Connecticut
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum recently launched a new website in September. You can view it here: aldrichart.org.
A $1,572 grant to Mystic Seaport Museum awarded by Connecticut Humanities will enable the Museum to hold a free online lecture series related to its new exhibition, Sailor Made: Folk Art of the Sea, which brings rarely-seen hand-crafted artifacts from the Museum’s collection to light. Three different speakers – Dr. Hester Blum, Nicolas Fox, and Dr. Nicole Williams – will explore Sailor Made from different perspectives, and encourage participants to dig deeper into the stories of the objects and their creators.
Connecticut Humanities has awarded a $10,000 grant to the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum in support of its reopening efforts. Funding for this grant has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act economic stabilization plan. With this generous grant, the museum will be able to maintain engagement with the public, establish an adequate protection plan and staffing, while continuing to be an invaluable educational and cultural resource for its communities. The museum proudly announces that it has won a prestigious award from the Connecticut League of History Organizations (CLHO) for the exhibition titled, From Corsets to Suffrage: Victorian Women Trailblazers.
Maine
Linda G. and Donald N. Zillman Art Museum – University of Maine
A $1.3 million naming gift from education leaders and arts supporters Donald and Linda Zillman will expand and enhance the formerly named University of Maine Museum of Art. The museum is now the Linda G. and Donald N. Zillman Art Museum – University of Maine. The Zillmans, longtime Maine residents, pledged the gift to the University of Maine Foundation for the construction and operation of five new galleries to showcase the museum’s collection of over 4,000 works of modern and contemporary art. The gift supports an expansion that will increase the square footage of the museum’s public gallery space by 40%. Construction of five new galleries will bring the total number to 12, with more than 4,700 square feet for exhibitions.
First Amendment Museum, a 5,000-square-foot historic 1911 home near the State House, has been gifted $150,000 by Kennebec Savings Bank.
Massachusetts
To keep the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum vital, relevant, and financially strong, an anonymous donor has committed a $5 million (endowment) matching gift if supporters can raise another $5 million in endowment funds. As part of a $65-million campaign called Renewing the Promise: For the Public Forever, which is raising funds to implement the Gardner’s bold Strategic Plan and ensure the continued success of the museum’s vision and values into the future, this gift challenges the museum to raise $5 million in endowment funds by 2024. These funds will be matched 1:1 with a $5 million contribution from the anonymous donor. With this support, the museum aims to deepen its commitment to the core values articulated in its Strategic Plan: Creativity is Our Legacy; Community is Our Purpose; The Collection is Our Catalyst; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are Our Commitments. The Renewing the Promise campaign will fuel these core values, enabling the Museum to reach broader audiences with programs, concerts, and exhibitions that connect art across disciplines to larger societal issues and lived experiences.
Roberto Lugo, Melting Pot II, Fuller Craft Museum
The American Craft Council recently honored Fuller Craft Museum with the 2020 Award of Distinction. The official award ceremony took place on October 18. Fuller Craft Museum recently announced the acquisition of Roberto Lugo’s “Melting Pot II”. This important addition to the museum’s permanent collection will greatly strengthen the museum’s growing collection of ceramic arts as well as its overall holdings in contemporary craft. Roberto Lugo is an American artist, ceramicist, social activist, poet, and educator. A self-described “ghetto potter,” Lugo confronts the intertwined complexities of systemic racism, representation, and history in his work, while challenging the established power structures within the art, craft, and design fields.
On October 30, 2020, a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the relocation of the Phillips Library collection from Salem, MA, to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) Collection Center in Rowley, MA. The Court ruled (in Peabody Essex Museum v. Maura Healey, Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) that it is consistent with equitable deviation from the terms of the founding statutes establishing the Essex Institute, an organizational forebearer of PEM. This decision enables PEM’s Collection Center, with its increased storage capacity, reading room and carefully-calibrated environmental systems, to be the ongoing home of the Phillips Library collection.
The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) and The Salem Pantry teamed up to address food insecurity on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Feeding Community is a joint initiative designed to raise awareness of food insecurity, secure essential funding, and recruit volunteers to support The Salem Pantry’s life-sustaining operations. PEM will enroll volunteers, collect food donations on site at the museum, and help distribute food to the community at the The Salem Pantry. Through the month of December, financial contributions made to either PEM’s Annual Fund or The Salem Pantry will help unlock a donor’s generous challenge pledge of $20,000. Broad participation is a key component of this fundraising effort and once each organization receives 200 donations, the Feeding Community challenge gift will be distributed. Learn more at: pem.org/feedingcommunity
The Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) has announced a new “Study Hall” program at the Whaling Museum to provide community members with a safe, socially distanced space to read, surf the World Wide Web using the museum’s free WIFI, attend a virtual class, or do school work. With the weather cooling down this fall, the NHA’s goal is to provide islanders with a safe space outside of their homes to utilize. “Study Hall” will be free to the year-round community as Whaling Museum admission remains free to year-round residents through the end of the year, thanks to the support of The Community Foundation for Nantucket’s Remain Nantucket Fund and Marine Home Center.
The Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) has been awarded a $190,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) supporting a project to better understand and catalog the NHA’s archeology collections. These include Native peoples and English settlers collections estimated to number at least 5,000 stone tools, pottery, and ceramic fragments.
The Martha’s Vineyard Museum (MVM) is the recipient of two awards from Preservation Massachusetts, the statewide nonprofit historic preservation organization dedicated to preserving the commonwealth’s historic and cultural heritage. MVM received the Robert H. Kuehn Jr. award as well as the 2020 People’s Choice award.
Georg Baselitz, Untitled, 1967. Black and red chalk and graphite on paper. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Dorette Hildebrand-Staab, 2020.100. Artwork © Georg Baselitz. Photo: Lynette Roth; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The Harvard Art Museums has announced a gift of nearly 50 works by major figures in postwar German art from the collector Dorette Hildebrand-Staab, a member of the German Friends of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The works include drawings by such notable artists as Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Antonius Höckelmann, Jörg Immendorff, Imi Knoebel, Sigmar Polke, and Eugen Schönebeck, as well as a suite of prints and multiples by these and other artists such as Hanne Darboven, A. R. Penck, and Dieter Roth. Dating roughly from the 1950s to 1980s, these works were made when many of these now-renowned artists were students at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin or the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In addition to the postwar works, a selection of late 18th- to early 19th-century etchings by German printmaker Carl Wilhelm Kolbe are also part of the gift.
Judith Shahn, Small Skiff, Collection of the Cape Cod Museum of Art
The Cahoon Museum recently received a grant from the Coby Foundation for the fiber art exhibition Salley Mavor: Bedtime Stitches, on view from September 11-December 22, 2020. The Coby Foundation, based in New York City, supports projects in the textile and needle arts fields. The Cahoon Museum collaborated with the Cape Cod Museum of Art on the exhibition, Modern Mix, that presents colorful, bold artwork from the modern art period. Modern Mix tells the story of the visionary collectors and community supporters who founded the museums to preserve and present the work of American artists from Cape Cod and beyond.
The Falmouth Museums on the Green has received a $ 5000.00 CARES Act grant from Mass Humanities to assist with payroll, utilities and programs during the COVID 19 situation. It has also completed a renovation of the rear ell section of its 1790 Dr. Francis Wicks House. Besides a new exterior roof, the work has included a handicap-accessible ramp for entrance to the rear of the house, and the interior work has created a new climate-controlled exhibit gallery. The first exhibition in the area is local artist Karen Rinaldo’s painting, “The First Thanksgiving, 1621”, which includes likenesses of all of the surviving Mayflower passengers and all of the Wampanoag. This painting, commissioned by the National Association of Christian Congregational Churches, is the first historically accurate depiction of the event and was created as “a gift to the Nation”.
The New Art Center applied for and was awarded a SBA Disaster Loan of $150,000 to make capital improvements to their 61 Washington Park facility, a historic 19th century church building, to ensure better air quality and ease of social distancing to open the building to the community once again. The remaining $50,000 to update the New Art Center has been funded by additional financing. Construction began in August with the majority of the work completed in mid-September.
New Hampshire
Squam Lakes Natural Science Center has been selected by the readers of ParentingNH as a “Family Favorite” award recipient for Favorite Environmental and Educational Center. The Family Favorite awards, now in its 10th year, is an award program that recognizes family-friendly businesses, services and places in almost 50 categories – as chosen by the readers of ParentingNH magazine. Categories include Family Restaurant, Pediatrician, Book Store, Indoor Play Place and Entertainment Venue, among many others.
The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire will be receiving a $24,000 grant from the Roger R. and Theresa S. Thompson Endowment Fund to help provide educational materials for kids on the Seacoast.
The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (CMNH) received a $50,000 grant from Jane’s Trust that will support virtual programming over the next year. The Children’s Museum has created instructional videos and related educational activities for many programs children would have usually participated in at the museum during field trips. These are being provided to schools, with materials for completing activities, in order to continue to offer enrichment activities during remote learning. Students can participate in-school, if in-person learning is happening, or from home.
Strawbery Banke Museum announced a New Hampshire Land and Community Heritage Investment Program grant will help it create an exhibit featuring African-American history in the city. Strawbery Banke, a living-history museum, received a $125,000 grant award for the restoration of the c. 1750 Penhallow House. The grant supports restoration of the exterior of the house, in the first stage of a plan to fully restore it as part of Strawbery Banke’s Heritage House Program. The project will preserve the building for future generations and provide space for an exhibit featuring the 20th century history of an African-American family, the first house exhibit of its kind at the museum and in Portsmouth. Kenneth Richardson was an active member of Portsmouth’s Black community during the 1950s. His story will enable the museum to interpret American history in a more inclusive, accurate way, according to the museum.
Rhode Island
The Museum of Work & Culture, a division of the Rhode Island Historical Society, was pleased to take part in September’s “National Youth Summit on Teen Resistance to Systemic Racism,” an online outreach program organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in partnership with Smithsonian Affiliations. Designed for middle and high school students across the country, this year’s topic allowed youth to examine the impact of teen resistance to systemic racism. The Museum is one of fifteen Smithsonian Affiliate organizations who hosted regional youth summits with local activists, scholars, and youth. The RIHS provided four opportunities for student leaders from the organization’s Teen Advisory Board, Public History Internship pilot program, and Rhode Island History Day to convene in a discussion about this history and to examine the power of today’s teens.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced on July 29, $30 million in grants for 238 humanities projects across the United States in several categories. Newport Restoration Foundation’s Whitehorne House Museum received a Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Grant, the only such award in the state of Rhode Island. The $50,000 planning grant supports organizations like NRF as they assess their needs and direct efforts in “preventative conservation measures to prolong the useful life of collections [and] to help cultural institutions preserve large and diverse holdings of humanities materials for future generations.” The planning grant will be used to research and develop a plan that will serve as a road map to improve the climate control and collections storage systems at Whitehorne House Museum. Located at 416 Thames Street in Newport, it is the only museum in the world specializing in 18th-century Newport furniture and related decorative arts. The current challenges facing the museum building, a Federal era mansion near the Newport harbor, and its collections are numerous, including fluctuations in its temperature and relative humidity, degradation of the building envelope, and storage issues. With this grant, NRF can work with an integrated team of outside consultants to create a planning document that will offer clear and implementable suggestions about the best systems for addressing the museum’s current challenges.
The Greenlove Foundation, an environmental Rhode Island-based non-profit, is giving back again to the community with a donation of a water bottle filling station. The Providence Children’s Museum is the new recipient of the hydration station installed with the goal of children learning more about the negative impact of single-use plastic bottles on the environment.
Vermont
The Vermont Art Council awarded nearly $200,000 in Cultural Facilities Grants to 17 Vermont arts and community organizations to help provide critical funds to improve safety, upgrade equipment, and ensure that the arts are accessible to all Vermonters.
- Montshire Museum of Science, $30,000 to support the installation of accessible gender neutral bathrooms and renovations to the Porter Community Room
- Clemmons Family Farm, $20,450 to support installing floor insulation and pouring a new cement floor on the lower level of the Big Barn
- Saint Albans Museum, $3,470 to support new display cases and facility improvements to the electrical, AV, lighting, and safety systems for the Rail City exhibit space