Alice Walton Announces New Art Bridges Foundation

Alice Walton

Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam M. Walton and the founder of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, announced Wednesday the formation of a new nonprofit foundation called Art Bridges.

The foundation will focus on expanding access to American art. It will create and fund exhibitions; provide single-object loans; fund in-depth educational and interpretive materials; bring together art from museums, private collections and foundations; and establish its own collection.

Art Bridges will partner with institutions ranging from large museums that have deep collections they are unable to fully display to small and mid-sized museums seeking to share a wider range of artwork with visitors. Crystal Bridges will provide administrative, collection care, education/outreach and curatorial expertise to the foundation.

Art Bridges is already working to partner with Brooklyn Museum, Fisk University Galleries, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Yale Museums & Galleries.

Institutions that have recently received works on loan from the Art Bridges collection include Amarillo Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, El Paso Museum of Art, The Old Jail Art Center, Portland Museum of Art, Tyler Museum of Art and Yellowstone Art Museum.

Two Art Bridges projects underway include program support for John Sloan’s “Bleecker Street” — currently on loan for the exhibition, “New York, New York,” at Nassau County Museum of Art; and support for Gilbert Stuart’s “William Smith” — currently on loan to Juniata College Museum of Art.

The nonprofit American Federation of Arts has partnered with Art Bridges too, to bring traveling exhibitions to institutions across the country. AFA and Art Bridges are currently working to bring “Selections from The Studio Museum in Harlem,” a working title, to Frye Art Museum, The Gibbes Museum of Art, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, The Museum of the African Diaspora, Utah Museum of Fine Arts and Smith College Museum of Art.

Art Bridges is also working with the Terra Foundation for American Art to create a six-year initiative to develop and nurture collection-sharing networks. “Terra Art Bridges” will provide funding to a diverse array of institutions across the U.S. to create new partnerships and facilitate new thinking about collaborative exhibition development, collection-sharing and care and professional development that benefits participating museums and the audiences they serve.