Humanities Endowment Awards $4.3 Million for 26 Projects at Museums and Historical Organizations

Eight earn recognition as We the People projects

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced that 26 U.S. museums and historical organizations will receive a total of $4.3 million in grants for consultation, planning, and implementation of interpretive permanent or traveling exhibitions or other public humanities projects. Eight of these have been designated as We the People projects, a special recognition by the NEH for model projects that advance the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture.

"Long-term and traveling exhibitions and other public programs at museums and historical organizations offer Americans many opportunities for lifelong learning," said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. "These projects bring audiences together with art objects, artifacts, and ideas that will deepen our understanding of history and culture."

A complete list of new grants to museums and historical organizations is available here.

Implementation grants offer museums and historical organizations up to $323,333 each to support interpretive museum exhibitions and the interpretation of historic sites. Iowa's Davenport Museum of Art will implement a traveling exhibition exploring early 20th-century American art, Alaska's Anchorage Museum Association will implement an exhibition interpreting the impact of Quonset huts on the built environment and culture of post-World War II Alaska, and California's Los Angeles County Museum will implement a traveling exhibition on the origins and development of the institution of kingship among the Maya through the middle of the sixth century.

With consultation grants of up to $10,000 each, nine institutions will work with scholars at the very earliest stages of a project on exhibitions, reinstallations or reinterpretations of permanent collections or historic sites, institutional interpretive planning, or other kinds of public humanities projects. New NEH consultation grants will support Alabama's Museum of Mobile, which will consult with scholars to develop an intergenerational oral history project examining the city's history during the Jim Crow era; New York's Children's Museum of Manhattan, which will develop themes for a traveling exhibition introducing children to the world of ancient Greece; and Virginia's Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities in Richmond, which will work with scholars on an interpretive framework for Scotchtown, Patrick Henry's home.

NEH grants are awarded on a competitive basis. Throughout the year, humanities experts outside of the Endowment and members of the National Council on the Humanities consider all applications and advise NEH on the quality and significance of each proposed project.