A little-known role of the AFA in shaping government policy includes a successful lobbying effort in 1913 to remove tariffs on art entering the United States and a 1916 session with the Interstate Commerce Commission to protest prohibitively high interstate taxes on traveling art. In 1920, the AFA was instrumental in organizing a lobbying campaign for the “development of a national gallery of art on a basis worthy of our great nation,” a goal that was eventually realized with the founding of the National Gallery of Art in 1941. Other government- tied AFA initiatives include arranging the first American representation in the Venice Biennale in 1924 and thereafter until the 1970s.

The AFA’s history includes a series of programs designed to facilitate greater access and appreciation of the visual arts, among them, the first nationally broadcast radio programs about art (1930s–1940s); the “Picture of the Month Program” (1954), offering original paintings at low rental fees to small art and educational organizations; the Anonymous Donor Program (1960s), distributing allowances to regional museums to purchase contemporary art; The Art of Seeing (1965), a landmark series of educational films on visual perception; The Curriculum in Visual Education (1966), a collection of films and instructional materials designed to heighten the aesthetic awareness of children; the AFA Visitor Artist Program (1970s), allowing artists to travel to museums around the country; an early traveling exhibition program of film and video, which gained artistic recognition for these mediums and pioneered the concept of a curated film exhibition with A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema (1976); and ART ACCESS I and II (1989–98), a fee-subsidy program sponsored by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund making AFA exhibitions of American art more affordable for museums.

In 1994 the AFA inaugurated Directors Forum, a two-and-a-half-day yearly conference for museum directors that featured panel discussions with some of the most distinguished professionals in the art world. Building upon the success of that program, the AFA began, in 2001, a similar conference for art museum curators. Today, the AFA organizes ArtMatters. Open to the public, ArtMatters is a conference held periodically to address vital topics in the museum and art world. In 2003, the AFA inaugurated ArtTalks, a series of evenings featuring prominent artists and other influential figures of the art world, among them, artists Janine Antoni, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, John Currin, Shirin Neshat, and Do-Ho Suh, as well as New York Times critic Roberta Smith, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and Sotheby’s World-wide Head of Contemporary Art Tobias Meyer.

These innovative programs notwithstanding, the AFA is still best known today for the service it was founded to provide—making art available to a wide public through organizing art exhibitions. Because of its founding mandate, the AFA has neither collection nor exhibition space, making it truly a museum without walls, sharing the resources and enriching the programs of museums worldwide. Since the organization’s inception, more than one thousand exhibitions have traveled throughout the world under its auspices.

Although its programs have been manifold, the AFA has held firm to a singular mission: to cultivate a fertile environment for the broad dissemination and appreciation of visual art. As one of the oldest and most prestigious arts organizations in the United States, the AFA continues to pursue its mission in the twenty-first century. In the words of the organization’s founder, it will keep seeking to “promote the study of art, the cultivation of public taste, and the application of art to the development of material conditions in our country.”