Angelica Daneo, chief curator at the Denver Art Museum, calls Rembrandt “one of the most celebrated artists of the 1600s” and an artist who “played a pivotal role in the development of European Art,” but until recently, residents of the Mile High City weren’t able to actually see any of his paintings unless they traveled somewhere else. The artist created close to 300 paintings during his career, but not every museum has one. Fortunately for Denver residents, that situation has been rectified—for two years, at least—thanks to the newly established Across the Nation program at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art that is lending works from its permanent collection to smaller and mid-sized museums around the United States.
The goal of the program is to share artworks from the National Gallery’s permanent collection with museums, many of which are in rural areas and mostly in western states that do not have pieces of this caliber to display in their communities. Ten museums (the Anchorage Museum in Alaska, the Boise Art Museum in Idaho, the Denver Art Museum in Colorado, the Figge Art Museum in Iowa, the Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, the New Britain Museum of Art in Connecticut, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno) are part of the first round of loans, with more expected in the coming years.
“We have so much to offer; our collection is here for the nation, and we felt that we were missing an opportunity to share with more people,” Kate Haw, officer for programs, exhibitions and audience engagement at the National Gallery of Art, told Observer. “Many people may not be able to come to Washington to see the collection here on our campus. While we welcome four million visitors a year and lend very generously to special exhibitions and museums around the country and around the world, we felt that we could be doing more for the nation in communities. And, as we are the National Museum, we really wanted to be more proactive about how we shared.”
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The National Gallery’s curators put together a list of 700 American and European artworks from its collection, representing paintings and photographs—some dating back to the 15th century. The Flemish artist Hans Memling was sent to the Flint Institute of Arts, along with works by Sandro Botticelli and Andy Warhol, while others received 19th- and 20th-century French works (paintings by Henri Matisse, Auguste Renoir and Paul Cezanne went to the Whatcom Museum) and Modernist pieces (the Anchorage Museum was lent paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko and Nancy Graves, and the Nevada Museum of Art received seventy photographs by Dorothea Lange).
“The Nevada Museum of Art organized an exhibition called ‘Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada’ in 2024,” Ann M. Wolfe, senior curator and deputy director at the museum, told Observer. Dixon was a painter “married to Dorothea Lange, and we wanted to follow up the Dixon exhibition with a Lange exhibition.” The National Gallery of Art has a large number of photographs by Lange, and it offered to share the trove with the Nevada Museum of Art. “The partnership has been a great opportunity to work with the National Gallery.”
All 700 artworks offered through the Across the Nation program were in storage, which meant it didn’t matter if you were in D.C.—you wouldn’t have been able to see them anyway. Pulling the pieces out of storage solved two problems: how to ensure there’s always room in the art vault and how to honor the museum’s collected works. The National Gallery made their offer more attractive by taking on the expense of crating, shipping and insuring the artworks they were lending. For their part, the borrowing museums needed to demonstrate that they had adequate conservation, proper climate controls and the ability to physically protect the works. Some staff members were invited to come to the National Gallery for training.
The largest museums have massive collections that are kept in storage and rarely make it to the exhibition galleries—the Met in New York has two million objects, while the Art Institute of Chicago has north of 300,000, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has roughly 450,000 and MoMA has around 200,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, media and performance artworks, architectural models and drawings, design objects and films, in addition to approximately two million film stills. In many cases, works are off view for good reason: some pieces are fragile and risky to pack and move or even display. “Many objects need to ‘rest,’” Charity Counts, executive director of the Association of Midwest Museums, told Observer. “It’s not wise to have something on display for an extended period that could fade from light exposure, for example.”
But other objects remain in storage because museum curators choose not to put them on display. They may have enough Renoirs on display, or the Renoirs in their galleries are better examples of the artist’s work than those in storage. In decades past, donors unloaded large numbers of artworks onto museums with conditions that pieces could not be sold, lent or traded away, and the museum curators and directors of the past often accepted a whole lot of material—some of which may have been misattributed or forgeries—because there was one gem in the pile that they really wanted. (Today’s museum officials are much less likely to accept donations that include conditions and find ways to cherry-pick what they really want.)
Museums try not to be static in their displays, swapping artworks and other items from their galleries with those in storage in order to broaden their story of the history of art, as well as lending pieces to other institutions that are organizing special exhibits. But that still leaves a great many objects owned by museums stuck in storage, probably never to see the light of day.
As to why more of the country’s major museums aren’t loaning out more works, consider that lending artworks from a museum’s permanent collection is not without risks. Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at the Mint Museum, told Observer that loans may produce “wear-and-tear on the object. You wonder, do the people borrowing these works know how to care for them?” Additionally, lending art generates costs because facilitating loans requires back-end work on both sides and institutions have to hire a registrar to keep track of where pieces are and when they are due back.
Selecting the artworks to lend also takes time and effort, according to Haw. “We went into the collection, looked at works that didn’t have any sort of restrictions from donors or any other conditions making them too fragile to lend.” After the group of 700 works was identified, curators at the National Gallery sought out their counterparts at smaller institutions around the country, allowing them to choose works from across our collections. “They were the ones who dictated. We did not dictate what went to whom,” she clarified.
Museums frequently lend works to other museums, and special exhibitions at institutions usually consist of objects that were borrowed from a variety of other museums in the U.S. and elsewhere. “The Met lends to museums of all sizes throughout the country, as part of its active and ongoing outgoing loans program,” according to a spokeswoman. Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution works with more than 200 museums and libraries around the country to coordinate loans of objects for special shows, and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas established a similar program, Art Bridges, which expands access to collections by facilitating long-term loans and traveling exhibitions between museums of all sizes. The Chicago-based Terra Foundation has its own loan program, offering works from its American art collection for special exhibits.
What distinguishes the National Gallery’s Across the Nation program is that its loans are not pegged to specific exhibitions but instead are intended to enhance or fill in gaps in permanent exhibits. Works by noted artists bring in visitors. “Renoir, Matisse, Cezanne, we don’t have that kind of work and that kind of name recognition in our museum,” Amy Chaloupka, chief curator at the Whatcom Museum, told Observer. “People are drawn to the museum when they see those names.”
The Across the Nation program could not have happened at a better time, Kahla Woodling DeSmit, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums, told Observer. “Previously, federal agencies like the Institute for Museums and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities would provide funding support for exhibitions and would often help address these costs,” she said. “However, under the current administration, many of these grants have been terminated within the last month, leaving many museums and cultural institutions concerned that their planned exhibitions may never open or that they’ll have to shoulder expenses that were once covered by federal grants.”
