Implementation of a traveling exhibition, a website, curriculum materials, and related public programs exploring the day-to-day lives of blacks and whites in the rural community of Columbus, Mississippi.

Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Trouble & Resilience in the American South is a traveling exhibition that reveals life in rural Mississippi based on photography of O.N. Pruitt. From 1915 to 1960, Pruitt, a white man in a racially segregated society, recorded community celebrations as well as troubling violence. A visual history of inequality, the images depict joys and sorrows of everyday folk—both black and white—in his hometown of Columbus, locally known as Possum Town. An exhibition of 75 large format photos includes interactive features of mobile app and website with oral histories, music and videos. It will travel to at least five locations, starting in Mississippi. Community events and educational curriculum will engage viewers to explore themes of small-town traditions; class, gender and race; spiritual life, and photography’s role, illuminating their relevance today not only for the American South but for the nation. A $400,000 implementation request covers partial exhibition costs.

Implementation of a temporary, single-site exhibition exploring the art and architecture of the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal.

The Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross seeks funding support of $100,000 from the NEH Public Humanities Projects Exhibitions Grant program to support the implementation of a temporary art exhibition to be held from September 4th through December 15th, 2019 entitled, “Dharma and Punya: Buddhist Ritual Art of Nepal.” The exhibition addresses two special areas of interest specified in the NEH program statement by protecting our our cultural heritage and reaching underserved communities. This exhibition will feature extraordinary examples of art and architecture from the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal; it will illustrate how art forms have for millennia attracted the devotion of Buddhist householders through the depiction of doctrinal stories and facilitating ritual practices.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition, website, curriculum, and public programs exploring the history of the scrap industry in America.

The Jewish Museum of Maryland (JMM) is developing Scrap Yard: Innovators of Recycling, a temporary, traveling exhibit that will allow visitors to explore the evolution of the American scrap industry over 250 years through the stories of people who created it – immigrants, their descendants and their successors. In addition to the 2,000-sq ft, experiential exhibit exploring scrap recycling through the lenses of history, sociology and technology, JMM intends to publish a companion book and free interpretive brochure, create a website, plan public programs, collect and curate select oral histories, and develop educational curricula. The exhibit will feature historical objects, oral histories, texts, images, multimedia, and interactives. Resources will be drawn from JMM’s collections, the archives of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), and a variety of other sources. Scrap Yard opens at JMM in 2019 and begins a national tour in 2020.

Implementation of a permanent exhibition that explores the 1876 Centennial Fair in Philadelphia.

Please Touch Museum (PTM)’s new Centennial Innovations (“CI”) gallery will highlight the 1876 Centennial Exposition (“the Fair”)’s human stories of discovery and innovation, and those of inequality and upheaval. Held to mark the 100th year of the nation’s founding, the Fair also marked the end of the Civil War and a pivotal moment of Reconstruction. High-tech inventions spurred some visitors to imagine a future of prosperity and wonder. Other attendees—including Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony—chafed against social barriers and hoped for a more just world. Today, PTM is housed in Memorial Hall, once at the center of the Fairgrounds. For CI, PTM will blend its holdings of Fair-related artifacts with physical interactives, imaginative role-play opportunities, digital learning experiences and powerful storytelling to provide children and families an engaging, accessible glimpse into the past and invite dialogue on the nature of invention and progress.

Implementation of a single-site, temporary exhibition on the art of Ming Dynasty painter Qiu Ying (c. 1494–c. 1552). 

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) respectfully requests a $100,000 implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying, a temporary exhibition on view from February 9 to May 17, 2020. The exhibition focuses on the art of the Ming dynasty Wu School painter Qiu Ying (ca. 1494–ca. 1552), traditionally classified by Chinese art historians as one of the "Four Great Masters of the Ming Dynasty." Curated by Dr. Stephen Little, LACMA’s Florence & Harry Sloan Curator of Chinese Art, and Head, Chinese, Korean, and South & Southeast Asian Departments, the exhibition will include approximately 70 paintings and works on paper and silk from the 15th century to the 20th century. It will be accompanied by an extensive array of didactic materials and a full complement of interpretive humanities and educational programs, along with a fully illustrated 256-page catalogue.

Implementation of a fourth story, Malala’s World, within the existing permanent exhibition The Power of Children: Making a Difference. 

The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (Museum) proposes the addition of “Malala’s World” to expand the permanent exhibit entitled The Power of Children: Making A Difference. Through this project, the Museum will build upon its groundbreaking and successful permanent exhibit by adding the inspirational story of Malala Yousafzai, a young girl from Pakistan who advocated for and continues to support education and equality under the threat of the Taliban. In 2014, Malala was awarded the Nobel Prize for her advocacy efforts. Since opening in 2007, over 3.5 million children and their families and 250,000 students have visited The Power of Children: Making A Difference exhibit. Additionally, 67,578 have visited the traveling version in locations across the United States.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition that explores the influence of Spanish art and culture on American painting during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Americans in Spain (working title) is the first major exhibition to present to a large audience the widespread influence of Spanish art and culture on American painting during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organized by MAM and the Chrysler Museum of Art (CMA), the exhibition is currently scheduled to travel to two venues. Curators at both museums have worked closely with esteemed scholars to examine an underexplored moment in history when many of America’s most prominent artists traveled to Spain for training. Americans in Spain focuses on a time when both countries were undergoing significant shifts in power, culture, and worldviews. The exhibition sheds light on the how the political, economic, and cultural conditions affected how the artists experienced Spain and shaped their work. This close look at the artists’ sojourns brings light to an understudied aspect of American art and provides a rich opportunity to expand the understanding of American visual culture.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition exploring the lives and sociocultural impacts of painter Winslow Homer (1836–1910) and painter and sculptor Frederic Remington (1861–1909) on fin-de-siècle America. 

With more than fifty paintings, watercolors, illustrations, and sculptures, Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington, brings together many of Homer and Remington’s most iconic oil paintings, watercolors, and sculptures to examine how each embodied a quintessential American identity for audiences at the turn of the century. This timely and vital project explores the ways in which Homer’s late marine seascapes and Remington’s visions of the Western plains responded to profound cultural and social changes in the United States in the late 19th-century, and how these linkages resonate in contemporary society.

Implementation of a 10,000-square-foot traveling exhibition on the art of Colombia from 500 BCE to 1600 CE.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) respectfully requests a $400,000 implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support "Portable Universe/El Universo en tus Manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia," a traveling exhibition on view in Los Angeles (October 31, 2021-February 20, 2022) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (June 20-September 19, 2021). Portable Universe will be the first comprehensive exhibition and in-depth investigation into the art of ancient Colombia in 20 years and will bring together approximately 400 objects spanning all major pre-Columbian cultures of Colombia from 500 BCE to 1600 CE. Curated by Dr. Diana Magaloni, Deputy Director, Program Director & Dr. Virginia Fields Curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas, and Director of Conservation,and Dr. Julia Burtenshaw, Assistant Curator, Art of the Ancient Americas,it will be accompanied by a catalogue and an array of interpretive humanities and educational programs.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition examining the history of the African Americans who lived and worked the land that became Clemson University.

This project records, represents, and solicits the experiences of six generations of African Americans in a microcosm of American history and racial politics-Clemson, SC. Through this one university campus, built on formerly Cherokee land by settlers from the Ulster Plantations of Ireland, we start with the pre-history of the plantation in British colonial settings to tell an intergenerational story of African American life to the present day. Emerging from six years of work documenting, highlighting, and inviting community reflections (with two prior NEH grants), Call my Name assembles an unprecedented volume of materials on African American life in Upstate, Appalachian South Carolina. With this application, we seek $400,000 for the implementation phase of the Call My Name exhibition, including a 2-year staff person. After the conclusion of its three-state tour, the exhibit will be permanently installed in an off-campus, independent location, the Clemson Area African American Museum.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition of Asian artworks inspired by religious and cultural beliefs about Hell.

Asia Society seeks an Implementation Grant in the amount of $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support “Comparative Hell,” a travelling, international loan exhibition that is scheduled to open at Asia Society Museum in New York, NY in September 2020, and at Asia Society Texas Center in Houston, TX in spring 2021. Developed with major Planning Grant support from the NEH, “Comparative Hell” will be a cross-cultural presentation of approximately seventy artworks inspired by notions of hell, including sacred, didactic narrative paintings and sculptures spanning the eighth to twenty-first centuries, from the Asian religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam. NEH support will enable Asia Society to install the exhibition; publish a scholarly exhibition catalogue; develop didactics, educational resources, and an interactive exhibition website; and present a scholarly symposium and series of complementary public programs.

Implementation of a permanent exhibition of Yiddish language and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present.

The year 2020 will be the Yiddish Book Center’s fortieth anniversary. To mark the occasion, we are creating the world’s first permanent exhibit to explore the extraordinary range of literature, theater and music created in Yiddish since the late 19th century. Yiddish: A Global Culture will illuminate this vibrant and cosmopolitan world through a rich mix of photographs, historic objects and the Center’s unparalleled collections of Yiddish books. Most Jewish museums treat Yiddish culture as a marginal phenomenon. By contrast, our exhibition will place it at the heart of the modern Jewish story - a sophisticated, transnational culture that has continued reinventing itself into the present day. We will show women as prominent creators and consumers of this culture, and the importance of migration and exile as formative experiences for both writers and readers. Using the vast resources of the Center’s physical holdings, as well as our digital collections of audio recordings, oral histories

Implementation of a temporary exhibition about landscape imagery in Roman art from the late Republic and early Empire.

"Art, Nature and Myth in Ancient Rome" will be the first exhibition in the United States to explore the wealth of landscape imagery in ancient Roman art. Our audiences' engagement with this striking genre will concentrate on three humanities themes: Human Engagement with Roman Landscapes, Roman Landscapes in Context, and Landscapes in Roman Art. Presented at the San Antonio Museum of Art from October 2021 to January 2022, the exhibition will present approximately 65 works, including wall paintings, sculptures, mosaics, and cameo glass and silver vessels. The proposed checklist features important works from the Vatican Museums and five Italian lenders, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States. The project received an NEH exhibition planning grant (2018), and we are now requesting an implementation grant to support the shipping and installation of the international and domestic loans, which are essential to conveying the exhibition’s humanities themes.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition about the art, culture, and environment of the Yolngu people of northern Australia.

Madayin is a traveling exhibition that will immerse visitors in the art, culture and environment of the Yolngu people of tropical northern Australia. For millenia, Yolngu have painted sacred designs on their bodies and ceremonial objects. With the arrival of missionaries and anthropologists in 1935, they turned to eucalyptus bark to express the richness and complexity of their knowledge system to outsiders. The result was an outpouring of creativity that continues to this day as artists find innovative ways to express their worldview across cultures. A unique collaboration between Yolngu curators from Yirrkala and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA, Madayin presents the history of bark painting from a Yolngu perspective. Featuring more than 100 works produced between 1935-2019, it showcases eight decades of one of Australia’s most unique contributions to global art and culture, while exposing American audiences to a complex alternative way of viewing our shared planet.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition about Diego Rivera’s murals and paintings from the 1920s to the 1940s.

SFMOMA requests support for the exhibition Diego Rivera’s America, on view October 24, 2020 – January 31, 2021. Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was one of the most aesthetically, socially, and politically ambitious artists of the 20th century. His complex compositions on public walls in Mexico and the United States made history and shaped history, and directly inspired muralists across the continent from the 1930s to today. Diego Rivera’s America is the most in-depth examination of the artist’s work in more than two decades. It will provide a new critical and contemporary interpretation of his images, whether painted on the wall or on the easel. The exhibition will be supported by a scholarly catalogue, education programs for students of all ages, and free public programs. Additionally, in-gallery interpretive media content will further contextualize Rivera and his work.

Implementation of the reinstallation of a permanent collection of medieval arms and armor, including open storage, a visible conservation lab, and a study center.

The Worcester Art Museum (WAM) seeks renewed support from the NEH to assist with the final design and installation of its new permanent 5,000 sq. ft. Arms and Armor Galleries. Featuring almost the entirety of WAM’s 2,000-object Higgins Collection of arms and armor, the galleries will emphasize accessibility, empowering visitors of diverse ages, backgrounds, and a broad spectrum of abilities, to curate their own experience in exploring the stores embodied in these alluring objects. The installation will be multisensory and multimedia to accommodate different learning styles, and will highlight the multiple thematic lenses through which these objects can be understood. The underlying humanities themes shaping the installation include the contrast between the seemingly pragmatic purpose of these objects and their complex functions, and the meaning of their enduring power as symbols today even though they are no longer in actual use.

Implementation of a traveling exhibition on the religious aspects of westward expansion in the nineteenth century.

"Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West" is an expansive, multi-format traveling exhibit and educational initiative that will premiere in New York from September 2022 through February 2023 and then embark on a multi-venue national tour beginning with our primary institutional partner, the Eiteljorg Museum. Deploying a wide range of artifacts, art, historical documents, photographs, and ephemera from museums and collections across the country, this immersive exhibit will engage hundreds of thousands of visitors in an exploration of the religious dimensions of westward expansion in the United States during the long 19th century and how that history continues to shape our culture today. Secondary formats include a virtual exhibition, audio and digital content, live and virtual public programming, evergreen K-12 curriculum materials, a family gallery guide, and a discussion kit to support community conversations will support the engagement of a broad and diverse national audience.

Implementation of a permanent exhibition and accompanying public programs analyzing how the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 shaped the city.

The Chicago History Museum requests support for a landmark permanent exhibition revives the story of the Great Chicago Fire 150 years after it ravaged the city in 1871. CHM will draw on extensive resources to translate our humanities scholarship for children in our target age group of 7-13 and their adults. Comprehensive front-end research on serving family audiences in the history museum setting, an unparalleled collection of artifacts and primary source documents from the Great Fire, and institutional and scholarly expertise on a topic with proven appeal across generations position us for success. The exhibition, its programs and media will support three experience goals: 1) Connect visitors and program participants to the history and relevance of the Great Chicago Fire; 2) Inspire civic and social-emotional learning among youth through historical inquiry 3) Foster intergenerational engagement with intellectually and emotionally resonant historical content.

Implementation of a single-site, temporary exhibition on the relationships between secular and liturgical garments and the art of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latin America.

The Blanton Museum of Art respectfully requests $100,000 in support of our upcoming 2021 exhibition, "Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial Latin America". "Painted Cloth" is organized by Rosario I. Granados, the Blanton’s Marilynn Thoma Associate Curator, Art of the Spanish Americas, and explores the production and meaning of garments used in civil and religious settings across Latin America in the late 1600s and 1700s. There are approximately seventy-seven works in the exhibition (from paintings, to sculptures, prints, furniture and garments), with twenty drawn from the Blanton’s permanent collection, and upon installation will take up the entirety of the Blanton’s temporary exhibition galleries (approximately 8,000 square feet).

Implementation of a thematic reinstallation of the permanent collection at the Spencer Museum of Art.

The revisioning of the Spencer Museum of Art's collection galleries will expand the diversity of cultures and identities represented in these exhibitions, center the experiences and comfort of visitors, and foster sustained inquiries into broad humanistic themes. The resulting exhibitions will be organized around four overlapping themes exploring ideas of intersections, empowerment, displacement, and illumination. These new thematic exhibitions will rebalance the collection galleries to showcase a breadth of mediums and foreground works of art by Black, Indigenous, and other artists of color and by women. An award from the National Endowment for the Humanities would provide critical support for continued community involvement in the realization of the project, as well as for casework, seating, production and installation, and evaluation of these fully reinstalled collection galleries across their first three years on view (2022-2025).

Implementation of a traveling exhibition on the arts of Islamic courtly dining culture from the eighth through the nineteenth centuries, including a catalog and public programs.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art requests a $400,000 grant to support the implementation of Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting at the Islamic Courts, premiering at LACMA April - September 2023 before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Organized by Dr. Linda Komaroff, Curator of Islamic Art, Dining with the Sultan will be the first museum exhibition to explore Islamic visual culture in the context of its related culinary and dining traditions. The exhibition will include more than 200 works from 25 public and private collections spanning the 8th through 19th centuries, including metalwork, ceramics, enameled glass, textiles, and illustrated manuscripts depicting food preparation and dining. Along with its catalogue and programming, Dining with the Sultan will make important contributions to scholarship in multiple humanities fields and will increase audiences’ understanding of the art and culture of the Islamic world and its diverse peoples and traditions.

Implementation of a 3,500-square-foot permanent exhibition exploring the diversity of identity through religion, history, and art.

Our City: Building Kindness and Empathy, a 3,500 square foot permanent exhibit at Boston Children’s Museum, invites children and their caregivers to think deeply about issues faced daily in a diverse society. Envisioned as a collaborative and dialogue-rich experience, this exhibit offers a welcoming, multisensory environment where families with young children can connect around music, food, family traditions and beliefs, visual art and design, history and political thought, and in doing so, surface questions of identity, cultural and social diversity, bias, and equity. Humanities scholars from the disciplines of religion, art, history, music, and philosophy have enriched the exhibit content, approach, experiences, and aesthetics. The Our City design team is translating their depth of knowledge into innovative methods for addressing the complex themes of identity, multiculturalism and diversity, and equity in ways that are meaningful for children 4-10 years old and their caregivers.

Implementation for a temporary exhibition examining the portraiture of Northern Renaissance artist Hans Holbein the Younger (Augsberg, 1497/98–London, 1543).

"Holbein: Capturing Character" explores the construction of personal identity in the Renaissance through the portraiture of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543). Didactic in nature, Holbein's works reflect the personal relationships and rich cultural exchanges between painters and civic communities during a time when humanism and the arts became closely intertwined in Northern Europe. On view February 11 through May 15, 2022, this two-gallery exhibition will investigate how Holbein visually and intellectually represented the personal identity of his sitters through many of his most famous paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as works by his contemporaries and other objects. This will be the first monographic exhibition on the famous artist in nearly 40 years and the largest single collection of his works ever publicly exhibited in the United States. Accompanying the presentation will be a variety of engaging public programs and a fully illustrated catalogue.

Implementation for a permanent exhibition exploring the role of the studio craft movement in postwar American history and culture.

Craft Front and Center is a permanent exhibition featuring the Museum’s collection that highlights the multiple historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts for craft in the post-World War II era. This is the first permanent exhibition for the museum. The goals of the exhibition are to anchor the museum visit in a cohesive narrative and introduce audiences to the history of craft as a diverse movement rooted in an egalitarian ethos, providing a picture of craft as a multi-faceted and vital part of American history, culture, and society. The project will begin 05/01/2022 and end on 12/31/2023.

Implementation for a traveling exhibition exploring the art and visual culture of Ethiopia as a geographic crossroads from antiquity to the present, including public programs and a catalog.

This project supports "Ethiopia at the Crossroads," a landmark international loan exhibition that celebrates the artistic traditions of Ethiopia from antiquity to the present. Opening at the Walters Art Museum in Fall 2024, this exhibition will explore the cultural significance and humanistic legacy of Ethiopia, from the earliest prehistoric origins through today. This will be the first major art exhibition in America to examine Ethiopian art in a global context by examining how Ethiopia embodies the idea of "crossroads" geographically, historically, and culturally. Accompanied by interpretive experiences in the galleries, contemporary art installations, a dynamic suite of public programs, and a field-leading scholarly publication, "Ethiopia at the Crossroads" will enrich scholars and the public alike with a greater understanding of the complex exchange of visual culture between Ethiopia and the world.