Alice Walton creates foundation to promote art sharing

Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress and founder of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, has created a nonprofit foundation, Art Bridges, to promote collaboration between museums large and small to share art from their collections and create and fund exhibitions.

In a release from Art Bridges, Walton says:

“Our country’s significant works of art should be available for all to see and enjoy,” said Walton. “Outstanding artworks are in museum vaults and private collections; let’s make that art available to everyone, and provide a way to experience these cultural treasures.”

Crystal Bridges has a history of collaborative outreach: From 2012 to 2015, the museum collaborated with the “museum without walls” Terra Foundation for American Art, the High Museum in Atlanta and the Louvre in Paris in exchanges of American works from their holdings, and at present the museum has works on loan to the Amarillo Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, the Dallas Museum and other institutions. The museum is also working with Terra, which includes the collection of the late Daniel Terra of Chicago, on a six-year project to develop sharing networks.

Art Bridges is “building partnerships,” according to the press release, with the Brooklyn Museum, Fisk University in Nashville; the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the New Britain Museum of American Art in Lexington, Conn.; and the Yale Museums and Galleries. Art Bridges has established partnerships with Crystal Bridges and the American Federation of Arts.

Art Bridges also has its own collection of 23 works of art, endowed no doubt by Walton and which also includes gifts of art from Carolyn and Laurence Belfer of New York. Among them is Jeff Koons’ “One Ball Total Equilibrium (Spalding Dr. J Silver Series),” a glass case that holds a basketball floating in water that Koons created with the help of the late physicist Richard P. Feynman. It was sold at Christie’s 2016 “Bound to Fail” auction for $15,285,000. Also from that auction and included in the Art Bridges collection is Bruce Nauman’s “No, No, New Museum,” a 62-minute videotape, that sold for $1,625,000, and Robert Gober’s “Untitled,” a sculpture of a stick of butter, which sold for $2,285,000. There are other, more conventional works in the collection as well, including an oil and graphite painting by Arshile Gorky, aquatints by Karl Bodmer and a Winslow Homer watercolor.