From the Fine Art Connoisseur November/December 2024 Editor’s Note:
Sharing Makes Us Stronger
The United States is fortunate to have a lively museum scene, with hundreds of thousands of artworks on public view at their home institutions and thousands more in circulation through traveling exhibitions. Even so, vast holdings of American art remain tucked away in museum vaults, inaccessible to art lovers due to financial and logistical constraints. 
That’s a regrettable situation now being addressed in earnest. Earlier this year, Art Bridges launched its Partner Loan Network, fostering long-term collection-sharing partnerships among museums of all sizes nationwide. This initiative existed in another form for the past seven years, but now its scope has broadened. “By providing a platform for museums to share their collections, the Partner Loan Network offsets limitations to collection-sharing by providing logistical and strategic support to get artworks out of storage and share them with communities across the country,” explains Anne Kraybill, CEO of Art Bridges.
Art Bridges is a foundation created by the arts patron Alice Walton, whose family founded Walmart and still controls it. Art Bridges has its own collection of art, and it works closely with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart’s hometown.
Today the Partner Loan Network involves more than 200 institutions ranging in size from the gigantic Museum of Modern Art to the more modestly scaled Peoria Riverfront Museum. Art Bridges coordinates the preparation of the artworks to be loaned, including insurance, crating, and shipping, at no cost to participants, and additional grants to support educational activities are available. Over the past year, nearly 280 objects were rotated, enhancing the collections of 29 borrowing institutions.
A useful example can be enjoyed this season at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. On view there through December 8 is the exhibition “The Great Search: Art in a Time of Change, 1928–1945,” which takes its title from the 1939 World’s Fair held in New York City. Organizer Holger Cahill, then national director of the Federal Art Project, spoke of the modern American artist’s “search that takes many paths” — a yearning desire to seek out new and enduring forms that would aid democracy.
Among the master artists represented in this year’s show are Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Andrew Wyeth. Though many of the works come from the Westmoreland’s superb collection, others have been loaned through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art Bridges. Philadelphia holds a particularly outstanding collection of American art, yet simply cannot show all of it. Why not, then, share some of those treasures, especially with another great venue in the same state?
Collaborations like this will help move our field forward, especially in this time of soaring costs and understaffing. To learn more about the network, visit artbridgesfoundation.org, and enjoy some of the resulting projects now underway.
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