Alice Walton's art habit began with a Picasso print at age ten
At ten years old, Alice Walton spent five weeks of pocket money on a print of Picasso's Blue Nude. Decades later the Walmart heiress, ranked by Bloomberg in July 2025 as the richest woman alive, turned that childhood habit into a free museum of American art in her small Arkansas hometown.
Walton was born on 7 October 1949 in Newport, Arkansas, and raised in Bentonville with three brothers; her father, Sam Walton, founded Walmart. She studied economics at Trinity University in Texas and worked as an equity analyst, money manager and broker before founding an investment bank, Llama Company, in 1988. Painting watercolours with her mother on camping trips gave her an early eye for art, and in the late 1980s she bought her first serious pieces, a pair of Winslow Homer watercolours.
Her collecting grew ambitious. In 2005 she bought Asher Brown Durand's Kindred Spirits, an 1849 tribute to the landscape painter Thomas Cole, from the New York Public Library in a sealed-bid auction for a reported 35 million dollars. Norman Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter followed in 2009 for 4.9 million. Her purchases range from Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe to Mark Rothko and contemporary painters such as Kehinde Wiley, and one was prompted by her effort to give up cigarettes: an Alfred Maurer picture of a woman smoking.
All this fed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, designed by Moshe Safdie and built on 120 acres of family land in Bentonville. It opened in 2011, charges nothing for entry, and had logged more than 5 million visits by 2021. Walton says she wanted people who had never had access to art to get it. Her Art Bridges Foundation, set up in 2017, lends works to small regional museums so less of the nation's art sits in storage.
Earlier she had helped bring an airport to northwest Arkansas, supplying 15 million dollars towards construction; its terminal carries her name. More recently her attention has turned to health, with a nonprofit medical school in Bentonville that enrolled its first students in 2025.
Source: Alice Walton
