Grants Awarded for 27 Humanities Projects at Museums and Historical Organizations
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced that 27 U.S. museums and historical organizations will receive a total of $689,000 for consultation and planning grants to support interpretive exhibitions or other public humanities projects.
"Museums and historical organizations bring the humanities to life for many Americans," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole in announcing the awards. "Through the collaboration of scholars, curators, and exhibit designers, audiences will deepen their understanding of history and culture through excellent public programming in the humanities."
With consultation grants of up to $10,000 each, 13 institutions will work with scholars at the very earliest stages of a project on exhibitions, reinstallations or reinterpretations of permanent collections or historic sites, institutional interpretive planning, or other kinds of public humanities projects. For seven of the 13 institutions, the new consultation grant is their first NEH grant of any kind.
New NEH consultation grants will support the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (New York, N.Y.), which will continue to explore the urban immigrant experience through an interactive Web site, and the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum (Austin, Texas), which will consult with scholars to design and develop a traveling exhibition on 100 years of immigration through the port of Galveston, Texas. Other consultation grants will support programs at historic sites representing crucial events in American history, including the Flag House and Star-Spangled Banner Museum (Baltimore, Md.) and the Alden House Historic Site (Duxbury, Mass.), near Plimoth Plantation.
Planning grants offer museums and historical organizations up to $40,000 each to support projects that require further preparations before being ready for full implementation. In most cases, a team of humanities scholars and programming advisers, representing a variety of perspectives, will work with an institution's staff to develop and refine key humanities themes of planned public programs. The Philadelphia Museum of Art will plan a traveling exhibition, catalog, Web site, and public programs examining the transmission across Asia of ideas and images of an important Buddhist deity, and the Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, Va.), will plan the reinstallation of its stellar glass collection, incorporating historic, economic, technological, and design contexts for the glass pieces.
NEH grants are awarded on a competitive basis. Throughout the year, humanities experts outside of the Endowment and members of the National Council on the Humanities consider all applications and advise NEH on the quality and significance of each proposed project.
A complete list of the awards is available as an Adobe PDF file in the above box.