Westchester Arts Groups Win Prestigious National Grants
Hudson River Museum Receives Mellon Foundation Grant
Hudson River Museum (HRM) recently announced that it is being awarded a $200,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. HRM is one of only 14 organizations nationwide to receive the Art Museum Futures Fund, a relief initiative created to help sustain arts and cultural institutions with immediate funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of the fund is to recognize “visionary leadership, distinctive collections and commitment to community, as well as historically overlooked artists and histories.”
Sing Sing Museum Awarded With Infrastructure and Capacity Building Grant
The Sing Sing Prison Museum has been awarded a $364,746 grant for infrastructure and capacity building from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The funds will be used to restore the historic 1936 Powerhouse into a multi-purpose program and exhibition space to be used for lectures, films, performances, seminars, displays and conferences related to criminal justice and the American penal system. This matching grant encourages private philanthropy to match federal funds and leverage private investment in the nation’s cultural institutions. The Museum is required to raise $1.1 million dollars to match NEH funding.
Hudson Valley MOCA Awarded Grant for “Enlighten Peekskill” Project
The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Hudson Valley MOCA with a grant of $20,000 to support its ‘Enlighten Peekskill’ project. The Museum’s president, Dr. Livia Straus, explains: “’Enlighten Peekskill’ is part of a NYS Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI), whereby Peekskill Waterfront Green and the Peekskill MTA Station will be linked to Downtown Peekskill through illuminated sculptures. These light works will offer a safe walking route that simultaneously highlights the importance of the arts in culture and commerce.”
ArtsWestchester Receives National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Textile Exhibition
ArtsWestchester has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an upcoming exhibition, The Social Fabric: Common Threads and Uncommon Visions. The exhibition will feature new work and site-responsive commissions, featuring Hudson Valley-area artists who use textiles to explore issues of broad social consequence. According to ArtsWestchester CEO Janet Langsam, “textiles are approachable artifacts of daily life. Beyond the clothes we wear, textiles and their associations, tactile qualities and the labor-intensive ways in which they are made can trigger moments of nostalgia, or an increased social consciousness.”
A version of this article first appeared in the March issue of ArtsNews, ArtsWestchester’s monthly publication. ArtsNews is distributed throughout Westchester County. A digital copy is also available at artsw.org/artsnews.
