Thomas Hart Benton

November 7, 2025- August 9, 2026

A collection of 25 paintings and drawings produced by Benton in 1943 and 1944 as a commission for Abbott Laboratories and the U.S. Navy. These works depicted the intensity of life aboard a submarine, the USS Dorado, and the wartime bustle of a shipyard in Ambridge Pennsylvania, building LSTs (landing ships for tanks). These unique encounters produced equally unique works of art, which capture the anticipation of war and the many contributing efforts.

In addition to these works, Benton’s Year of Peril series will be featured in reproduced images. The paintings, conceived and created in the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, capture the unadulterated brutality of the war and his fear of the rising Axis Powers. Full of evocative imagery, color, and symbolism, these works served as Benton’s rallying cry to the American public to support U.S. entry into World War II.

Manufacturing Victory In Arkansas

Discover six statewide ordnance plants that produced and tested explosives for the frontlines of World War II while their employees quietly changed the way society functioned here in Arkansas. 

Imagery and Irony: The Fight for Women’s Suffrage through the Political Cartoons of Nina Allender

Nina Allender’s political cartoons illustrated the fight for women’s suffrage in ways that no other medium could. The battle for equality became accessible, tangible, funny and gut-wrenching through her art. From 1914 until her final cartoon appeared in 1927, Allender created more than 300 illustrations during the woman’s suffrage campaign. This exhibit explores the power of those illustrations and their connections to government propaganda created to support World War I. 

Vietnam, America’s Conflict

Vietnam, America’s Conflict brings together the powerful photography of Jim Guy Tucker and Bruce Wesson, graduates of Little Rock’s Hall High School class of 1961. The work of these two schoolmates captures the faces of men, women, and children learning first hand their own profound lessons of war. Using the portraits in this exhibit, Tucker and Wesson remind museum patrons of the reality of war. 

War and Remembrance

Learn how photos, letters, other memorabilia and events help us to understand the Civil War perspective through memory and time.