Tag Archive for: Fort Worth Museum of Science and History

Kudos Affiliates!! March 2023

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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 

Framingham State University (Framingham, MA), in partnership with Accelerate The Future, received $1.39 million from the Massachusetts Office of Health and Human Services to diversify and expand the state’s pipeline of behavioral health specialists. The funds will help place 300 employees at local community health organizations into the University’s master’s degree program in mental health counseling. An emphasis will be placed on recruiting and retaining Black, Indigenous and people of color, bilingual, and culturally responsive behavioral health employees. 

Mouser Electronics, Inc.is a major sponsor of Engineers Week through the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (Fort Worth, Texas). Mouser has been a sponsor of this annual event designed to increase public awareness and appreciation of engineers and their work for over a decade. 

Dubuque Museum of Art (Dubuque, IA) received $25,000 from the Dubuque City Council as part of the American Rescue Plan ARPA funds. The funds will be used to support daily operations at the museum. 

Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI) received a $1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Staff will use the funds for strategic planning, digital content creation, marketing, and investment in tech-related personnel to expand their current digital presences. 

AWARDS & RECOGNITION 

Kurt Dewhurst, director emeritus and curator of Folklife and Cultural Heritage for the Michigan State University Museum (East Lansing, MI) and Marsha MacDowell, curator of Folk Arts and Quilt Studies for the MSU Museum, each received the Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes long-term, exemplary efforts made during their time at Michigan State University. Dewhurst and MacDowell have explored, celebrated, and expanded diversity, equity and inclusion through their work as museum professionals, teachers, mentors, researchers, writers and administrators. 

June 2021 Kudos!

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Kudos Affiliates!! June 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 National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium (Dubuque, IA) and its national outreach program RiverWorks Discovery, received a combined $200,000 from three foundations to support a new RiverWorks Discovery national traveling exhibit. The Walton Family Foundation awarded $100,000, with American Electric Power (AEP) Foundation and the Eugenie and Joseph Jones Family Foundation awarding $50,000 each. Grants will support the design and development of a new hands-on, educational exhibit designed to educate the public on the importance of the commerce, culture, conservation, and careers of America’s inland waterways.

The Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL) is collaborating with Empirical Brewing to help raise money for science education. Empirical Brewing will brew a series of beers in collaboration with the Adler planetarium, called “Space for Everyone.” 25% of all sales will support digital programming, including a science-comedy show called Wow Signal on Adler’s YouTube channel.

Cape Fear Museum of History and Science (Wilmington, NC) has been selected by the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) as a recipient of an IF/THEN® Gender Equity Grant for $8,600. The IF/THEN® Gender Equity Grant program offers science centers the opportunity to launch projects that increase the representation of women and gender minorities in STEM, as part of the broader efforts to advance diversity, accessibility, inclusion, and equity.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

The Institute of Museum and Library Services announced the High Desert Museum (Bend, OR) was one of 6 recipients of the 2021 National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation’s highest honor given to libraries and museums that make significant and exceptional contributions to their communities.

USA Today announced their 10Best Museums of 2021. The winners included the following Affiliates in their respective categories and place:

Best Pop Culture Museum

1.Birthplace of Country Music Museum (Bristol, Virginia)

Best Science Museum

3. Tellus Science Museum (Cartersville, GA)
5. Michigan Science Center (Detroit, MI)
6. Denver Museum of Nature & Science (Denver, CO)
8. Perot Museum of Nature and Science (Dallas, TX)
9. Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (Fort Worth, TX)
10. Saint Louis Science Center (St. Louis, MO)

Best Art Museum

1. Booth Western Art Museum (Cartersville, GA)
2. Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ)

Best History Museum

2. National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (Cincinnati, Ohio)
5. USS Constitution Museum (Boston, MA)
6. Museum of History & Industry (Seattle, WA)
7. National WWII Museum (New Orleans, LA)

The North Carolina Museums Council honored the Greensboro History Museum (Greensboro, NC) with a 2020 Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion Award for its History Happening Now initiative and the Pieces of Now exhibition. The Museum developed its History Happening Now initiative last spring to focus efforts on collecting people’s stories, experiences, and feelings about the upheavals of 2020. The initiative led to the creation of the exhibition Pieces of Now: Murals, Masks, Community Stories and Conversations, featuring more than 20 pieces of street art created as part of 2021’s Black Lives Matter protests, along with photos, objects, and video interviews with artists and organizers.

LEADERSHIP

Van Romans, president of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (Fort Worth, TX), is retiring after more than 15 years leading the institution. Kippen de Alba Chu, the current chief of staff, will serve as the interim president while the museum looks for Romans’ replacement.

Kudos Affiliates!! March 2021

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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 Friends of the Oklahoma History Center (Oklahoma City, OK) received a $35,000 grant from Inasmuch Foundation for the digitization of its scholarly journal, The Chronicles of Oklahoma. The funding will pay staff to process digitized issues of The Chronicles of Oklahoma to give patrons the ability to download or print individual articles, book reviews, meeting minutes, or other specific content from each issue. 

Dubuque Museum of Art (Dubuque, IA) will receive a percentage of more than $18,000 raised by the Home+FloorShow 2020 Community Holiday Event. The funds will support general operating expenses.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation named Florida International University (Miami, FL) and Mystic Seaport Museum (Mystic, CT) among the winners of its Just Futures Initiative. The Initiative supports teams of scholars who are studying past periods of crisis and disruption in order to lead us to cultural and social transformation.

  • Florida International University was awarded a $4.6 million grant for the project-Race, Risk, and Resilience: Building a Local-to-Global “Commons for Justice.” South Florida residents are vulnerable to extreme weather, but because of deep inequities in pre- and post-event resources, minority neighborhoods are particularly disaster prone. The Commons for Justice will identify the most urgent exposure problems for communities of color and provide resilience options as well as collect and preserve coping stories from those who live in at-risk neighborhoods.
  • With the $4.9 million grant, Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice will partner with Mystic Seaport Museum and Williams College for the project Reimaging New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom. The collaborators will use maritime history as a basis for studying historical injustices and generating new insights on the relationship between European colonization in North America, the dispossession of Native American land, and racial slavery in New England. 

Facebook will sponsor the new Current Science Studio at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (Fort Worth, TX) with a $255,000 grant. The exhibit will link science with current events like the upcoming Mars rover landing, tracking hurricanes, or marking Covid-19 cases worldwide. 

Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland, OH) received $750,000 from the state of Ohio to continue capital improvements to the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum’s lower gallery and collection storage areas.

The Rhode Island Historical Society (Providence, RI) received a $25,000 grant as part of Rhode Island Commerce state’s hospitality, arts, and tourism (HArT) relief program.  Staff will upgrade technology to produce virtual tours, events, educational programs, and other public programs.

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Marsha MacDowell, Curator of Folk Arts and Quilt Studies at the Michigan State University Museum (East Lansing, MI), was named the 2020 recipient of the American Folklore Society’s Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for significant lifetime achievement in the field of public folklore.

LEADERSHIP

Peter Seibert, Executive Director and CEO of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West (Cody, WY), announced his resignation to become the new Director of the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia.

Coming Up in Affiliateland in March 2021

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Is that spring we see coming?!

NATIONWIDE
Smithsonian Affiliations wraps up the collaboration with the National Museum of American History and its Pandemic Perspectives series with the talk, How the National Museum of American History is Collecting COVID-19, on 3.23. Thank you to all the Smithsonian Affiliates that helped us make the series a success! Previous recordings can be found at https://americanhistory.si.edu/pandemic-perspectives

Smithsonian Affiliations kicks off Women’s History Month with a weekly virtual series co-hosted by Affiliates. The series begins Wednesday, March 3. Contact your local Affiliate or affiliates@si.edu for more details.

Lego sets showing women innovators in space history, positioned in a gallery at the National Air and Space Museum

Happy Women’s History Month from the original prototypes of the  LEGO® Ideas “Women of NASA” set displayed in front of the Apollo Lunar Module in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, August 20, 2018. Credit: National Air and Space Museum

TEXAS
The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History will be hosting a ‘drive-in’ screening showcasing two-minute videos that their teen collaborators created for a Smithsonian Earth Optimism initiative to cultivate youth action for the environment, in Fort Worth,  3.5.

FLORIDA
Tampa Bay History Center will host a virtual lecture by National Museum of American History curator Lisa Kathleen Graddy on Creating Icons: How We Remember Woman Suffrage, 3.17.

 

Kudos Affiliates!!! September 2019

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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 19th annual Spinx Charity Classic Golf Tournament raised $106,000 for charitable organizations including the Children’s Museum of the Upstate (Spartanburg, SC). SPINX chooses beneficiaries that align with its philanthropic focus of “growing healthy kids where we live, work and play” through programs that focus on improving education, health, wellness, and moral growth for children in South Carolina.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is funding a new $6.6-million round of research grants aimed at bolstering the ability of buildings and other structures to stand up to earthquakes, hurricanes, winds, fires, and other natural disasters including $359,000 to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, CO). The funding will be used to advance the understanding of the role and transport of embers in real outdoor environments to enable effective and appropriate mitigation and defensive measures against wildland urban interface fire hazards.

nVent Foundation announced its first grants to nonprofit organizations, with a focus on youth education programs that offer hands-on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) learning experiences to young people, especially from underserved or underrepresented communities. The Foundation awarded 14 grants, including one to The Bakken Museum (Minneapolis, MN).

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

The American Alliance of Museums (AAM) unveiled the names and locations of the museums taking part in AAM’s unprecedented national initiative to diversify museum boards and leadership.  Backed by $4 million in grants from three foundations (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Alice L. Walton Foundation, and Ford Foundation), Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion, will provide the framework, training, and resources for museum leaders to build inclusive cultures within their institutions that more accurately reflect the communities they serve. The participating Affiliates include: Adler Planetarium (Chicago, IL), DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago, IL), Shedd Aquarium (Chicago, IL), Fort Worth Museum of Science and History (Fort Worth, TX), Perot Museum of Nature and Science (Dallas, TX), Space Center Houston (Houston, TX), The Witte Museum (San Antonio, TX), Museum of Sonoma County (Santa Rosa, CA), Museum of Mississippi History (Jackson, MS), and Old Capitol Museum (Jackson, MS).

Dubuque Museum of Art (Dubuque, IA) and Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science (Miami, FL) were among 18 reaccreditations announced by The American Alliance of Museums for 2019.

Marie Selby Botanical Gardens (Sarasota, FL) was the recipient of the prestigious Program Excellence Award given by the American Public Gardens Association (APGA) for a four-year partnership entitled “Air Plants and Other Epiphytes of Belize: A Collaborative Project Between Two Botanical Gardens and a University.” The main goal of the project was to promote in Belize the study, conservation, and display of epiphytes, an area in which Selby Gardens specializes.

The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library (NCSML) (Cedar Rapids, IA), in partnership with de Novo Marketing of Cedar Rapids received the 2019 “Communicator Award of Distinction” from the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts. The award honors excellence in marketing and communications. The award was presented to Eric Johnson, Art Director at De Novo for his work with the NCSML writing team on the Spring-Summer 2019 issue of SLOVO Magazine, a biannual publication of the NCSML.

the Moon is rising in Affiliateland in April 2019

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Great events at Affiliates as spring starts blooming!

NORTH CAROLINA
The National Air and Space Museum has loaned three Apollo-related artifacts for the exhibition One Giant Leap: North Carolina and the Space Race opening at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, 4.5.

WASHINGTON
Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission exhibition, organized by the National Air and Space Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, will open at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, 4.13.

ILLINOIS
As part of the Smithsonian Year of Music, the DuSable Museum of African American History will host A Celebration of Ella!!, a tribute event honoring the music and legacy of Ella Jenkins. At 94, Jenkins is one of the most revered singers and songwriters of the past century, with dozens of albums released through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, in Chicago, 4.13.

PENNSYLVANIA
A protest armband from the 1960s, on loan from the National Museum of American History, will be part of the The Vietnam War: 1945-1975 exhibition at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, 4.13.


NEW YORK
Katherine Ott, curator at the National Museum of American History, delivers the last talk of the Questioning Identity lecture series, Poking at Normal: Museums and the History of Real People  at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, 4.24.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
Teens from five Affiliate communities will visit Washington with museum staff and parents, to meet with Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton and participate in person in the final meeting of the Secretary’s Youth Advisory Council. Thanks to the Rockwell Museum, Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Arab American National Museum, and the Upcountry History Museum, for helping us to include national teen voices in the work of the Smithsonian over the last two years!, in D.C.,  4.24.

IOWA
Smithsonian Affiliations Director Myriam Springuel and National Outreach Manager Aaron Glavas will participate in the affiliation announcement at new affiliate, the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, 4.26.

MASSACHUSETTS
Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory will present the April talk Moon Race: The U.S.-Soviet Competition to Put a Human on the Moon as part of the year-long Moon Landing in Context lecture series at Framingham State University in Framingham, 4.27.