The Art Museum of WVU is dedicated to educational outreach and welcomes group tours from schools and community groups. The Jacknowitz Travel Fund pays for school visits to the museum for primary and secondary students, customized programs at various grade levels, snacks and art supplies for hands-on activities. During the pandemic, the Art Museum remained connected with community members by sending out approximately 2,000 art kits to students in Monongalia, Preston, Harrison and Upshur counties. The kits, created with grant funding from the Art Bridges Foundation, contained information about West Virginia artist Blanche Lazzell and materials to make prints. Read the Article

Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is partnering with three Southern art museums to form the American South Consortium as part of a national effort to expand the public’s access to American art. Thanks to a $2 million grant from the Art Bridges Foundation, the Wadsworth, along with curators from South Carolina’s Columbia Museum of Art, and Alabama’s Mobile Museum of Art and Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, will spend the next three years collaborating on a series of traveling exhibits of American art, using works from each museum’s respective collections. Read the Article

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art has received a $2 million grant that will allow the Hartford-based venue to share works of art from its American collections with three southern museums. The funding comes from the Art Bridges Foundation. “The Art Bridges Cohort Program allows us to share our exceptional American collections with wider audiences,” Wadsworth Director Matthew Hargraves said in a statement. “We are thrilled to welcome great objects from institutions in the American South that will expand our understanding and appreciation of the diversity of American art and material culture.” Read the Article

“Life and Death: Luis Jiménez” features 35 pieces from the late Chicano artist. Containing sculptures, sketches, studies, drawings and prints, the exhibit is running until April 1. It is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. “I love [the exhibit], especially culturally, like being able to see into someone else’s culture,” said theater senior Vanessa Hancock. “I think it’s beautiful, and just like the different mediums, it’s really nice to see.” “Life and Death” shares the gallery with “Bridges III,” which is the third installation of a collaboration with the Art...

Many muses inspired the artwork of Henry Koerner, especially the gilded Baroque architecture of his native Vienna, Austria.  Koerner’s portraits of famous people, commissioned by Time magazine, burnished his reputation. He refused to work from photographs and insisted his subjects sit while he sketched. This meant that he met everyone from Barbra Streisand to Nelson Rockefeller and Maria Callas to then-U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy. According to Jeremiah William McCarthy, Chief Curator at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, “In recent years, major museums have started to collect him again,” adding that the Arkansas-based Art Bridges Foundation, established by Walmart...

The Midwest has a reputation for being resourceful in conducting a unique voice and placement within the art world. Without being pressured to follow a particular art movement, Midwestern artists have the freedom to experiment and question the walls that house the artwork. Walking through the current exhibitions at the Peoria Riverfront Museum, you may question how a museum located in central Illinois amassed such an extraordinary collection of artworks. Renowned artists such as Judy Chicago, Alfred Conteh, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Jack Whitten, and many more are part of the exhibition “American Revolutionaries: Art and Disruption,” which is on...