BENTONVILLE -- Every city is a palimpsest.

One generation writes over another. Buildings change hands, neighborhoods acquire new identities, industries disappear, fortunes are made and fortunes evaporate. Yet traces of earlier lives remain visible beneath the surface if one knows where to look.

New York may be the nation's most accomplished practitioner of this cultural overwriting. Factories became artists' lofts. Artists' lofts became galleries. Galleries became luxury retail. Entire districts transformed so completely that visitors today can walk through SoHo without realizing they are moving through the fossil record of one of the most influential artistic communities of the late 20th century.

Bentonville is overwriting itself at a startling pace. The railroad town became a company town. The company town became headquarters of a global corporation. The headquarters is becoming a place where mountain-bike trails, contemporary architecture, ambitious public art and museum scholarship are part of the city itself. Every generation inherits a different place while walking the same streets.

That may be why one of the most memorable objects in Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's "Keith Haring in 3D" feels at home here.

It's a steel support column collector Larry Warsh "rescued" from Haring's Broome Street studio before renovation could consign it to the same fate that awaits most pieces of urban infrastructure. At some point, Haring covered the surface with the figures and symbols that became his unmistakable visual signature.

The choice of Warsh's word is revealing. The column was saved not simply from the demolition pile but from anonymity.

Museums are filled with such acts of recognition. A Greek vase survives a shipwreck. A medieval manuscript escapes a monastery fire. A Civil War letter remains tucked inside a family Bible to be rediscovered generations later. Haring's beam belongs to that tradition while simultaneously complicating it. It was never intended to be art but to hold up a building. Haring transformed it through use rather than design, and the museum now presents it as drawing, sculpture, document and architectural fragment.

That resistance to classification turns out to be the exhibition's central subject.

"Keith Haring in 3D," organized by Crystal Bridges, is being described as the first major exhibition devoted exclusively to Haring's three-dimensional work. The description is accurate, but incomplete. The exhibition is about objects and, more specifically, an artist seemingly incapable of accepting the distinctions routinely imposed by museums and critics. Haring spent his brief career eroding the boundary between art and ordinary life. This exhibition's greatest accomplishment is demonstrating that the painted appliances, furniture, masks, automobiles and architectural fragments are not charming side projects but expressions of the same democratic impulse that produced Haring's iconic subway drawings.

It arrives at a revealing moment in the evolution of Crystal Bridges.

When the museum opened in 2011, much of the national........

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