The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts has lost a half-million-dollar donation from a member of the Rockefeller family. The donation was meant to help the museum get closer to its $155 million goal for its capital campaign. The new building will open on April 22, 2023. Anne Bartley, who moved to Arkansas with her family when she was a child and is the daughter of Jeannette Edris Rockefeller and the stepdaughter of Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, told AMFA of her decision in a letter on September 13. She gave up the pledge, which was part of her will, when she found out that the new building won't have a gallery named for her mother.
In 1998, Bartley gave $500,000 to the Arkansas Arts Center's $22 million capital campaign to build a new wing. In February 2000, the Arts Center opened the doors to its bigger building. In a letter to the Arts Center's Director at the time, Townsend Wolfe, Bartley also said that she would give $500,000 from her estate to the Jeannette Edris Rockefeller Permanent Collection Gallery. This gallery was one of three in the new wing. It was near the entrance to the Alice Pratt Brown Atrium. In March 2021, Bartley got a letter from AMFA Executive Director Dr. Victoria Ramirez saying that the Arkansas Arts Center would be renamed the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts and that her mother's name would be on a "special plaque" in the new building to honor "patrons who had named spaces in the old building." If she had questions about the "recognition," she was told to call the development office.
Winthrop Rockefeller in 1967
Bartley, who now lives in San Francisco and used to be on the Arkansas Arts Center Board of Trustees, said the letter was "cold and impersonal" and that calling her mother just a patron was "a slap in the face." Jeannette and Winthrop Rockefeller helped get the Arkansas Arts Center up and running. When the Little Rock Junior League asked for help in 1959, they went on a tour across the state to raise money for their arts center. They insisted that everyone in Arkansas should help build it. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund helped pay for and build the building. On May 18, 1963, the arts center opened with an exhibit of European masterworks from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art.
Bartley's past in Arkansas is very interesting. When Gov. David Pryor asked her to run the Department of Natural and Cultural Heritage, she was the first woman to be put in a cabinet position. Governor Bill Clinton asked her to run the state's office in Washington, D.C., in 1974. She joined the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund after Gov. Frank White closed the office. From 1993 to 1995, she worked in the White House as a member of the First Lady's staff. After that, she worked on progressive projects.
Warren Stephens is the head of the AMFA Foundation. He and his wife, Harriet, are in charge of the capital campaign for the new arts center and seem to make most of the decisions at AMFA. He wrote to Bartley that he didn't know about the promise to Wolfe and was disappointed by her decision, she said. Bartley also told the Times that she was "flabbergasted" by AMFA's decision to destroy "Standing Red," the Tal Streeter sculpture that stood across the back entrance to the former arts center and was dedicated to Jeannette Rockefeller, and by the lack of communication with the public about the decision. The Stephenses will be honored with a name for the main gallery, and Robyn and John Horn will be honored with a name for the Windgate Art School gallery.
Selena Mattei