Ion Art: Arts and Culture magazine

There is something simultaneously exhilarating and unnerving about walking the halls of Tyson Foods’ corporate headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas. There is this gut feeling – some deja-something-or-another – involving … what? … some ill-defined concern. But what comes to mind this day – what is consuming the awareness of your right now – is the fact you are surrounded by fine art.

Wearing a visitor’s tag at Tyson comes with the knowledge that there will not be – no matter how gracious and generous with their time your greeters and escorts – opportunity to do this collection justice. The experience will be a fly-by, of sorts – fascinating and beautiful, but passing much too quickly.

Of course it is not really for the visitors – this collection of “perhaps 700 pieces” – it is for the employees, the company. This is a point armchair art critics seem to miss. There is no obligation to be representative of anything other than the wishes and whims of those who are writing the checks. This is not a museum; it is a labyrinth of halls where people on their way to water coolers walk past a great deal of work by top-shelf Arkansas artists and an impressive collection of art with a broader reputation. Anyone in accounts payable who needs to see someone in accounts receivable is apt to walk past a collection of Andy Warhol serigraphs (“his primary medium”), pause at an original Carroll Cloar flanked by two pencil studies, pass by a museum portfolio of Ansel Adams photographs, go down a hallway containing “maybe forty-something” original watercolors – spanning a career to date – by George Dombek, consider an overdue visit to Staymore in front of a work by art history professor, writer and artist Donald Harington and slip into a door past one of several Thomas Hart Bentons.

“It’s primarily a matter of personal taste,” says Tyson CEO, John Tyson. “The themes and subject matter go in all different directions. I was fortunate to spend my senior year of college in France. I was in an art history class, and we were inside all the great museums in Paris. That’s where I fell in love with art.”

In fact, it was Tyson’s father, Don, who began collecting art in the 1960s – primarily Western art, the heavyweights of the genre, Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell and others, along with an ample collection of work by a local boy done good, a contemporary and friend of Don Tyson’s, J.D. Woods.

John Tyson says that his first big acquisition – Warhol’s ten-piece and four-piece Cowboys and Indians series – provided a nice segue into a broader collection and a perfect opportunity for an active discussion among Tyson employees.

“Since the early collection was Western art, the subject of the Warhol series provided opportunity for a great discussion regarding problem solving,” he says. “We put table tents in the cafeteria, challenging employees to look at similar goals and objectives from different points of view. ‘Is there another way to come at this problem?’ The purpose of art is to make you think. We put that to work right away.”

The Collection

It’s a little like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant, gathering information about this collection. You are the guest of the two people who, with the possible exception of John Tyson, know more about it than anyone. You are with Shannon Dillard Mitchell, director of the U of A’s Fine Arts Center Gallery, a past “contract-labor curator for the corporate collection,” and Archie Schaffer, Tyson’s Senior Vice President, External Relations (and a model for a character in one of Harington’s many novels). They each have allotted a generous amount of time from their busy schedules to visit with you. Still, the information comes forth at an unmanageable rate. It is an unrealistic attempt to do the collection justice in a couple of hours. It truly is, you are aware, a “Where do we begin?” situation.

There is no inventory. Thrown about the office in which you first meet are names you know. There are many you don’t; many you wonder if you should. It is what some would call a shopping cart collection as opposed to “truly curated.” Still the “cart” has had some important work placed into it.

There is a sizable representation of Arkansas artists. The list of non-regional contemporary artists whose work followed Warhol into the collection includes: Willem de Kooning – whose work seems always to be compared or, more often, contrasted to Jackson Pollock’s; Sam Francis; Christo whose work seems always be compared to … well, Christo; Roy Lichtenstein; Wayne Thiebaud; Robert Indiana – the LOVE series; Richard Diebenkorn; Ed Ruscha; Robert Motherwell; and Helen Frankenthaler.

The walking tour is, of course, the most exciting and frustrating part of the morning. It is a whirlwind of line, color and emotion. The escorts often find themselves, in mid-sentence, pointing out a piece, only to spot you still standing thirty yards behind, paralyzed by the work in front of you.

Too quickly, as you feared, it is over. How, you wonder, as you are scanning notes on the way out the door, are you going to adequately portray the quantity and quality of the privately owned art you have just walked among? How will you evaluate and translate its weight and impression?

The answer is, of course, you won’t In the end, it’s a little like looking through someone else’s medicine cabinet in an attempt to journal what those who dwell there use to shoo the sniffles and the blues: it’s interesting in a hurried and voyeuristic sort of way, but it is not really a reasonable goal, even if reachable.

The Value of the Collection

“I really don’t look at it within that context,” John Tyson says when asked via phone about the importance of the collection to the company. “It’s more a matter of enjoyment to me. And since I enjoy art so much, I want to share that enjoyment with others.

“At some point, the question was whether to buy art for a personal collection or for the business. The decision to buy it for the company was not necessarily wise from an investor’s point of view. But this company’s been good to me, and I wanted to give something back.

“The way I value the collection is that the people who work in this building [more than 2,000] and the visitors [averaging 200 or more per day] may take the time to contemplate a piece of art they pass by during the course of doing business. Maybe the art will make them relax, giggle or think about their hopes. It just makes for a healthy environment. “That’s all it is, really.”