Art Bridges Foundation, a nonprofit founded by philanthropist and collector Alice Walton in 2017, has maintained a mission to expand access to diverse art to communities across the United States since its inception. With the aim of fostering and promoting empathy and understanding through art, Art Bridges has facilitated dozens of traveling exhibitions across the United States, offering visitors the opportunity to explore and discover artworks that might otherwise be beyond their reach.

Beyond this, the Foundation also maintains a commitment to getting museum and collection artworks out of storage and on view where they can be experienced and enjoyed by viewers. In line with these core motivations, the foundation inaugurated its Art Bridges Partner Loan Network, a model of art sharing wherein member museums can better circulate work from within their collections.

The benefit of this program is multifaceted. While it empowers smaller, regional museums to present art that would otherwise potentially be beyond the institutions means to acquire or borrow, it also gives larger museums the opportunity to bring to light works that might otherwise remain unseen. Beyond this, it creates an opportunity to circulate not only important American art but also increase institutional representation of underrepresented creators, such as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and women artists. And in the shadow of COVID museum closures, the loan program can help reinvigorate exhibition programs and increase attendance through the draw of new and hard-to-see artworks on view.

So how does it work? The Art Bridges Foundation partners with major institutions throughout the United States; these partners in turn identify and create groups of five to seven artworks to be distributed to other museums and institutions. The foundation handles the logistics—from packing and shipping to loan agreements and insurance—and the associated costs, which in and of itself can be prohibitively expensive to both major and minor institutions. These artwork loans are granted on an 18- to 24-month basis, at which time they travel to another borrowing museum.

To date, the Art Bridges Partner Loan Network has shown steadily increasing growth, and has seen art loaned from major institutions to museums nationwide. Some examples of the program’s success include the loan of artist Clementine Hunter’s work from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, to the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) at the University of Rochester. The loan helped flesh out MAG’s programming, and provided an opportunity to feature additional work by a BIPOC artist.

At the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, 12 artworks from the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, went on view as part of the 14-month exhibition Order/Reorder: Experiments with Collections, which examined American identities both past and present through visual media as well as a program of interactive visitor experiences. And the Huntsville Museum of Art inaugurated a gallery dedicated to American art within its collection, which was complemented by a loan of significant works from the Art Bridges collection to further contextualize and expand the narratives presented.

Ultimately, the Partner Loan Network art-sharing program plays a pivotal role in enabling museums regardless of size, place, or resources to increase their audience size and impact their community.

Learn more about Art Bridges Foundation and how they can support your local institution here.