Over the past two decades, no individual donor has been more influential in boosting access to the arts and promoting community engagement with it than Alice Walton.
In 2005, Walton, the only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, established the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, to “welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature.” The admission-free museum, which opened in 2011, welcomed a record-breaking 785,000 visitors in 2023, validating Walton’s vision of providing the public with unfettered access to world-class art in an environment situated far from a major coastal enclave.
That being said, Walton’s ambitions were never confined to her home region of Northwest Arkansas.
In 2017, Walton launched the Art Bridges Foundation to get vast troves of American art out of storage and into museums of all sizes across the country. To this end, its Partner Loan Network provides support to institutions seeking to loan or borrow artworks from museum collections within the network. Over time, the foundation has broadened its remit to address diversity in museum leadership and support partner museums during the pandemic, all while remaining laser-focused on Walton’s vision of fostering audience engagement.
Art Bridges in August announced the winners of its inaugural Bridgemaker Prize, an annual award recognizing the achievements of the foundation’s museum partners. The three winners — Hudson River Museum, Peoria Riverfront Museum and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art — “demonstrate the power of combining art with deep community connection,” said Art Bridges CEO Anne Kraybill. “After seven years of partnerships, the time felt right to celebrate this kind of leadership and inspire others across the field.”
In 2016, we dubbed Walton “America’s Most Important Arts Philanthropist” due to her vision of making art accessible to all Americans — and the extent of her financial means to enact her vision. At the time, her net worth was $33 billion. Now, that figure hovers around $110 billion. For the fiscal year ending December 2023, her Alice L. Walton Foundation had over $4 billion in assets, so we can expect more giving to the arts as well as her other interest areas, which include education, health and wellness, and advancing economic opportunity.
The inaugural Bridgemaker Prize serves as Art Bridges’ latest contribution to a space beset by declines in public funding, disengaged younger donors and the lingering effects of the pandemic.
“Alice’s founding vision is at the heart of this prize: that American art should be accessible to communities everywhere, not just in major metropolitan hubs,” said Kraybill. “While the details were developed by our team, the spirit of the Bridgemaker Prize reflects Alice’s belief that American art — when shared broadly and paired with meaningful community engagement — can transform lives.”
How Walton and Art Bridges define audience engagement
Art Bridges provides financial and strategic support for exhibitions, collection loans and programs to over 285 museums in its partner network. “We expect to reach 300 museum partners nationwide very soon,” Kraybill said, “which is a huge milestone for us and communities across the country.”
A few years ago, I checked in with Walton after the Alice L. Walton Foundation made a $10 million gift to Crystal Bridges to create an endowment dedicated to developing the next generation of arts leaders. Walton discussed how Art Bridges was working with partner museums to boost engagement, citing the Missoula Art Museum’s deep personal relationships with tribal communities across the state and increased access to work by contemporary Indigenous artists. “Most museums have a desire to engage with communities more deeply, and many just need some support and encouragement to do so,” she said.
Not surprisingly, Kraybill views engagement through a similar lens. “For us, engagement means sparking genuine, two-way connections between museums and community,” she said. “It’s about people seeing themselves reflected in art, finding personal meaning, and feeling museums belong to them. At first, our focus was moving art out of storage and into more places nationwide to increase access to American art. Today, we know the most impactful projects pair art with programming that invites dialogue and connection.”
How winners of the Bridgemaker Prize engage audiences
I first connected with Kraybill last March, a few months after she became Art Bridges’ CEO. One of the highlights from our conversation was her contention that while offering free admission boosts engagement by eliminating a financial barrier to entry, museum officials also need to address “‘threshold fear,’ which is when some people think, ‘Museums aren’t a place for me,’ or ‘Maybe I’m just not that into art.’”
The antidote to “threshold fear” is programming that resonates with these individuals, she said. “We want to create spaces where everybody feels represented and expand people’s perspectives about the American experience,” Kraybill told IP. “A lot of the museums we work with were founded in a different era, and they just don’t have the acquisition budget to diversify their collection. Art Bridges is an important tool for them to expand their collections and have those conversations.”
None of this is to suggest that Art Bridges’ relationship with its partners is a one-way street. Kraybill and her team help museums get American art into communities, but partners expose foundation staff to new and innovative ways to engage with the public. Kraybill said the Bridgemaker Prize came together after foundation stakeholders noticed how many of its partners were “going beyond single projects — they were reshaping museum practice itself.”
A closer look at the three winners underscores their unique approaches.
The Yonkers, New York-based Hudson River Museum has collaborated with Art Bridges on an exhibition, “Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time,” that includes works by 22 contemporary Native and Indigenous artists. The exhibition “doesn’t just display work by Native and Indigenous artists,” Kraybill said. “It creates a platform for their stories.”
Located in Peoria, Illinois, the Peoria Riverfront Museum has worked with Art Bridges on 20 projects, including the loans of more than 100 individual works from the Art Bridges collection and other national collections. Kraybill cited the museum’s “community-centered approach that bridges local history with contemporary art, creating programming that speaks directly to their region’s unique cultural identity while fostering broader conversations about place and belonging.”
The third prize winner, Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, is the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to art by and about women of the African diaspora. Previous Art Bridges support enabled the museum to tour “Silver Linings: Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection,” which features work by artists of African descent from Spelman’s permanent collection. The exhibition has been seen by over 112,300 individuals and, as Kraybill noted, “continues to spark dialogue and impact audiences nationwide” with lectures exploring the role of historically Black colleges and universities in preserving Black art.
Each museum received a $50,000 award to support future projects in alignment with Arts Bridges’ mission. The winners will also have the opportunity to share their work on the foundation’s digital platforms.
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How visual arts organizations can boost meaningful audience engagement
Of course, every museum programming officer spends practically every waking hour of their day thinking about how to engage audiences — especially if their efforts can attract funder support. Yet some museums still have difficulty in making resonant connections. Why?
The most obvious culprit is capacity. “Engagement takes time, resources and sustained commitment, which can be challenging for institutions of all sizes,” Kraybill said. This challenge is all the more acute at a time when some visual arts organizations haven’t returned to pre-pandemic attendance figures and are grappling with federal funding cuts.
But a lack of capacity doesn’t tell the whole story. Museums, Kraybill noted, “sometimes struggle with breaking down traditional barriers between institution and community.” As noted earlier, these barriers could involve cost — some museums simply can’t afford to provide free admission — as well as program offerings that, however well intentioned, don’t click with segments of the audience.
“There’s also the challenge of measuring impact in meaningful ways that go beyond attendance numbers,” Kraybill said, underscoring what is perhaps the most vexing element of the engagement question, since the impact of the arts experience is inherently subjective and qualitative. Museums can address this challenge by commissioning surveys to gauge how an exhibition affected viewers, but again, the definition of “meaningful” depends on the audience member — and impact-oriented funder — in question.
Kraybill encourages museum leaders to recognize that since engagement is ultimately relationship-building work, they should begin by listening to individuals in their extended orbit.
“Communities will tell you what they want if you ask with openness and humility. Build partnerships, not just programs — work with schools, local artists and leaders, and grassroots groups who already have trust on the ground.” Stakeholders should also think beyond the confines of the conventional engagement delivery mechanism known as the exhibition. “Some of the most impactful projects,” Kraybill said, “happen through festivals, performances, or outside the museum walls.”
