The Bridgemaker Prize

Recognizing our museum partners for their outstanding work reflecting the foundation’s core pillars of art sharing and community engagement.

About

Art Bridges Foundation is excited to announce a new award that honors our museum partners who exemplify excellence in advancing our mission, impacting their communities, and influencing the field. These partners collaborate with us to reimagine museum practices, elevate diverse storytelling, and deepen community engagement through interdisciplinary programs.

“The Bridgemaker Prize is an opportunity to highlight the incredible work being done by our partners across the country to make art accessible, meaningful, and transformative for all. Each of this year’s awardees has used Art Bridges’ support to tell a new story about American art, whether it be by uplifting underrepresented voices or reimagining the way we approach familiar works.” — Anne Kraybill, CEO, Art Bridges

The goals of this prize are to:

Promote the values and mission of Art Bridges, and recognize partners who best embody them
Increase visibility of Art Bridges’ art sharing and community engagement initiatives
Strengthen relationships with current museum partners and showcase their impact
Inspire museums nationwide to push boundaries, build stronger communities, share artworks from their collections, and champion the transformative power of art

The inaugural Bridgemaker Prize is divided into two categories, reflecting our pillars of art sharing and community engagement.

Art Sharing: Acknowledges museums for their innovative and impactful efforts in expanding access to American art through exhibitions, collection loans, and art sharing initiatives.

Community Engagement: Celebrates museums for engaging their audiences through community-building, transformative, and interdisciplinary art experiences.

Each winner receives a $50,000 award to support future projects in alignment with Art Bridges’ mission. In addition to the monetary prize, recipients have the opportunity to spotlight their work across our digital platforms, expanding their reach and inspiring museums nationwide to push boundaries, foster dialogue, and champion the power of art.

Hudson River Museum

Over the course of its seven-year partnership with Art Bridges, community engagement award recipient Hudson River Museum has collaborated with the foundation on 37 total projects, attracting visitors from throughout the New York region and 45 states in 2024 alone. Projects have comprised Access for All programming, several partner loans, and collaborations with Art Bridges’ Learning & Engagement team. "Art and Identity" inaugurated the partnership, bringing outstanding figurative works from the Art Bridges Collection to the museum to explore artistic depictions of identity across centuries. The partnership was further strengthened by the museum’s debut of "Free First Fridays," which activates the HRM with dynamic performances, hands-on art making, and immersive experiences. Most recently, HRM has collaborated with Art Bridges on "Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time," a groundbreaking exhibition that explores memory and time with works by 22 contemporary Native and Indigenous artists.

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Peoria Riverfront Museum

Since 2019, community engagement award recipient 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. Art Bridges projects have impacted around a million visitor experiences including nearly 100,000 in the museum's Every Student Initiative. The collaboration has allowed the museum to broaden the scope of its work. For example, the museum’s first project with the foundation, "Vantage Points: Contemporary American Photography" on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, was its first contemporary photography exhibition. Through its work with Art Bridges, the museum has also been able to more extensively showcase its uniquely regional offerings. The Illinois River Valley, where PRM is situated, is historically home to some of the most remarkable Midwestern carvers, and the museum’s Center for American Decoys honors this particularly American folk art by collecting, exhibiting, studying, and sharing world-class decoys. "Masterworks," which opened in 2024, includes 47 decoys on loan from New York’s American Folk Art Museum, made possible by the Art Bridges Partner Loan Network.

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Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

Art sharing award recipient Spelman College Museum of Fine Art has leveraged Art Bridges support to tour "Silver Linings: Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection." Showcasing Spelman’s permanent collection, "Silver Linings" highlights the legacy of artists of African descent spanning the twentieth century through the contemporary moment. This exhibition is critical to understanding the importance of art collecting within Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and includes work by Black artists who have been overlooked by mainstream art museums. The exhibition toured with a slate of educational programming, including lectures by museum Director Liz Andrews at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Over the course of its tour, the exhibition has seen an estimated total attendance of more than 112,300, with around 29,500 participants in related programming. Spelman will be opening a new gallery space this fall, and the Bridgemaker Prize will help the museum to expand and stay open during the summer for the first time.

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Eligibility

Official reports and documentation for all Art Bridges projects must be completed and approved to be eligible for consideration.
Partners must have completed the annual Partner Profile.

Selection Process

All partners are evaluated by Art Bridges staff using mission-aligned criteria, ensuring a fair and structured assessment based on impact, innovation, and alignment with Art Bridges’ values.

Partners and their collaborative projects with us are evaluated based on the following, with program-specific indicators identified across the prize categories:

Mission Alignment – How well their projects reflect Art Bridges’ core values and goals
Impact and Reach – The extent to which their projects have broadened art access, engaged audiences, and demonstrated long-term sustainability
Innovation – Creativity in program design and expanding the narrative or definition of American art
Collaboration – Strength of community partnerships and cross-institutional collaborations over time