Connecticut

Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History recently received $160 million from Edward P. Bass, a Yale alumnus, businessman and philanthropist. This generous donation will support the renovation of the museum, which was founded in 1866 and is home to thirteen million objects. The renovation will include the creation of fifty percent more exhibition space, a lower-level lobby to welcome large groups, and new classrooms.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, awarded a $62,174.00 IMLS Museums for America grant, will amplify its partnership with Hart Magnet School, a Title 1 elementary school in urban Stamford by increasing exposure and access to the arts for first-fifth graders, their families, and educators. A new program model, leveraging the museum's artist exhibitions, will focus on technology and an inquiry-based approach to science. Students, educators, and families will be encouraged to see and think in new ways through on-site STEAM tours at the museum, artist-led workshops at Hart, teacher professional development, and afterschool family activities. Outside evaluators will work with the project team to develop goals and associated metrics to measure how the model of museum-school partnership can enhance student achievement, engage families more deeply in their child's school experience and community, and contribute to teacher professional development. The evaluator will also train museum staff on best practices for program assessment.

The state Bond Commission approved funding for a $2.25 million improvement project at the Shoreline Trolley Museum located in East Haven and Branford to install water and sewer lines to install fire sprinklers, relocate the maintenance shop from a flood plain, and construct visitor restrooms. State aid will allow the museum to relocate its maintenance facility out of a flood plain, eliminating the museum's current practice to prepare for flooding events, which can take two days, and expand its shop to better accommodate visitors as well as students through a partnership with Gateway Community College, which provides experience to railroad engineering students.

Connecticut State Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk) announced that the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum is slated to receive a $5 million grant from the State Bond Commission for HVAC and electrical upgrades. This grant will allow the Mansion to take a major step forward with the implementation of the Master Mechanical Plan. This plan was originally inspired and funded by the Board of Trustees in 2008, and with support from the City of Norwalk, Norwalk Historical Commission and previous state grants, several Americans with Disabilities Act phases have already been completed. This funding will provide, for the first time, a fire protection system for the Mansion, bring electricity to the second and third floor of the Mansion, and additionally support a new heating system that will allow the museum to stay open during the winter months.

Mystic Seaport Museum is the recipient of $736,167 in Save America’s Treasures grants (funded by IMLS, the National Park Service, NEH, and NEA) to support the restoration of the L.A. Dunton fishing schooner and critical preservation work for the Rosenfeld Collection of Maritime Photography. Built in 1921 in Essex, MA, the 123-foot-long L.A. Dunton is one of the last surviving examples of the Grand Banks fishing schooners, once one of New England’s most common fishing vessels in the beginning of the 20th century. The Dunton was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994. The grant of $491,750 will support the acquisition of rare shipbuilding timber and other materials for the planned restoration of the vessel. The second grant of $244,417 will fund the restoration, digitization, and rehousing of selected cellulose diacetate negatives from the museum’s Rosenfeld Collection of Maritime Photography, which have been affected by a form of acetate film base deterioration. The Rosenfeld Collection, acquired by the Museum in 1984, is built on the inventory of the Morris Rosenfeld & Sons photographic business and is the largest archive of maritime photographs in the United States.

Weir Farm National Historic Site received a contract award for new exhibits and associated interpretive media at the park. Phase one, which covers the Weir House, the Weir Studio, and the Young Studio and includes life-size realistic figures of J. Alden Weir and Mahonri Young at work in their studios, will be installed in 2019. Phase two, which covers the park’s visitor center, is scheduled to be installed in 2020. Weir Farm also received project funding to implement the furnishings plan for the Weir House kitchen.  The kitchen will be furnished to its ca. 1940 appearance when Dorothy Weir Young and her husband, sculptor Mahonri Young, lived in the house and managed the farm. Additionally, Weir Farm will open four rooms of its pre-1835 English barn to the public in 2019 for the first time. It will be minimally furnished based on a furnishings plan completed in 2017 with objects from the park’s collection which will evoke the era when the Weir and Young families actively farmed the land, ca. 1882 to 1940.  Specialized barn and farm tours will be added to the tour schedule in 2019. Additionally, Weir Farm recently acquired Autumn, a 1906 oil painting by J. Alden Weir, formerly in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Maine

The Telephone Museum's main building has a new look! The original sliding barn door now slides open to reveal an array of glass doors and windows, which bring extra light and airiness to the museum's appearance. The updates to the building also include extra insulation, new siding and structural re-enforcement. The funding for this project was almost entirely member-driven, and was accompanied by improvements to several of the working, hands-on exhibits.

Last spring, the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine (HHRC) received the Maine Education Association’s (MEA) Corporate Award for Excellence in Combating Prejudice and Discrimination in Maine Schools. The MEA represents more than 24,000 Maine teachers. During the 2018-2019 school year, the HHRC presented its free educational outreach programs to forty schools in 37 communities and reached more than 5,000 students and teachers.

The Castine History Partners, a coalition of Castine’s non-profits and town government, are developing an interactive-learning project focused on the history of Castine. Thanks to two recent grants, the Castine Virtual Tour project will launch in September as an online alternative to the popular walking tour map of Castine sponsored by the Castine Merchant’s Association. The virtual tour will allow users to have a deeper understanding and connection with Castine’s rich history. Members of the Castine History Partners include the Castine Historical Society, Maine Maritime Academy, the Town of Castine, Wilson Museum, and Witherle Memorial Library. The group began meeting in the spring of 2017 with the goal of finding a collaborative project that would benefit the town and further the missions of the partners.

The Abbe Museum is a recipient of an IMLS Museums for America (MFA) grant in the amount of $169,070. With this funding, the staff of the Abbe Museum will continue to decolonize its museum practice, informed by Wabanaki people, and develop the Museum Decolonization Institute (MuseDI) to share its process and understanding with others. The Museum will establish a methodology and practice group to inform and guide the project, which will consist of museum professionals and expert advisors, cultural anthropologists, decolonization practitioners, community of practice experts, and evaluators. A community of practice will provide a forum for sharing, changing, and collaborating on decolonizing museum practices to better the museum's relationships with Wabanaki people and to do the same for peer museums working with tribal communities. The Institute will create and test an assessment tool and develop curriculum; develop and deliver an onsite workshop format; and produce webinars and ongoing curriculum resources to workshop participants. The project will support the museum's position as a teaching and inquiry-focused institution for decolonizing public approaches to documenting and interpreting Native American history and experience.

The Brick Store Museum was awarded a $29,240 NEH planning grant to improve environmental conditions in the Kimball House (c. 1850), one of five museum buildings, which is used as a collections storage facility and educational program center. The planning project will investigate three main areas: improving the envelope of the building, installing an HVAC system, and increasing storage capacity. The grant will support a team of staff, trustees, preservation specialists, architects and engineers who will analyze the characteristics of the building and its envelope, survey the existing mechanical and electrical systems, and evaluate the storage conditions. The outcome of this investigation will be sustainable preservation strategies that can be applied to vastly improve the environmental conditions inside the building and thereby preserve the collections housed inside for future generations.

IMLS awarded a $134,184 grant to the Maine Historical Society for its extensive costume collection. The project will enable MHS to move the entire collection to a state-of-the-art Collections Management Storage Facility, improve storage for the costumes through re-housing, digitize the entire collection, and create an online collections guide and interpretive resources. It is critical for both the preservation, access to, and use of the collections. That project will begin immediately and is scheduled to last sixteen months.

Massachusetts

Provincetown Art Association and Museum received a major oil painting by Hans Hofmann to its permanent collection, Landscape, 1935, in memory of Stephen Mindich.

This fall, the Emily Dickinson Museum is entering the third and final phase of infrastructure improvements to its two buildings: the Homestead and the nearby Evergreens. The first two phases involved putting in new electrical, fire-detection and fire-suppression systems and addressing and preventing further water damage, among other improvements. The third phase will include installing insulation, storm windows and new HVAC systems in both buildings. The project as a whole carries a $2.2 million price tag. The NEH recently announced the award of a $300,000 Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grant for a project that will include replacing and expanding the building’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning system to better protect art and historical objects therein that document the life and world of Dickinson. The NEH grant, along with a one-to-one match from Amherst College, will support a two-year project to complete these improvements at The Evergreens by 2020.

The Nahant Historical Society received a grant from the Community Preservation Coalition, which enabled Valarie Kinkade of Museum & Collector Resource (MCR) to lead the organization’s new team through the process of cataloguing their collections with PastPerfect. This grant will also allow NHS to upgrade its computer software and hardware to help facilitate the cataloguing, as well as purchase needed archival supplies. NHS also received a NEMA Publications Competition Honorable Mention in Books for its recent publication, Bayley’s or Bailey’s Hill? by Gerald Butler, and expanded its collaboration with Johnson Elementary School, focusing on Asian history, geography, and engineering.

Discovery Museum CEO Neil Gordon (center), Betty Siegel, Director of VSA & Accessibility, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (right) and Lew Michaels, LEAD 2018 Content Committee Member (left).

Discovery Museum announced its selection as a recipient of the 2018 John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD®) Awards. The annual awards honor a select few arts administrators and organizations whose dedication has resulted in the advancement of inclusion of people with disabilities in the cultural arts and whose efforts serve as an example to all in the field. The Community Asset Award was created to recognize the achievements of people and organizations who continually demonstrate success with access initiatives, improving accessibility in their organization, city, state or region. Recipients must be an individual or team on staff at a cultural arts organization or a cultural arts organization that has demonstrated success improving or providing access for individuals with disabilities for a minimum of five years. The new Discovery Museum and Discovery Woods were developed based on Universal Design principles to be accessible to all, regardless of ability. They are places where inclusion can be a commonplace experience, where all kids can play together.

The Concord Museum announces the Grand Opening Celebration of the Anna and Neil Rasmussen Education Center. November 2nd is the official ribbon cutting with a free open house on Saturday, November 3rd and 4th with music, living history, performances and more. As part of the Museum’s Master Plan the galleries will close for renovation on October 9th.

Last year the Somerville Museum and Charan Devereaux received an American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) Leadership in History Award of Merit for "Union Square at Work," a project that reached out into the local community to explore the city's oldest commercial district through history, music and photography. The "Union Square at Work" exhibit traveled to the Massachusetts State House, and an image from the project was included in a Boston City Hall exhibit curated by the MFA, Boston's Lane Curator of Photographs Karen Haas. The "Union Square at Work" project included 25 events and concerts in locations around the city and a collection of music from twenty Somerville bands and artists.

The Museum of Old Newbury recently received four grants totaling $38,000 in support of programming, exhibitions, collections care, and historic preservation. A $4,500 grant from the Institution for Savings supports public programming and development of a special exhibition focusing on prominent Newburyport artist Laura Coombs Hills (1859-1952). A $2,000 matching grant from the Essex National Heritage Commission will help to fund reinterpretation in the museum’s military history gallery, allowing for expanded partnership with local schools. A grant from the H. Patterson Hale Foundation in the amount of $12,500 offers support to the continued care and preservation of the museum’s collections. The Newburyport Preservation Committee awarded a grant of $19,000 for the restoration and rehabilitation of the museum’s historic cobbled courtyard, addressing safety, preservation, accessibility, and drainage issues.

The Museum of Old Newbury is also pleased to announce the completion of two projects highlighting its extensive photograph collection: the publication of Newbury as part of Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series, and the digitization of 1,500 photographs through partnership with Digital Commonwealth. Newbury includes over 200 historic photographs, primarily from the museum’s collection, and highlights the area’s early history through the 20th century. The Digital Commonwealth partnership represents the first step in increasing accessibility to the museum’s collection of approximately 18,000 photographs. Additionally, the museum recently acquired a significant late 17th century cradle. The cradle was likely made by Serj. Stephen Jaques on the occasion of his niece Mary Plumer’s birth in 1681. The piece remained in the Plumer family for centuries and carries with it incredible stories of Newbury’s early settlement era.

The Sudbury Historical Society has been selected as the Massachusetts recipient of an Historic New England 2018 Community Preservation Grant of $1,000 for a stipend for a professional archivist to plan rehousing of a portion of its archival collections and the purchase of proper storage equipment as part of an upcoming move to the future Sudbury History Center. In September 2018, the SHS gifted to the Town of Sudbury $726,000 that the SHS raised through private donations and grants for Phase II of renovations to the c. 1730 Loring Parsonage for the future Sudbury History Center. A contract with Classic Construction & Development Corporation was signed by Sudbury’s Town Manager and construction on the History Center project is set to begin in October 2018. The SHS is designing interior spaces, including exhibition galleries, the archives, office areas, and visitors center and is determining needs for Phase III of the project. Boston Children’s Museum recently received the following grants: Boston Children’s Hospital Collaboration for Community Health to support Linking with Libraries: Opportunities for Early Learning through Family and Community Engagement; and an IMLS grant to support Our City, an exhibition focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion.

The Rotch-Jones-Duff House and Garden Museum in New Bedford recently acquired the wedding dress Sarah Krebs wore at her marriage to George Stewart in 1925.

New Hampshire

On July 14, Peter Coccoluto of Concord Hill Auctions conducted the 18th Annual Vintage Boat and Car Auction, on the grounds of the New Hampshire Boat Museum, with net proceeds of $180,000 funding museum operations. It was the tenth year that Coccoluto has run the sale, which included 143 lots comprising vintage and contemporary boats, kayaks, canoes, vintage automobiles, boat motors going back to the 1950s, ship models, paintings and nautical accessories. The top price of the day was $70,150, and more than 80 percent of the lots sold. Three hundred people attended with over 250 bidders.

On July 5 the Lucknow Estate, now operated as Castle in the Clouds, was named to the National Register of Historic Places.


This September, the Museum of Art of the University of New Hampshire mixed art with activism by participating in the 50 State Initiative organized by For Freedoms. Since 2016, For Freedoms has produced exhibitions, town hall meetings, billboards and public art to spur greater participation in civic life. The 50 State Initiative is a new phase of programming from September through December 2018 during the lead-up to the midterm elections. Centered around the vital work of artists, these exhibitions and related projects will model how arts institutions can become civic forums for action and discussion of values, place, and patriotism. For the 50 State Initiative, the Museum of Art asked university students to fill in For Freedoms yard signs to express their opinions about what freedom means to them. Nearly one hundred students responded. The completed yard signs were installed in the Mills Courtyard from September 14-21, becoming a public art piece encouraging civil discourse on campus.

Rhode Island

The Bristol Art Museum made big strides this summer, hiring its first full-time employee, Museum Administrator Traci Williams, and realizing its summer-long project, Alegria. A celebration of the local Portuguese culture through a series of special programs and events, as well as the featured juried exhibition Arte Corajosa, Alegria was funded largely through a community grant from the Rhode Island Foundation. Adding a full-time employee to BAM’s team has been integral to the professional and literal growth of the organization, effectively expanding the reach of its influence in the region. Similarly, the summer series of Portuguese art and cultural events enabled BAM to connect with its local community and engage in more in depth ways.

The East Providence Historical Society will dedicate its new Education Center on October 14th. This reuse of the Manager’s Cottage for the Hunt’s Mills Amusement Park (1895-1928) / meter house for the EP Water Dept. (1928-1989) was accomplished with a RI State Cultural Facilities grant ($28,000 for ADA compliance) and a Champlin grant ($51,140 for interior work). The building will provide space for school/adult groups to explore the rich history of the area, 1643 to the present. While this work on the Education Center has been in progress, EPHS also received a Champlin grant ($42,650) for restoration of the Hunt House Museum summer kitchen, updating of the plumbing/hot water system, and a new exhibit area in the basement, now the home of our extensive Rumford Baking Powder Company collection.

The Rhode Island Historical Society received a $22,306 IMLS Museums Empowered award for the purposes of training staff and volunteers across the organization to better develop, frame, interpret, and tell the histories of those who have been traditionally overlooked, marginalized, or silenced. The award will support such activities as a three-day training offered by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, which was "founded on the idea that as trusted educational and community spaces containing human and visceral connections to the past, museums and historic sites are ideal venues for fostering dialogue and civic engagement." ICSC will also set up a series of four video conferencing sessions with the following international sites: Memorial ACTe (a museum in Guadeloupe, on the site of the former Darboussier sugar factory); the Barbados Museum and Historical Society; Maison des Esclaves on Gorée Island in Senegal (the first UNESCO World Heritage site in Africa); and the Whitney Heritage Plantation Museum in Louisiana. Furthermore, physical site visits will be made to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Conn.; the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives & Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth); and the Hip-Hop Archive at the Joseph P. Healey Library at University of Massachusetts (Boston).

Vermont

On August 10, Fairbanks Museum conducted the largest astronomy lesson ever with 1,701 people gathered on the green across the street for stargazing. Jen D’Agostino, director of visitor services, conceived of this wildly successful, free family-friendly program.

The Vermont Historical Society celebrates its 180th birthday this November and begins a new strategic plan. Additionally, VHS is excited to partner with the Center for Research on Vermont for the Backstory: Vermont program, which aims to match students at the University of Vermont with internships at local historical societies and museums around the state. The organization also recently completed an extensive construction project at the Vermont History Center in Barre. The project included structural and finish work to the historic building, remembered fondly as the Old Spaulding School. Now that it is complete, VHS is happy to welcome the Vermont Department of Libraries to the space.