The Art Bridges Foundation has been an important partner of DelArt for years, providing support for everything from audio tours to traveling exhibitions to data-driven evaluation of museum programming. In 2025, that partnership continues in equally multifaceted ways.
The foundation’s Access for All grant enables the Museum to provide designated times for free admission and to incorporate performing and literary arts into its programming, showcasing the dynamic possibilities of blending various art forms.The spring 2025 exhibition, Marisol to Warhol: Printmaking and Creative Collaboration, is supported by Art Bridges, who is lending a William T. Williams painting to the show. And 2025 will be the first full year for the Museum’s Art Bridges Fellow, a recent college graduate who will spend three years at the Museum working and learning across multiple specialties in arts administration.
“Delaware Art Museum has been a strong Art Bridges partner for a number of years, working with us on several projects, and we felt the Delaware Art Museum team would provide a supportive environment for an Art Bridges Fellow,” said Amanda Driver, director of fellows and internship programs at Art Bridges. “Fellows are employees at their museums who work towards increasing access to American art through art sharing and community engagement initiatives and work on a number of Art Bridges projects.”
The Art Bridges Fellows Program began in 2022 to help create career pathways for professionals from historically underrepresented groups, and there are currently 18 fellows working at partner museums across the country. DelArt’s fellow, Hilda Delgado, started in August 2024, just over a year after she graduated from Haverford College with an art history degree. After three weeks getting oriented to the Museum, Delgado traveled to Arkansas to gather with the other fellows and spend a month learning about the Art Bridges Foundation, meeting its team, and gaining an understanding of its mission.
Over the next three years, Delgado will gain experience in four separate but interrelated museum fields: preparation, curation, registration, and education. True to the spirit of the fellowship, she has started off working on multiple projects at once and has two mentors at DelArt. Manager of Learning and Interpretation Zoe Akoto is working with Delgado as she works on creating interpretive materials for Marisol to Warhol: Printmaking and Creative Collaboration. And on a longer time frame, Delgado is working with Head Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art Margaret Winslow on a solo exhibition of artist Lisa Bradley’s work planned for 2026.
“Having one fellow for the entirety of the three years is a critical aspect of the program,” Winslow said. “It significantly expands what the fellow can do and learn, and it really expands an institution’s capacity. It is a mutual benefit.”
Delgado agreed that the three-year term of the fellowship is one of its key attributes, providing her stability and space to learn about the museum field broadly while also exploring and developing her own ideas and academic interests.
“What’s wonderful about this fellowship is that people are understanding that you’re very early in your career, but there’s this sense of growth and opportunity. I feel very supported by my mentors,” Delgado said. “I do a little bit of everything, and I think the goal is to be exposed to all facets of the museum world and have this holistic understanding of it. It’s really fascinating because they’re all interconnected.”
Just as the fellowship will connect Delgado with the many realms of work required for DelArt to stage its exhibitions and offer its programming, Art Bridges’ overall mission and support for the museum and similar institutions around the country joins together many aspects of the art world to enable all of them to do more.
“Art Bridges supports the travel of other museums’ collections. They have their own collection, which they travel as loans. They’re a convener, a networker,” Winslow said. “We are very grateful for their ongoing support.”
