Tag Archive for: city lore

Kudos Affiliates!! December 2023

Kudos to these Affiliates on their recent accomplishments! Do you have kudos to share? Please send potential entries to Aaron Glavas, GlavasC@si.edu. 

FUNDING

High Desert Museum (Bend, OR) is one of 28 Oregon arts organizations receiving a $10,000 grant through the Oregon Arts Commission Arts Learning Program to strengthen arts education for K-12 students. The grant will support Kids Curate, a yearlong, bilingual education program that provides more than 50 hours of engaging and sequential arts learning experiences to 50 underserved students at Bear Creek Elementary School in Bend.

Michigan State University Museum (East Lansing, MI) is the benefactor of a $2 million gift from the Forest Akers Trust. The investment will be used to construct and equip two spaces within the museum— an Immersive Lab and an Exhibit Lab. These new labs will empower university students to take a hands-on approach to exhibition creation and visitor engagement with the museum’s extensive collection of more than 1 million objects.

University of Nebraska State Museum (Lincoln, NE) received a $2 million gift from the Hubbard Family Foundation to establish the inaugural Dr. Michael and Jane Voorhies Endowed Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology position. Dr. Voorhies is a professor emeritus in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and curator emeritus at the state museum. The gift honors the Voorhies’ work discovering, researching, and helping establish the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park. Ashley Poust, a paleontologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the San Diego Natural History Museum, has been named the inaugural curator.

The Fishers City Council approved a resolution granting Conner Prairie (Fishers, IN) $80,000 to serve the Fishers community, following a recommendation from the Fishers Nonprofit Committee.

Through its new Geosciences Open Science Ecosystem program, the National Science Foundation is funding 12 new projects to support sustainable and networked open science activities including Project Pythia and Pangeo: Building an Inclusive Geoscience Community Through Accessible, Reusable, and Reproducible Workflows. Led by the University at Albany, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, CO), and Code for Science and Society/2i2c, this project will advance the development and use of Pythia Cookbooks, which are web-based interactive computing platforms embedded in open, cloud-based computational environments for executing common geoscience workflows.

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced $41.3 million in grants to support vital humanities education, research, preservation, and public programs featuring these Affiliate projects: 

  • Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK) ($100,000) to conduct comprehensive energy and carbon audits and cover consultant costs associated with development of a climate smart sustainability plan for the museum. 
  • Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA) ($190,000) to develop two five-day workshops for 72 secondary school teachers on Japanese American history and community history through Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood. 
  • Plimoth Patuxet Museums (Plymouth, MA) ($3,642) to purchase a digital, automatic monitoring system to record consecutive temperatures and relative humidity. 
  • Michigan State University Museum (East Lansing, MI)  
    • ($10,000) to purchase storage furniture to house portions of the Apparel, Textiles and Design teaching collection in museum-quality cabinetry. 
    • ($9,983) to improve the storage of 6,500 excavated and cataloged objects by replacing shelving and implementing radio frequency identification tagging technology for the digital tracking and retrieval of the collection. 
  • Dennos Museum Center (Traverse City, MI) ($10,000) to install 1,400 square feet of window tint film to reduce visible light levels in the museum’s promenade wing, a gallery space for light-sensitive objects such as photographs, works on paper, and organic materials. 
  • Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Jackson, MS) ($187,059) to create two, one-week Freedom Summer: 60 Years Later workshops for 72 K-12 educators on using a site-based approach to studying the civil rights movement in Mississippi. 
  • Center for Jewish History (New York, NY) ($350,000) to reconstruct the Center for Jewish History’s collection storage building to improve preservation of irreplaceable collections and reduce energy costs and carbon emissions. 
  • City Lore, Inc. (New York, NY) ($175,000) to develop a two-week Understanding Puerto Rican Migration and Community Building through the Arts and Humanities residential institute for 30 K-12 educators on the migration experience of New York City’s Puerto Rican communities expressed through the arts. 
  • Ohio History Connection (Columbus, OH) ($319,511) to digitize 100,000 pages of Ohio newspapers published prior to 1963, as part of the state’s sixth round of participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program. This phase would focus on three themes: community building, democracy, and transportation. 

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

T

Barco presented their fourth annual Blooloop 50 Museum Influencer List for 2023.The list highlights 50 key individuals whose innovation and creativity have been integral to developing today’s museums including:

The Southeast Museums Conference awarded the Greensboro History Museum (Greensboro, NC) two Gold Awards and one Silver Award for excellence in the use of technology. The competition encourages innovation, effective design, accessibility, creativity and pride of work, as well as recognition of institutional identity. The Gears of Democracy introductory video won Gold Awards for both its production and multi-screen installation in the NC Democracy: Eleven Elections exhibition. The stereoscopic video produced for the museum’s Gerrymander Madness received a Silver Award. NC Democracy: Eleven Elections has also been recognized with a 2023 Award of Excellence from the American Association of State & Local History. The exhibition explores choices and change across 11 state elections between 1776 and 2010, illustrating the twists and turns of who could participate, how voters cast their ballots, and what influenced decisions that continue to shape what democracy means today.

Kristan Uhlenbrock, director of The Institute for Science & Policy, a project of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (Denver, CO), was named one of the recipients of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications. The award presented by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in partnership with Schmidt Futures recognized Uhlenbrock’s podcast series using interviews to explore the complex mix of climate change, science, politics, policy, economics, culture, and humanity to tackle one of the biggest problems facing the Western U.S.– water scarcity. In addition, the Institute earned a $100,000 grant from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) to explore creating a science policy fellowship program that would give state legislators direct access to doctoral-level scientific experts. The grant is part of the NCSL’s State Science Policy Fellowship Planning Grant Initiative and could help legislators make choices about issues like energy, air pollution, climate, water, public health, and technology.

The American Alliance of Museums announced Samuel W. Black, Director of the African American Program, Senator John Heinz History Center (Pittsburgh, PA) and Marise McDermott, President and CEO, Witte Museum (San Antonio, TX) have been named members of its Excellence in DEAI Steering Committee.

LEADERSHIP

Misha Galperin, Ph.D., president & chief executive officer, Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History (Philadelphia, PA), announced she will be stepping down from her role at the museum. Misha will stay on and work with the Board to onboard a successor and effect a smooth transition. 

Kudos Affiliates!! September 2022

Kudos to these Affiliates on their recent accomplishments! Do you have kudos to share? Please send potential entries to Aaron Glavas, GlavasC@si.edu.

FUNDING

The Bishop Museum of Science and Nature (Bradenton, FL) has secured $547,000 in state funding to expand its manatee care program, providing additional holding and acute care space in the statewide effort to rescue, rehabilitate, release, and monitor Florida’s manatees.

The National Coral Reef Conservancy (ReeFLorida) at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science (Miami, FL) secured $1,150,000 in state funding for the Conservancy. The monies will provide groundbreaking research, education, and conservation to save Florida’s damaged coral reef while connecting the Miami community to STEM-based education opportunities with the goal of conserving, restoring, and sustaining Florida’s Coral Reef.

The Morris Museum (Morristown, NJ) was awarded $15,000 under the Morris County Small Business Grant Program, to assist in part with operating expenses following a four-month shutdown of the museum due to the pandemic. In addition, the Museum was approved for a $186,939 Historic Preservation Trust Fund grant. The grant will help the museum to continue restoring the slate roof of the historic building.

The Putnam Museum and Science Center (Davenport, IA) received an equity grant from the Terracon Foundation, which support organizations that mirror Terracon’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. These grants are focused on systemic changes in racially diverse and underrepresented communities.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced grant awards for museums across the nation to improve services to their communities through the agency’s largest competitive grant program, Museums for America, and its special initiatives, Museums Empowered and Inspire! Grants for Small Museums.

Museums of America supports projects that strengthen the ability of individual museums to benefit the public by providing high-quality, inclusive learning experiences, maximizing resources to address community needs through partnerships and collaborations, and by preserving and providing access to the collections entrusted to their care. Affiliates funded through this year’s Museums for America program include:

  • Las Cruces Museum System (Las Cruces, NM) ($54,000) to adapt a museum exhibit into an educational resource for school-based settings. The Indigenous Borderlands exhibit will launch at the Branigan Cultural Center in late 2022, exploring Indigenous history and culture of the “borderlands,” in the present-day Las Cruces, NM, El Paso, TX, Ciudad Juárez, MX region. The project team will collaborate with local Indigenous academics and cultural leaders to develop educational activities that complement the exhibit and augment school curricula. They will design a traveling trunk as a mobile educational kit loaned to schools for use by teachers. Indigenous partners will provide in-classroom and recorded talks in connection with the trunk.
  • Indiana Historical Society (Indianapolis, IN) ($224,961) to implement an outreach program to support history organizations and individuals across Indiana in preserving their local stories. In response to a statewide needs assessment, the project will provide local organizations with training on best practices for collecting and retaining digital content.
  • Museum of History and Industry (Seattle, WA) ($151,580) to redesign the True Northwest: The Seattle Journey exhibition with a focus on integrating accessibility and inclusive design principles. The redesign will incorporate findings from a three-year evaluation of True Northwest and develop an exhibit that better reflects the lived experiences in the Puget Sound region.
  • Mercer Museum (Doylestown, PA) ($111,907) to improve the care, management, and intellectual control of 500 objects installed in 1916 in its Central Court, which has been preserved and exhibited as an historic interior.
  • Ohio History Connection (Columbus, OH) ($249,810) to launch the “Marking Queer Ohio” project to identify the stories, spaces, and places that reflect the impact of LGBTQ+ Ohioans in shaping the state’s larger history. As part of its Gay Ohio History Initiative, the museum will partner with Equality Ohio and a network of partners to build a foundation of primary sources to support the placement of ten LGBTQ+ historical markers across Ohio.
  • Cincinnati Museum Center (Cincinnati, OH) ($250,000) to fabricate and install the exhibit Ancient Worlds Hiding in Plain Sight, combining its invertebrate paleontology collection of more than 450,000 specimens with cutting-edge technology. Using an interdisciplinary approach and inclusive lens, the exhibit will blend science, history, and technology to enliven stories of the city’s prehistoric environment.
  • Denver Museum of Nature and Science (Denver, CO) ($222,670) to conduct a three-year project to advance collections stewardship for logistically challenging large bones of dinosaurs in the Morrison Formation fossil collection. The project will increase access to these scientifically significant specimens—including holotype specimens—for scholars and the public.
  • Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT) ($236,788) to stabilize and improve the condition of film negatives from its collection that have been affected by a form of severe deterioration known as vinegar syndrome.
  • Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ) ($245,678) to improve the care, management, and long-term preservation and access to its collection of Native American materials, books, artist documentation, and archival collections.
  • Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA) ($104,690) to catalog and conserve items from its collection of art and associated ephemera of Japanese American artist Henry Sugimoto.
  • Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL) ($116,857) to collaborate with Illinois library system partners to reach audiences throughout the state in advance of the October 2023 and April 2024 solar eclipses. The planetarium will develop a booklet and poster for librarians featuring solar eclipse educational activities and content. It will distribute these resources, along with a supply of solar viewing glasses, to every public library in Illinois, equipping them to share sky observing resources with their community members.
  • City Lore (New York, NY) ($190,000) to expand its “Creative Traditions” initiative by implementing a series of community-curated exhibitions, public programs, and mentoring opportunities to sustain the cultural traditions of diverse communities in New York City. The center will create a citywide network of folk and community-based artists, host monthly convenings and performances, and offer fellowships for four Cultural Ambassadors to curate exhibitions about their communities’ traditions and aspirations.
  • South Carolina State Museum (Columbia, SC) ($249,856) to improve the stewardship of its collections through a collections inventory and digitization project of 3,500 objects in its science and technology collection as well as 2,000 objects currently on view in its exhibition galleries.
  • Connecticut Historical Society (Hartford, CT) ($84,015) to provide digital access to primary sources as a response to new state legislation mandating every secondary school in Connecticut offer a course on Black and Latino studies starting in the 2022–2023 school year. Project activities include developing 10 digital resource packs that will contain digital copies of primary sources from the history society’s collection, a lesson plan linking the primary sources to themes in the state curriculum, and a short video giving deeper context to the primary sources.
  • Michigan State University Museum (East Lansing, MI) ($92,129) to improve the care and management of over 2,000 vertebrate specimens that include rare, endangered, threatened, and extinct species.

Museums Empowered: Professional Development Opportunities for Museum Staff is a special initiative of the Museums for America grant program supporting staff capacity-building projects that use professional development to generate systemic change within a museum. Affiliate awards include:

  • Wolfsonian (Miami Beach, FL) ($249,877) to expand the professional development opportunities that it offers to undergraduate and graduate students at Florida International University, a designated Hispanic Serving Institution.
  • Denver Museum of Nature and Science (Denver, CO) ($211,531) to develop a training program for emerging leaders in the museum. Six cohorts of 12 staff members will participate in a 12-week training program led by a newly hired training specialist to develop leadership skills.

Inspire! Grants for Small Museums, a special initiative of the Museums for America grant program, is designed to reduce the application burden on small museums and help them address priorities identified in their strategic plans. Awarded Affiliates include:

  • Virginia Museum of Natural History (Martinsville, VA) ($37,781) to enhance its science education programs and outreach activities by transforming an existing underutilized laboratory into a new Exploration Lab.
  • Dennos Museum Center (Traverse City, MI ) ($24,665) to improve the care of its collection through rehousing and inventory updates. Informed by a recent Museum Assessment Program (MAP) report, the museum will purchase and install five compact shelving units and reorganize their storage space to optimize collections care for approximately 165 objects from Michigan and the Midwest.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced the projects for the National Leadership Grants for Museums program including:

  • Spurlock Museum (Urbana, IL) ($48,454) to develop an affordable, simple tool to measure the presence of ultraviolet (UV) light, which can cause irreparable damage to museum collections in galleries, work areas, and storage.
  • Ohio History Connection (Columbus, OH) ($49,340) to test and evaluate a community of support program model to encourage museum visits through Museums for All, an initiative through which museums offer free or reduced admission to people receiving food assistance.

AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

Union Station, Kansas City (Kansas City, MO) has been named one of the 37 most beautiful train stations in the world by Architectural Digest.

LEADERSHIP

The trustees of the Abbe Museum (Bar Harbor, ME) announced the selection of Betsy Richards as the new Executive Director and Senior Partner with Wabanaki Nations. For over 25 years, Betsy Richards has been dedicated to building cultural and narrative power for Indigenous peoples and other BIPOC communities. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, she brings to her role a wealth of experience in museums, philanthropy, social justice, and the performing arts.

The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs has named Anthony R. Fiorillo as the new executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science (Albuquerque, NM). Previously, Fiorillo has been a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man at Southern Methodist University. He will begin on September 19.

Kudos Affiliates!! February 2022

Kudos to these Affiliates on their recent accomplishments! Do you have kudos to share? Please send potential entries to Aaron Glavas, GlavasC@si.edu.

FUNDING

The National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium (Dubuque, IA) received a $10,000 grant from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ “Spring into Action” campaign to provide opportunities for people in the community to do conservation work and to restore and preserve habitat areas.

An anonymous donor contributed $25 million to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (Denver, CO) and its supporting organization, the DMNS Foundation. Ten percent of the donation will help with staffing, equipment and launch activities. The remaining will help establish an endowed fund to support the museum’s collections conservation work.

Framingham State University (Framingham, MA) received a $146,785 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will fund a series of workshops and focus on using digital humanities tools to explore issues of race in America, both historically and in the current moment. Potential topics for exploration include tracing the transatlantic slave trade, uncovering Native American presence in colonial New England, identifying local abolitionist movements, and showcasing contemporary African American and Latinx literature.

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at the Center for Jewish History (New York, NY) received $7 million in funding for the launch of the Vilna Online Collections. The online collection is an international project to digitally reunite its pre-WWII archive located in New York City and Vilnius Lithuania.

The National Endowment for the Arts announced the first round of recommended awards for fiscal year 2022 featuring the following Affiliate recipients:

  • Arizona State Museum (Tucson, AZ) ($40,000) to support a professional development program for emerging and master folk artists. Emerging artists studying with acclaimed Indigenous weavers and teachers, Porfirio Gutiérrez (Zapotec) and Barbara Teller Ornelas (Navajo), will receive instruction in using natural dyes and weaving. The artists will learn skills associated with the museum, such as object handling and exhibit design and will culminate with an exhibit produced by the artists that will showcase their weavings and the master artists’ collaborative work.
  • Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA) ($40,000) to develop a traveling exhibition featuring artist Glenn Kaino. Based on the fictional story of three young Japanese Americans in U.S. internment camps during World War II, and inspired by the conflicts found in the traditional fable of “The Fox and the Stork” in which the two animals play pranks on one another to their detriment, Kaino analyzes the challenges that American-born citizens faced while imprisoned in the camps. The story will be presented in multiple formats by Kaino, including a monumental work outside the museum and inside, a series of new paintings and cinematic vignettes that convey the entirety of this story.
  • History Colorado (Denver, CO) ($20,000) to support the collection, digitization, and exhibition of artwork produced during the Colorado Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s-70s. The exhibition will explore Chicano identity and empowerment, displaying historic works alongside works by contemporary Chicano artists.
  • Kona Historical Society (Kealakekua, HI) ($10,000) to support a concert series that presents songs, stories, and the history of the land of Hawai’i. Local Hawaiian musicians will perform combining music and storytelling in their presentations. These free in-person concerts will be livestreamed on social media, and each concert will be recorded for future online viewing.
  • Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI) ($35,000) to create a writing fellowship program for youth. Programming will feature BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) teaching artists skilled in a variety of writing disciplines such as poetry, fiction, script, and graphic novels/zine-making. The program will provide local high school students, who include middle to low-income Arab-American, Black, and Latinx families, with opportunities for self-expression and collaboration with peers through imaginative writing, production, and performance-based activities.
  • City Lore, Inc. (New York, NY) ($20,000) to implement a qualitative study exploring the resilience of organizations with arts programming that are excluded from the arts philanthropic support system. The project will address research questions about the resilience of arts and cultural providers such as social clubs, religious institutions, and small businesses during times of crisis, with a focus on the periods before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Springfield Museum of Art (Springfield, OH) ($20,000) to support an exhibition and accompanying catalogue featuring the works of women artists. The exhibition will explore the theme of contemporary women artists who focus on issues of identity.
  • International Storytelling Association (Jonesborough, TN) ($25,000) to support Storytelling Live!, a seasonal teller-in-residence program. Artists, including African, Latino, Asian, and Native American storytellers and representing a broad range of storytelling traditions, will be featured in week-long residencies that include concerts, workshops, and special performances serving hospitals, schools, senior centers, and correctional institutions.

Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence, RI) received a $48,000 grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission for capital preservation work at the facility.

The Children’s Museum of the Upstate (Greenville, SC) was awarded a $28,500 grant from the Bosch Community Fund to support steamWORKS, the museum’s special think-tank lab.

Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT) received three grants totaling $519,999 from Connecticut Humanities. The largest grant of $500,000 is a Connecticut Cultural Fund Operating Support grant, which assists organizations in recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and improves their ability to serve their communities. The second is a $10,000 grant from the Sustaining Humanities through the American Rescue Plan Capacity Grants to support diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion training across all departments. The third award of $9,999, is a Capacity Building Grant to fund Lord Cultural Resources’ external information gathering and reporting in order to help the museum better understand and engage with a more diverse public.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has designated Mystic Seaport Museum an Informal Education Community Anchor. The designation recognizes the museum and its Treworgy Planetarium as a community resource and provides a $24,266 grant to bring space exploration to traditionally underserved areas and broaden student participation in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.

LEADERSHIP

The Kenosha Public Museums Board of Trustees has named Leslie Brothers the next executive director of the Kenosha Public Museums (Kenosha, WI). Brothers brings extensive experience as an executive director, most recently at the Ulrich Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art at Wichita State University and the McDonough Museum of Art at Youngstown State University. Leslie will begin her new role in March.

Executive Director, Andrew Sandall of the Museum of Arts & Sciences (Daytona Beach, FL) announced he is stepping down from his position to take over as president and CEO of the Morris Museum (Morristown, NJ). Maria Hane will serve as the interim executive director until a search for a new executive director is completed.

Dr. Gabriela Chavarria has been named the new executive director of the Burke Museum (Seattle, WA). Dr. Chavarria currently serves as the vice president and chief curator of the Science Division at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Dr. Chavarria’s appointment begins on March 1, 2022 following the retirement of current executive director Julie Stein.

Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden (Staten Island, NY) welcomed Jessica Baker Vodoor as the next President & CEO to lead the 83-acre site and historic cultural institution.  Ms. Vodoor served for eight years in Times Square as the Vice President, Operations for the New 42nd Street where she directed the operations of the New 42 Studios and the Duke on 42nd Street. Ms. Vodoor began her role on January 10.

Kudos Affiliates!! September 2021

Congratulations to these Affiliates on their recent accomplishments! Do you have kudos to share? Please send potential entries to Aaron Glavas, GlavasC@si.edu.

FUNDING

Framingham State University (Framingham, MA) is part of a six university consortium, as well as the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, to receive a $441,367 grant from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) aimed at increasing the number of college courses utilizing free Open Educational Resources (OER) rather than costly textbooks. The project – Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL): Culturally Relevant Open Textbooks for High Enrollment General Education Courses and Career and Professional Courses at Six Public Massachusetts Colleges – will test the hypothesis that underrepresented students will achieve higher academic outcomes if free, culturally-relevant course materials that reflect their experiences are utilized. Student savings on textbooks over the three-year grant period are projected to be over $800,000, and the goal is to create a new model that provides continued savings long into the future.

The Dubuque Museum of Art (Dubuque, IA) received a $20,000 operational support grant from the Dubuque City Council as a result of the financial impact from the pandemic.

The Infusion Fund awarded Carolinas Aviation Museum (Charlotte, NC) an $80,573 grant to support the museum’s operating budget which was impacted by the pandemic. The Museum also received a $1.5 million gift from Honeywell to catalyze the launch of the The Lift Off Campaign to develop a new state-of-the-art facility in Charlotte.

The National Park Service announced the award of 17 projects of the Underrepresented Community Grant Program which is focused on working towards diversifying the nominations submitted to the National Register of Historic Places:

  • History Colorado (Denver, CO)- $46,930 to conduct a survey and solicit nominations for Women’s Suffrage Sites in Colorado.
  • Ohio History Connection (Columbus, OH)-$50,000 to administer a nomination process for three Green Book sites in Ohio.
  • Oklahoma Historical Society (Oklahoma City, OK)-$50,000 for the architectural/historic survey of Oklahoma’s All-Black Towns.

The following Affiliates initiatives were some of the 239 humanities projects awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities:

  • Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, CA) ($75,000) for planning for Cruising J-Town: Nikkei Car Culture in Southern California, an exhibition on Japanese Americans’ car culture throughout the 20th century in California.
  • Florida International University (Miami, FL) ($250,000) for preparation of a collection of essays on the architecture of the African diaspora in the United States entitled Architecture of the African Diaspora in/of the United States.
  • Florida International University ($349,646) for the rehousing of works on paper, photographs, and textiles from an offsite storage facility to new compact shelving and cold storage at The Wolfsonian.
  • Kona Historical Society (Kealakekua, HI) ($10,000) for the purchase of storage materials and installation of shelves to house a collection of historical photographs, unpublished diaries, journals, letters, family records and memorabilia, land documents, and selected Kona newspapers and articles documenting regional history and vanishing cultural traditions.
  • Krannert Art Museum (Champaign, IL) ($200,000) for implementation of a reinterpretation of the museum’s permanent gallery of Andean art and the creation of a digital portal allowing deeper exploration of the collection.
  • Plimoth Patuxet Museums (Plymouth, MA) ($163,742) to develop a two-week, residential institute Ancient Stories, New Neighbors: Decolonizing Indigenous Homelands and 17th-Century New England for 25 K–12 teachers on the history of Indigenous peoples in southern New England.
  • Montana Historical Society (Helena, MT) ($263,415) for the digitization of 100,000 pages of Montana newspapers to increase geographic coverage, especially of Native American newspapers published on or near reservations, as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.
  • City Lore, Inc. (New York, NY) ($75,319) for the development of a feature-length film The Colfax Massacre about a Reconstruction-era conflict between southern whites and African Americans and its legal and social legacy.
  • The Witte Museum (San Antonio, TX) ($75,000) for the planning for a reinterpretation of the museum’s permanent exhibition Where Nature, Science and Culture Meet on the history of Texas.
  • Hermitage Museum & Gardens (Norfolk, VA) ($9,366) for a preservation assessment of the collections representing more than 30 global cultures and 5,000 years of world history, from the Neolithic era to the early 1950s.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced grant awards through the agency’s largest competitive grant program, Museums for America, and its special initiatives, Museums Empowered and Inspire! Grants for Small Museums to improve services to their communities:

Museums for America

  • History Colorado ($249,886) to strengthen the implementation of the “Museum of Memory” project by maximizing community-led collective memory work and its contribution to social wellbeing. This public history program brings community together to remember and document their experiences, creating opportunities for those historically impacted by systems of oppression and inequality to explore their past through memory sharing, storytelling, grassroots collecting efforts, and art-based community share backs. 
  • North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (Raleigh, NC) ($250,000) to add a new, permanent paleontology exhibition, Dueling Dinosaurs, and a public lab that will allow middle school students to explore a variety of fossils using hands-on tools and techniques.
  • Anchorage Museum (Anchorage, AK) ($181,143) seeks to decolonize its collection through the dissemination of images and materials related to the Chickaloon Native Village. The project will expand access to collections with digital surrogates and newly created metadata made available online through both the village’s and the museum’s online image databases. The museum will hire an archivist, a collections technician and involve village elders to work on the project. Although this is the first project of this kind undertaken by the museum, it will serve as a model for future relationships with other Alaska Native villages.
  • Wing Luke Museum (Seattle, WA) ($178,311) to develop a new program series, Wing Luke Community Connections, of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) art workshops, art talks, free public readings, film screenings, and discussions. The series will feature a variety of artists, authors, filmmakers, and scholars who have been exploring the diverse AAPI immigrant experience to bring greater understanding to historic roots, heritage and culture, socio-political issues, and ongoing identity formation.
  • Plimoth Patuxet Museums ($212,742) to develop History in a New Light: Reimagining Wampanoag and Indigenous Museum Education, a series of educational programs, resources, and events responding to increasing demand for nuanced and fact-based histories told from indigenous perspectives.
  • Putnam Museum and Science Center (Davenport, IA) ($245,639) to partner with the Science Museum of Minnesota—creators of the Race: Are We So Different? exhibit—for the “Ground on Which We Stand” project. The initiative will distill the themes of the Race exhibit through the lens of local history so that participants can learn about, build pride in, and embrace the collective identity of their diverse community.
  • Museum of the Rockies (Bozeman, MT) ($167,830) to create an exhibit exploring the region’s Native people. “American Indian Voices: Natives of the Northern Plains and Rockies” will examine cultural history, language and storytelling, and contemporary art and voices. The museum also will create a K–12 curriculum in accordance the Montana Office of Public Instruction that will assist teachers in interpreting American Indian culture and prepare students to visit the exhibit.
  • Arizona State Museum (Tucson, AZ) ($190,953) in partnership with The Poetry Center and Center for Digital Humanities will create a digital museum with exhibit locations in diverse areas of Tucson as well as accompanying activities for K-12 classrooms, families, and adults. The collaborative virtual outdoor museum will use geolocation technology and offer augmented reality encounters with curators, educators, poets, and community tradition bearers.
  • Michigan State University Museum (East Lansing, MI) ($170,332) to improve storage conditions for a large and diverse collection of apparel and textiles that are used for teaching and research. 
  • High Desert Museum (Bend, OR) ($217, 350) to develop design plans for a new 4,500 square-foot permanent exhibit entitled “Creating Together”, to help visitors better understand the indigenous plateau region, ancestral homeland of many indigenous communities and plateau tribes.
  • Michigan Science Center (Detroit, MI) ($105,499) to purchase a portable planetarium that will bring planetarium shows to more than 2,000 children through its Traveling Science Program.
  • Connecticut Historical Society (Hartford, CT) ($219,385) to create a new public-facing initiative, the Community Historian Project. This contemporary collecting project—which gathers items of the recent past as well as from events happening today—will develop community historians to identify, document, and preserve their experiences as residents of Connecticut, and share these experiences during a series of community presentations.
  • Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (Spokane, WA) ($249,589) to expand access to its collections of inland northwest history, art, and cultures with a long-term plan and policies for digital preservation of collection materials.
  • History Colorado ($249,725) to create an exhibition on the Sand Creek Massacre. The museum will partner with three tribes: Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Northern Arapaho Tribe, and Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. This exhibition will be the first in the U.S. to share the culturally vetted history of the massacre with the general public through the voices of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal members.
  • Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor (Easton, PA) ($120,734) to conduct a wall-to-wall inventory of the museum’s main collections storage facility and physically and digitally improve access to the objects stored there.
  • Museum of Us (San Diego, CA) ($229,940) to reimagine the exhibit, Race: Are We So Different? and provide complementary educational programming to meet community needs. This will expand the museum’s culture of community collaboration and serve as a framework for community-centric activities, tours, workshops, and public programs.

Museums Empowered

  • Denver Museum of Nature and Science (Denver, CO) ($137,930) to develop an evaluation tool that measures the meaningfulness of the visitor experience. Project activities focus on developing, testing, and disseminating a tool to understand what makes visitors choose a museum, how that experience is remembered and shared, and how to create experiences to which visitors will want to return.
  • Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence, RI) ($26,618) to increase organizational capacity to address inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) issues across the museum, building upon existing institutional assessments of programming, interpretation, hiring processes, facilities, and vendor relationships.
  • Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (Seattle, WA) ($217, 427) to hire a full-time diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) coordinator who will further the museum’s strategic DEAI goals.

Inspire! Grants for Small Museums

  • The Dennos Museum Center (Traverse City, MI) ($47,100) to address the issue of overcrowding in their collections storage area which was identified through a 2020 Museum Assessment Program (MAP) report.
  • Christa McAuliffe Center for Integrated Science Learning (Framingham, MA) ($49,964) to implement a team mentorship and project-based learning program for local high school students. Program participants are tasked with creating campaigns (exhibits, videos, and presentations) that increase awareness of environmental challenges helping participants to develop knowledge, analytical and communication skills, and ethical viewpoints that guide their actions on local and global environmental issues.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

The Shedd Aquarium (Chicago, IL) and the Greensboro History Museum (Greensboro, NC) were recipients of the Media & Technology MUSE Awards, presented by The Media & Technology Professional Network of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM):

Digital Campaign

GoldAs Shedd Aquarium Closed, Penguins Waddled into the Limelight
Shedd Aquarium

Research and Innovation

GoldPieces of Now: Murals, Masks, Community Stories and Conversations
Greensboro History Museum

2020 Response

SilverPieces of Now: Murals, Masks, Community Stories and Conversations
Greensboro History Museum

Kudos Affiliates! May 2021

Congratulations to these Affiliates on their recent accomplishments! Do you have kudos to share? Please send potential entries to Aaron Glavas, GlavasC@si.edu.

FUNDING

The Minnesota Historical Society announced the newest recipients of 30 Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Small Grants including The Bakken Museum (Minneapolis, MN). The Museum received $9,994 to process the Earl Bakken Legacy Collection, allowing for greater public access to these resources. The Bakken Museum will also be a core research partner as part of a $1.5 million grant awarded to Binghamton University faculty. The grant will help improve makerspace learning for youth.

Frank Leta Honda has donated two new 2020 Honda Odyssey minivans to the Saint Louis Science Center (Saint Louis, MO) to transport Youth Exploring Science (YES) Program teens and Science Center educators to events during the summer as COVID-19 safety protocols allow. The YES Program was founded to help teens, particularly those from underserved communities, to recognize their potential in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) career fields.

Framingham State University (Framingham, MA) has been awarded a $62,250 grant from the Massachusetts Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) to coordinate a multi-day Racial Equity Policy Review Institute. Designed for up to 150 leaders within the campus community, participants will gain a better understanding of systemic racism in higher education and how it manifests on campus, be able to define what a racist policy is and how it shows up in student outcomes, and create an initial yearlong plan to undertake policy review.

History Colorado (Denver, CO), Hagley Museum (Wilmington, DE) and USS Constitution Museum  (Boston, MA) were among several Affiliates awarded humanity grants from The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Grant awards support the preservation of historic collections, humanities exhibitions and documentaries, scholarly research, and curriculum projects.

  • History Colorado was awarded a Media Projects Production grant for $310,536 to support the production of the Lost Highways Podcast series, an eight-episode offering focused on Colorado and Western history. History Colorado also received an Exhibitions-Implementation grant for $400,000 for The Sand Creek Massacre Exhibition. The permanent exhibition details the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal members.
  • Hagley Museum and Library ($194,400) and Center for Jewish History (New York, NY) ($153,292), each received a Fellowship Programs grant. The grants will support 12 months of stipend support for 1–3 fellowships per year for two to three years.
  • USS Constitution Museum will receive a Dialogues on the Experience of War grant for $96,264 to develop Sailors Speak: The Impact of War on Naval Veterans, their Families, and the Country. The award will be used for the training of facilitators to lead three discussion series for naval veterans and their families, based on historical documents and material culture from the War of 1812 and the post-9/11 wars.
  • City Lore (New York, NY) was awarded an Exhibitions-Planning grant for $75,000 to create a traveling exhibit about the 1970s Federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), that provided work for artists.
  • American Jewish Historical Society (New York City, NY), part of the Center for Jewish History, received $131,681 for a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant for The People’s Relief Committee Project to preserve and digitize materials that document the work of the People’s Relief Committee for Jewish War Sufferers (1915–1924), an American Jewish organization that sought to help Jewish communities and individuals in Europe during and after World War I.

The Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence, RI) received a donation of $50,000 from Walmart to pay for the creation of a curriculum to teach Black history and heritage in the local schools. The curriculum will include lesson plans, teacher training, and virtual learning tools.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

The Rockwell Museum (Corning, NY) announced Janelle Steiner, events coordinator, and Kate Swanson, interpretation and public engagement educator, have been selected to participate in The Museum Association of New York’s (MANY) “Building Capacity, Creating Sustainability, Growing Accessibility” program. The IMLS Cares Act grant project is designed to help museums impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic share their collections and reach audiences who cannot physically visit their museums. In this two-year program, museums will identify an event or project to deliver virtually to their audiences, focusing on developing programs from stories found in their collections that reveal cultural and racial diversity in their communities.

LEADERSHIP

Stephanie Haught Wade was named the new director of Historic Arkansas Museum (Little Rock, AR). Wade has been a historian with the Department of Arkansas Heritage since 2017, where she managed the Arkansas Historical Marker Program and was a member and administrator of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commemoration Committee. She began work on April 5.