If you’ve recently enjoyed trivia night at The HUB Bike Lounge or shopped Two Friends Books at 8th Street Marketplace, you’ve engaged with the work of artist, curator, and educator, Dayton Castleman.
Verdant Studio’s Director of Creative Placemaking and Artist Lead, Castleman hails from New Orleans with a robust arts background peppering cities like Houston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. But it was an underdog port city in Spain that inspired his decision to leave his tenure in art education to work at Phat Tire in Bentonville.
Situated in Northern Spain, the Bilbao of the 1990s was a down-on-its-luck steel and shipbuilding town with not much to lose. Certainly, this grungy city suffering from crippling unemployment and political unrest wasn’t expected to become a catalyst of cultural transformation for the region. But in 1997, the renowned Guggenheim institution opened its first European museum along the Nervión River in Bilbao. Its world-class collection housed by an architectural marvel designed by Frank Gehry, transformed Bilbao into a cultural juggernaut with an economic impact exceeding the local treasury, tenfold.
In the decades following Guggenheim Bilbao’s opening, city leaders, developers, and curators worldwide have studied the project hoping to bottle the “Bilbao Effect” like a prescription for building culturally vibrant and financially successful communities. Around 2006, these studies caught the attention of artist and MFA student, Castleman.
Before grad school, Castleman’s interests had shifted from gallery work to creating for public spaces. Rather than working within the limitations of a museum space, his attention shifted to placemaking and understanding how communities can use their built environment to cultivate artistic ecosystems, like Bilbao.
“No matter their background, people who enter a museum or gallery are prepared for a particular experience," he said. "But when you’re going to get groceries, and you see something out of the ordinary, you’re not in the same frame of mind. That really shaped my interest in going to grad school for sculpture and working in public spaces.”
What he hadn’t mentioned at this point of the interview was that emergency brain surgery had also played a major role in his future in sculpture. We’ll get to that…
Castleman had been studying examples of cities that had invested in culture and three stood out as pivotal, the most profound (to him) being Bilbao. “The Guggenheim Museum is one of the most important art brands in the world,” he said. “What the analysis showed was that, over the next 10 years, the museum became the catalyst for cultural transformation.”
With this concept at the forefront of his mind, Castleman had a unique lens for observing a newsworthy announcement out of little ol’ Bentonville, Arkansas.
“I’m reading about Bilbao around the same time the announcement about Crystal Bridges came out. It was getting similar reactions to those Bilbao had in ‘97: ‘Why would anyone choose to build a significant art museum in a city like that?’ So, I began studying Northwest Arkansas from a distance.”
Castleman was looking for three key indicators to determine how closely Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges would parallel Bilbao’s Guggenheim: city leaders investing in culture, the significance of the real estate development, and the strength of the collection.
“Looking at the Crystal Bridges project, and the works the museum was collecting, I thought, ‘These are some of the singular examples of American art that exist in the world, and now, if you want to see them, you have to go to Arkansas to do it.’ It’s a really interesting strategy from a collection point.”
Fast forward to winter 2011, Castleman was a tenured professor of sculpture at Trinity College looking at early photos of the newly opened Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art wondering, “What if I had moved to Bilbao in 1997?”
“Just as that thought was out in the open, I also thought, ‘You could move to Bentonville,’” he said. “I really believed something similar was going to happen in this region and I was willing to quit my job and work at Phat Tire just to be here.”
As a kid, Castleman lamented to his parents that there were no more hidden places left to explore. But by the summer of 2012, he and his growing family had packed up and moved to Bentonville to see if they could participate in a cultural experiment that could uncover the art world’s next Bilbao.
While working at Phat Tire, he kept an eye open for opportunities at Crystal Bridges. “At the time, in terms of my idea of ideal employment, it was the only game of town other than the University of Arkansas,” he said. “Toward the end of July, I applied for a museum educator position and I started working at the museum from eight to noon, then one to six at Phat Tire.”
Not long after, 21c was preparing to open its Bentonville hotel and looking for a museum manager. “Like three or four months into being here, I got an offer for both the Senior Museum Educator at Crystal Bridges and Museum Manager at 21c; I chose to go the 21c direction and was there until 2020.”
In the meantime, Castleman continued his work in public art, creating "The Three Feathers," the first public art commission in the Bentonville Arts District, and "The Vine" at 8th Street Marketplace. “That was nights and weekends - the usual for most artists. Doing that type of work, I began building relationships with architects and people in the built environment.”
As we unpacked his experiences as an artist and what inspired his shift from painting to sculpture and public art, he said, “The short version of it is, when we were living in Philadelphia, I had emergency brain surgery, and when I came out, I was a sculptor instead of a painter. As I was in recovery, I lost interest in the two-dimensional imagery I was making.”
This feels like the kind of life event you’d lead with when telling your story, but it turns out, Castleman is creatively satisfied in a supportive role, both as a project manager and a community organizer.
“I like gathering like-minded people to do interesting things together,” he said. “One thing that I love about working on art in public spaces is that the work becomes about the place, not the person. My perspective shapes the work, to be sure, but it's not about me, it's about where it is.”
The Guggenheim forever changed the way people think of and experience Bilbao, much like how Crystal Bridges continues to stimulate Bentonville’s creative economy. Today, Castleman works with Verdant Studio and the Urban Land Institute [ULI] to help educate and align developers and artists to further these initiatives.
“Public art creates connections between places, opportunities for contemplation, and memory in the way of wayfinding," he said "We don’t need a mural, but it changes our relationship with that space. My work with Verdant Studio and ULI is to help bridge some of the gaps between developers and artists. I want others like me to be able to live and thrive in Northwest Arkansas. I want it to be a larger, healthy creative ecosystem."
Learn more about Dayton Castleman and his work as an artist and placemaker with both Verdant Studios (Verdant-Studio.com) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI.org) at www.DaytonCastleman.com or follow along on instagram @DaytonCastleman.
"I wondered, 'What if I had moved to Bilbao in 1997?' And just as that thought was out in the open, I also thought, 'You could move to Bentonville, Arkansas.'"
"I had brain surgery, and when I came out, I was a sculptor instead of a painter."