Art Bridges CEO Wants to Get Museum Collections out of Vaults and in Front of the Public

By incorporating Max Weber’s Interior with Music, 1915, Stuart Davis’ Untitled (Black and White Variation on “Pochade”), circa 1956-58, and Luis Alfonso Jimenez’s sculpture Howl, 1986 (cast in 1998), among other pieces, the museum could “further contextualize and expand the story of American art,” according to Art Bridges.

Art Bridges’ support has also led to expanded programs to draw young adults and millennials who don’t often go to the museum. Among these is one that allows visitors to pose in front of a screen that turns their likeness into cubist imagery. They also have introduced programs in conjunction with colleges and universities in the area “to bridge the arts through music, performance, and visual arts,” the foundation said. “Shaping American Art: Art from the Permanent Collection” will run through Feb. 9, 2025. 

“It kind of serves as a proof of concept for their curator and their team about how they can tell these stories in new and very exciting ways,” says Anne Kraybill, chief executive officer at Art Bridges. 

Kraybill returned to Bentonville, Ark., in December to helm the foundation after serving as director and CEO of the Wichita Art Museum in Wichita, Kan., and as the Richard M. Scaife director and CEO of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Pennsylvania. From 2011-18 she was director of education and research in learning at Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which Walton also founded.

In her director roles, Kraybill came to understand “the value and benefit of Art Bridges.” It wasn’t just the loan program itself, but that “it created excitement and a new way of thinking for the entire team,” she says. “When you’re able to have new artworks enter into conversation with your collection, you just start thinking about things differently … When you’re able to get funding for programming in partnership with the community, suddenly there’s a whole new level of engagement with people who maybe didn’t think that the museum was all that interested in working with them before.”

“There’s just for me a vision of fundamentally changing how museums work and who they serve,” she says.

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Kraybill was attracted to Crystal Bridges in the first place because Walton had “built that institution for the people, not just for the collection,” Kraybill says. “She also built the museum with very minimal storage because she did not want art to just kind of languish in the vaults.”

When Kraybill worked at the museum, the institution conducted a study that measured the impact of museum field trips on K-12 students. One outcome was a realization that smaller, regional museums may have great, focused collections, but they don’t necessarily have the same broad access to works of art.

That recognition sparked the idea of changing how museums collaborated “by getting artwork out of storage and sharing it across the country,” Kraybill says. 

Art Bridges was born to provide the financial and strategic support to create this “democratization of access to American collections,” she says. “But we also believe that it’s not enough to share those collections—we want to activate and engage the community.” 

That’s why for every loan or art sharing initiative Art Bridges facilitates, the foundation also provides funding for museums to partner with their community and create educational and engagement programs. 

Another goal is to create smaller networks of art sharing among regional institutions through its “cohort” program.

In 2021, the Boise Art Museum in Idaho presented “Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea,” featuring the histories of indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and LBGTQ+ people to reveal rarely told stories of the American West. The exhibition was the culmination of a multi-year, joint curatorial initiative, supported by Art Bridges, that ultimately featured works from the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Ore., and the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash., in addition to the Boise Art Museum. 

Currently, the Anchorage Museum in Alaska is proposing a cohort to “talk about climate change through the lens of art,” Kraybill says. The initiative proposes to include institutions representing artists who explore the changing climate in their art, but they are also looking at collaborating on the questions of how to address it in their internal operations. 

Art Bridges is also behind many of the free museum days or nights, or reduced ticket prices, now happening at museums across the country through a US$40 million initiative called Access for All. The Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pa., announced in March, for example, that admission is free on the second Sunday of every month, facilitated by a US$400,000 grant from Art Bridges.

In some cases, museums leveraged an Art Bridges grant to expand access, Kraybill says. In New York, a foundation grant combined with contributions from several trustees is allowing the Whitney Museum of American Art to offer free admission on Friday evenings and the second Sunday of each month for three years. 

Institutions already offering free admission used the funding to draw new audiences, including the Wichita Museum, Kraybill says. Art Bridges is evaluating the program now and plans to roll out a “phase two,” giving museums more lead time to partner with other funders to expand its effectiveness. 

As CEO, one of Kraybill’s goals is to double its museum partner network from 220 museums today and to add more institutions in the middle of the country. She is also focused on collecting data on museum visitors through a study that is examining not only who goes to museums, but also why they go. 

“The public isn’t necessarily coming for your traveling exhibition that you paid oodles of money for—they’re [maybe] coming because they’re looking for something high quality to do with their group,” Kraybill says.  “Understanding that is another great way that we can help [museums] activate their permanent collections in a deeper, more meaningful way.”