Crystal Bridges Museum President Don Bacigalupi in front of Gina Phillips' "Fort Dirt Hole." Phillips is a New Orleans artist.
It’s been almost two years since we reported that Don Bacigalupi, the president of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, was leaving the Bentonville institution to head the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas’ brainchild planned for Chicago.
Well, Lucas ruled out Chicago as the site of his $743 million museum last month after “extensive delays” caused by opposition to his plans to put the project on a parking lot near Lake Michigan. The group Friends of the Parks, seeking to protect the lakefront, had sued to block the museum.
Now, Lucas says, he’s looking again to San Francisco, which he’d abandoned in 2014 after negotiations to locate it on Presidio property fell through. Los Angeles has also offered itself as a location, and Sacramento citizens (bless their hearts) are circulating an online petition to build support for their city.
The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce had said the museum would have an economic impact of $2 billion to $2.5 billion in increased tourism spending and $120 million to $160 million in new tax revenue in its first 10 years.
Bacigalupi — his official title Lucas Museum founding president — knows something about difficult beginnings. In December, when the Lucas Museum still planned to locate in Chicago, he told Crain’s Chicago Business that when he first took the job at Crystal Bridges: “Many of my colleagues were unkind. They thought I had fallen off the edge of the earth and lost my mind.”
Bacigalupi expressed confidence in Lucas’ vision, telling the publication: “A hundred years ago, when the Carnegies and Rockefellers and Guggenheims and Fields and Adlers gave back, it was called community service. We’ve gone through generations of personal greed, and we forget that that kind of spirit still exists. When someone makes this kind of epic gift, people nowadays don’t know how to receive it. There’s a pushback and skepticism and criticism.”
A Modest Proposal
Bacigalupi joined Crystal Bridges as executive director in 2009 and was key in the planning and development of the museum’s art collection and opening of the museum, which has been a success by anyone’s definition.
As for filmmaker Lucas, who lives in Marin County, he was dismayed by his reception in Chicago. “No one benefits from continuing their seemingly unending litigation to protect a parking lot,” he said in his June 24 statement announcing the end of the museum’s Chicago plans. “The actions initiated by Friends of Parks and their recent attempts to extract concessions from the city have effectively overridden approvals received from numerous democratically elected bodies of government.”
Whispers offers this modest proposal: Come back to Arkansas, Mr. Bacigalupi, and bring the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art with you.
As Bacigalupi told Minnesota Public Radio’s program Marketplace in May, “We’re talking about an extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime gift to a city and its people, and indeed the nation and the world. But it’s going to be located somewhere.”
As Yoda told Luke in the “Empire Strikes Back”: “Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not.”
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