Art Bridges is equitably redistributing art across the country through art sharing and community engagement.
This article originally appeared in Museum magazine’s November/December 2024 issue, a benefit of AAM membership.
When I was in high school, I was a terrible student, but I always showed up for my art class with Mrs. McDaniel. She was a visionary teacher who transformed her classroom into studio spaces, giving each of her students their own space to create art. She engaged us in mature conversations about art and its purposes. I remember her asking, “Does an artist need a viewer?” She believed that artists didn’t just create for themselves; rather, artwork is not fully realized until someone has engaged with it.
Decades later, I find myself inspired by another visionary leader, Alice Walton, who shares this belief. When she built Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, she did so with minimal arts storage; she did not want the majority of the collection locked away without an audience to engage with it. This idea inspired her to create Art Bridges Foundation, which provides strategic and financial assistance to get American art out of storage and into communities across the country because everyone deserves access to art.
Art sharing may not be the first thing that comes to mind when museum leaders think about advancing diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) in their institutions. However, collection loans are essential to diversifying exhibitions in communities across the US. Such loans can increase representation—in both the artists on view and visitorship—and foster conversations that lead to empathy across differences. Too often, however, the costs associated with crating, shipping, and insurance make art sharing inaccessible for many smaller institutions. Art Bridges helps equitably redistribute art across the country through two program pillars: art sharing and community engagement.
Art Sharing
Art Bridges has several programs to share art with partners across the country. Through the Partner Loan Network, Art Bridges collaborates with institutions that have holdings of art in storage to create small groupings of artworks (usually three to eight depending on size) for borrowing institutions to exhibit for two years or more. Art Bridges provides financial support for crating, shipping, insurance, and installation of the artwork.
Recently, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, borrowed a grouping of 19th-century works from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to incorporate into its 19th-century galleries, thereby including the perspectives of Native Americans and African Americans on notions of Manifest Destiny. St. Louis is known as the “gateway to the West,” so it’s particularly important that the city’s museums have access to works that explore the history of westward expansion, land expropriation, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
Museums that share artworks through the Partner Loan Network include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, and National Academy of Design in New York, to name a few. As more museums learn about this program through partner calls, staff visits, and conferences, new partners are joining every day, including smaller museums that have wonderful artworks but limited gallery space. Our partners understand that the public is better served if their collections can be enjoyed.
In addition to facilitating loans of artworks in storage, Art Bridges is also actively acquiring artworks to loan. The Art Bridges Collection focuses on ensuring an inclusive American art history and includes seminal works by artists such as Howardena Pindell, Julie Buffalohead, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Kerry James Marshall. These works are available to institutions for up to one year and, as with the Partner Loan Network, Art Bridges provides financial support for crating, shipping, insurance, and installation.
Art Bridges also helps museums without traveling exhibition departments share their temporary exhibitions while also curating our own exhibitions to share for six-month periods. Most recently, Art Bridges supported “Liberating Light,” a selection of works by La Vaughn Belle, Michael D. Linares, and Daniel Lind-Ramos from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) collection. The exhibition reflects on the intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and ancestral ties that bind us as seen through contemporary Caribbean art video productions by Afro-descendent artists. Art Bridges provides financial support to MAC, manages the exhibition tour, and provides financial support to museums seeking to bring this exhibition to their community.
Community Engagement
In addition to these loans, Art Bridges provides supplemental Learning and Engagement awards, comprised of financial and technical support, to help museums activate the artworks and further engage their communities. For example, The Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee, borrowed and installed two artworks from the Art Bridges collection in its historic mansion’s portrait gallery: Woman with Flowers by David Clyde Driskell and Brenda P. by Barkley L. Hendricks. In addition, the museum created “The Portrait Project: Shaping a Digital Identity,” a unique, digital application that allows visitors to craft portraits of themselves, a loved one, or preloaded historical figures in the style of the two borrowed artworks. All aspects of the digital interactive are available in English and Spanish. Participants can save their creations for themselves or share them with the museum, which will display them in its central walkway to encourage others to visit the portrait gallery and participate in the activity. With this project, the museum is a site of activation and interaction, particularly for new, young visitors.
Our art sharing and community engagement programs seek to increase access to art and help museums reach diverse communities. But how do we know if these programs are moving the needle on these goals? Most museums collect data on the number of visitors, but many don’t track first-time visitors, motivations for visiting, and basic visitor demographic information. Without these details, museums won’t know if they are reaching new audiences and truly serving their full community.
The Collaboration for Ongoing Visitor Evaluation Studies (COVES) is a visitor intercept survey that, over time, collects a representative data set that helps museums understand their visitorship. Art Bridges provides the financial resources for the staff support needed to administer the survey, as well as the survey instrument and dashboard, so that art museums can participate in COVES and measure progress on their goals.
Barriers to Our Work
While Art Bridges reduces financial and logistical barriers to art sharing, we must still navigate arbitrary industry standards. Institutions have many reasons for denying loans; however, the most common barrier we encounter relates to facility temperature and humidity standards. Many museums across the country don’t have state-of-the-art HVAC systems and struggle to maintain the environmental standard we see most often in loan agreements: temperature at 70 degrees (+/- 4 degrees) Fahrenheit and relative humidity (RH) at 50 percent (+/- 5 percent).
However, while these strict environmental regulations were implemented in the name of preservation, they were not originally intended for collections care or conservation needs. According to Caitlin Southwick, the founder of Ki Culture, a sustainability nonprofit for museums, when HVAC systems were introduced to museums in the mid-20th century, the reason was human comfort. Two scientists, Harold Plenderleith and Garry Thomson of the National Gallery in London, were interested in how these systems might affect the museum’s collections. Taking into account human comfort, they decided that 69.8 degrees Fahrenheit and between 50 and 55 percent RH was reasonable, and given the capabilities of the systems, the temperature and RH should be expected to fluctuate slightly.
These became common temperature standards for artwork in museums, even though they were based on the capabilities of the machines and standards for human comfort for Londoners in the 1970s. These environmental standards were not specifically related to art preservation requirements. The subsequent application of these numbers globally and for all collections was based on a misunderstanding, not best conservation practice.
Nonetheless, these standards have become the norm in loan agreements, thereby eliminating loans to museums that cannot maintain these conditions. While we work with partners to help identify solutions for their environment, Art Bridges is also challenging art museums as a whole to update their standards. Increased flexibility on environmental conditions not only helps alleviate the climate burden of these challenging standards but also brings attention to the ethical concerns of using them as an arbitrary barrier to sharing art with less-resourced museums.
The current vitriol across the political spectrum has put our country at a crossroads. Increasing access to art is more urgent than ever and should be considered a critical component of museum DEAI programs. Through their artworks and exhibitions, museums can foster conversations that bring us together and encourage empathy across differences.
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