Keep going a bit further and you’ll land up at the brand new Walmart campus with ponds and landscaping that looks like something out of a European urban project; you’re also next door to the 8th Street Market, another former food processing plant turned into a food and drinks center, with culinary arts eduction, books and more.

Libations And Other Liquids Top To Bottom

Let’s start at the top where the glass-enclosed Momentary Tower Bar addition will stop you in your tracks as you get off the elevator. You’d swear you’re in a mid-century space and you’ll drool how the floor-to-ceiling windows would make for the ultimate in penthouse apartments. A popular feature is the glass hole in the roof just above a glass hole on the floor that opens all the way to the factory bottom six floors down. It’s not for the vertically challenged as you sit fire pit-style on the semicircular banquette sipping craft cocktails (do try the Umami Mango with reposado tequila).

Down on the ground floor at a branch of Arkansas’s popular Onyx Coffee Lab, look out for the automated conveyor belt for delivery of your caffeine. As any self respecting hipster attracting venue would have, a Momentary Food Truck is parked outside. Local chefs also cook for the monthly Supper Club dinner series.

Credit for reimagining this Momentary village within a city—and its dramatic six-story curtain wall and glass galore—goes to the Chicago firm of Whealer Kearns Architects.

Art And Music Under Many Roofs

The Momentary’s state of the art indoor Røde House music venue is named for the high end audio maker. Its walk-up Røde Bar gives out to the plaza. Outdoors, a huge white Canopy is the stage venue for Live on the Green concerts (see schedule selections at bottom).

There’s still time to catch the delightful exhibit Best in Show: Pets in Contemporary Photography that comes from the Fotografiska Museum New York. Celebrated photographer Elliott Erwitt is among 25 artists shown, while William Wegman appears with his famous weimaraners. A series of goofy dogs taking baths was shot by Sophie Gamand, and an amusing row of photos of dogs and owners who look like one another by Gerrard Gething. You can bring your pooch too (through April 13, 2025).

The show was curated in conjunction with the Best Friends Animal Society whose aim is to end shelter kills. The animal welfare organization’s Pet Resource Center (one of five nationwide) opened in Bentonville last year and welcomes everyone for a visit. Of course, this coffee mad town means there’s a coffee shop inside too. You might just leave with a latte and a Labrador.

All across town, Bentonville’s cultural institutions provide bilingual English/Spanish information panels. The respect extends to Indigenous cultures as well, as in The Momentary’s recent Cherokee Nation Film Showcase in the wonderfully named Fermentation Hall.

Public Art Abounds

The Momentary publicly acknowledges that it lies on the site of Osage hunting grounds. A member of the Osage Nation, artist Addie Roanhorse contributed Sway, an arrow pattern design on the Tower glass and elsewhere.

Neon lives on here with Bahamian conceptual artist Tavares Strachan’s huge red Youbelonghere sculptural signage draped across the Momentary exterior. It’s a gorgeous piece in its calligraphic elegance.

Mounted outdoors, artist Leo Villareal’s homage to Buckminster Fuller, Buckyball, is made up of LED bulbs that change colors around aluminum tubing that sort of soccer ball-like make up one geodesic sphere inside another.

As part of the city’s outdoor OZ Art NWA program, the celebrated Yinka Shonibare’s fiberglass and steel Wind Sculpture (SG) VIII (2022) is a vibrant piece of African cloth that, while in fact static, seems to be caught in the wind. The Nigerian British artist’s work evokes African heritage over centuries of colonization.

With so much going on at The Momentary, you’re gonna wanna take your time.

A selection of upcoming art and music events at The Momentary includes:

-The Prison Concerts: Folsom and San Quentin feature Johnny Cash images by photographer Jim Marshall in the exhibition galleries, May 24–Oct 12.

-Live on the Green: GloRilla, June 13; Alabama Shakes, July 22; Ziggy Marley & Burning Spear, October 3.

RØDE House: The Main Squeeze, March 28; Shemekia Copeland, July 26.

FreshGrass|Bentonville: Billed as “an all-ages American and global roots music festival” will include Béla Fleck and Rosanne Cash with John Leventhal, May 16-17.

Read also this story on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.