THE National Foundation for the Humanities (NEH) will award $35.63 million in grants for 258 projects in a variety of disciplines and topics, including exhibits at major museums and initiatives are regional arts institutions and nonprofit organizations.
The grants, announced on April 18, are the first awarded by the NEH since the launch of its “Spotlight on Humanities in Higher Education” program, which is aimed at populations of American colleges and universities. Grants range from underwriting a multi-part restoration for the USS Intrepid (the decommissioned aircraft carrier now home to Manhattan’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum) to completing a documentary project about the life and the career of WEB Dubois.
The organization “is proud to support exemplary education, preservation, media, research, and infrastructure projects that expand resources for Americans, support humanities programs, and opportunities for students and communities. underserved, and deepen our understanding of our history, culture and society,” its president Shelly C. Lowe, a member of the Navajo Nation, said in a statement.
The latest round of NEH grants will fund museum exhibits across the United States, including several that involve major scholarly research on topics dating back to antiquity. Among them is an upcoming traveling exhibition tracing the global influence of art and culture in North and East Africa during the Byzantine era, co-organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. . The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) received a grant to support an exhibit exploring the role of color in Mesoamerican art.
The National Building Museum in Washington, DC will receive a $400,000 grant to create a long-term exhibit exploring built environments in children’s books. The Museum of the City of New York will receive $100,000 from the NEH to create an exhibit examining how New York City has been portrayed in the arts and media over the past century. Other grants will support somewhat less glamorous but no less essential aspects of the inner workings of museums: the Toledo Museum of Art is receiving an infrastructure grant for plumbing renovations.
Nineteen of the new NEH grants will fund curricular innovation at higher education institutions, such as supporting the creation of a minor in art conservation at St. Mary’s College in California. Other grants will focus on broader cultural heritage projects, such as an attempt to create a database of 17th-century court cases related to attempted slave escapes in the Chesapeake Bay area.
Founded in 1965, NEH supports research in literature, philosophy, history, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals across the United States.
