RELATED: Photos from the Olana Partnership Dinner

The daughter of the founder of Wal-Mart, Alice Walton, has taken away more than a few New York art treasures, including Asher Durand’s “Kindred Spirits” from the New York Public Library, for her new museum in Bentonville, Ark., Crystal Bridges. But on Tuesday night, on the eve of this week’s auctions and shows of American art, including a Church show opening Friday at Adelson Galleries, Ms. Walton put her weight behind a treasure that is most certainly staying put: Olana, the Persian-style Hudson Valley home of Frederic Church, owned by New York State and open to the public as a house museum and education center.

Ms. Walton and her art adviser, John Wilmerding, an art history professor at Princeton who served as curator of American art and deputy director at the National Gallery of Art, were the recipients of the Olana Partnership’s Frederic E. Church Award, presented at the partnership’s annual fund-raising event. This year’s gala raised close to a million dollars, with strong support from collectors, dealers, and auction houses that have sold Ms. Walton artwork, and many that dream of doing so.

That is good news for Olana, already a carefully restored and glorious house museum with a strong education and outreach program, and a long wish list of projects that need funding.

Ms. Walton called attention to the similarities between Olana and Crystal Bridges, especially their sense of place.

“Church’s fascination with art and nature is what Crystal Bridges is all about,” Ms. Walton said.

Designed by Moshe Safdie, Crystal Bridges is a complex of curved buildings, bridges, and even a dam surrounded by water and parkland. Olana, which Church himself designed, sits atop a hill in Hudson, N.Y., with a view of the Hudson, surrounded by farmland and forest.

A key difference is the collections. Olana contains the paintings Church displayed in his home, exactly where he hung them, both his own and those he collected on trips around the world. Crystal Bridges will display works acquired over a relatively short period of time expressly for the museum.

“You’ll be shocked by what she has acquired, in terms of the caliber. This is going to be one of the real achievements in the field,” Mr. Wilmerding said of Ms. Walton. He was speaking with more than curatorial authority: His own gifts of art to the National Gallery of Art were significant, and the collections of his grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, started the Shelburne Museum.

The event drew leaders in the field of American art, including the curator of American art at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, Theodore Stebbins Jr.; the curator of American art at Yale, Helen Cooper; a curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kevin Avery; the director of the museum at the New-York Historical Society, Linda Ferber, and the president of the Amon G. Carter Foundation, Ruth Carter Stevenson.

“This seems to me a landmark event in the history of American art. I don’t think anything like this has ever happened before,” Mr. Stebbins said.

And it happened not in Arkansas or the Hudson Valley, but in New York City, at the Pierre hotel.

agordon@nysun.com