Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress and daughter of the discount big-box store’s founder, Sam Walton, devotes some of her $105 billion fortune to American art. She played a central role in the creation of Crystal Bridges, the hugely successful museum in Walmart’s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas. But many people don’t know that Walton also created the Art Bridges Foundation to help many of America’s smaller museums participate in the wealth of American art. Anne Kraybill was a member of the founding team at Crystal Bridges before becoming a museum director in her own right in Pittsburgh and Wichita. Then, in 2024, she returned to Bentonville to become C.E.O. of the Art Bridges Foundation. We chatted about her ambitions for the foundation and beyond, including the obstacles to moving art around the country, the status problem for small regional institutions, and creating opportunities for early career curators. As always, this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your role is to help with the broader infrastructure of museums, but doesn’t change begin with programming that leads to more engagement? You’re seeing a shift happening, even with curators who are much more public-facing. They’ve got to be accessible to the public. They’ve got to be able to take their deep expertise and make it relevant. They’ve got to be willing to collaborate with educators who are working with all different types of audiences and communities in new ways. Otherwise, you aren’t going to reach the larger segment that we’re going to need to survive, quite frankly. You saw this shift happening in libraries a while ago. They’re not just repositories for books. They’re creating these fourth spaces, where you can have gatherings and meetings and be more of a community resource. I think museums are going to have to go this way. This model of simply putting art on the walls, and expecting people to come is over—if we do that, we’re not going to have the support we need. The original museum concept was aimed at educating the working classes by exposing them to art. We’re not just trying to educate or elevate. A lot of museums were founded, in the 20th century, for new immigrants. Now there is this idea that visitors have just as much to bring to the institution as the object has to bring to the visitor—their narratives, their interpretation of that art, are just as important as whatever historical documentation the institution has. With Art Bridges, we’re trying to democratize access to collections. With every art loan we make, we provide funding for community engagement. We encourage innovative programming done in collaboration with the community.

What are the roadblocks to all this stuff moving? Is it shipping costs? Is it just a reluctance to lend? You have a lot of art museums where the permanent collection is thought of as “our” collection. It is not often thought of as a common public good. Who cares who owns it? The public really doesn’t. When they’re walking into an institution to see art, it’s pretty rare that they’re looking at the label. Is it on loan, or is it part of this collection? Shipping costs are expensive, but we cover that. Insurance is expensive, but we help cover that. Crating is expensive, but we help cover that, too. So it’s not the financial barriers. It’s the mentality of, This is ours. Do we feel safe lending it to another institution? Oftentimes, there are facility standards out there that prevent those loans from happening. Generally, what’s taught is 70 degrees, 50 percent humidity. I can guarantee you, the institutions making those loans aren’t even able to meet those standards. We’ve been really pushing institutions: Let’s figure out ways to get to yes. Maybe not everything can be loaned. Maybe some things are too fragile. But I’m pretty positive that a painting that was done before electricity was made, that has been inside homes of people, that has been exposed to all kinds of conditions, and has suffered no damage, is going to be just fine. It sounds like there needs to be some sort of an exchange where it’s easier for curators to see what’s out there, and what their requests would be. Then have someone act as a guarantor between two institutions. We help broker these all the time. We play matchmaker. So if we’ve got an institution that has works they want to lend, we can help find borrowers. We do all of the legwork of getting the facility reports. And if there’s anything that’s just really out of whack with climate, we can help support mitigation. Sometimes, it’s just simple things, like maybe they need a dehumidifier. I’ve joked that we need to create the Bumble app for art sharing. How could we have a larger database, a repository of works that are available, that institutions could easily put into their shopping basket and check out? There’s also a status issue here. Small regional institutions want to borrow works that larger museums don’t want to lend. And you’ve mentioned that there’s a growing trend of very small museums putting on particularly strong shows that are traveling. One of the questions we’re curious about is, if three institutions asked for the same object at the same time, how do you choose? A lot of it goes back to prestige, right? Is there a publication involved? What’s the reputation of the institution—rather than, what’s the impact this could have if it went to that community? That should really be the question: What’s the maximum impact it can have on the public? We’ve seen through some of our cohort programs, where you have a larger lead institution, their eyes are suddenly opened to the amazing work happening at some of these smaller to midsize regional museums. I’ve used the example of the Boston MFA taking a show from a small museum in Wilmington, North Carolina. How thrilling is that?! Part of what Art Bridges is trying to do is knock down the silos of peer-to-peer work across institutional sizes and institutional reputations. There’s a lot of great work happening at smaller institutions that could be shared with larger institutions. You’re an early career curator, your show is not going to see the light of day for years. We have a new initiative for large institutions with an early career curator who’s got great ideas, but there’s just not space in the schedule, because it’s set years in advance. So they’re going to come, and they’re going to pitch two to three ideas of exhibitions developed from their collections, which we would then fund and send to partner institutions across the country. We also have an access-for-all program that’s about reducing financial barriers, and institutions have implemented it. The Whitney is a great example. They used their access-for-all funds to make one Sunday per month free, which led to their every Friday night free, which then led to Julie Mehretu giving a grant for everybody under 26 free. Museums that have high tourism—maybe there’s a way for them to improve access for their local communities. Museums that are already free access for all can actually go toward marketing to new audiences and toward programming. So that was a $40 million investment to 64 institutions. We’re evaluating it right now, and we should be rolling out the next iteration of that at the end of 2025, or early ’26.

The Met’s public relations department scored a coup with this Wall Street Journal article over the weekend outlining the museum’s move to the front foot in dealing with restitution claims. The museum holds more than 1.5 million objects, and briefly dipping into former director Thomas Hoving’s memoir would tell you that previous regimes took a more swashbuckling approach to obtaining treasures. So the Met hired former Sotheby’s restitution lawyer Lucian Simmons as its head of provenance. He got his own star turn in The New York Times yesterday. He oversees a staff of at least 10 researchers who are now looking for gaps and red flags from within each curatorial department, so the museum can find novel and mutually beneficial solutions. With that, I will say farewell for now. M