Displaying items by tag: andrew w. mellon foundation

The Peabody Essex Museum has received a $750,000 grant to expand a fellowship program intended to train aspiring Native American museum professionals. The three-year grant, awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will enable the museum to increase the number of fellows it admits annually, extend the program to 12 weeks, and introduce more formal mentoring programs.

The organization behind the prestigious Fulbright fellowship is launching a new program to rescue artists from conflict zones. The Artist Protection Fund, a three-year pilot project led by the Institute of International Education and funded with $2.79m from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, offers grants to threatened artists and places them at host universities or art centers in friendlier foreign countries.

“Threats against just one individual artist can have an immediate chilling effect on entire artistic communities,” Allan Goodman, the president of the Institute of International Education, said at a launch event at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) has received $1.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in support of the center’s role as a catalyst for multidisciplinary creative experimentation and integration of the arts across all areas of MIT. The recent grant brings the Mellon Foundation’s total support for CAST to $3 million, among the largest gifts received by the Arts at MIT.

Philip S. Khoury, associate provost, expressed gratitude for the Mellon Foundation’s ongoing support and recognition: “The Mellon Foundation has an unparalleled role in funding pioneering programs in the arts and humanities, and this gift is a wonderful affirmation of the role of the Arts at MIT, CAST’s mission, and of the Institute’s distinctive arts heritage. We are enormously grateful for the Mellon’s ongoing support, which will enable us to expand the vital work of the Center.”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded to Yale University Press an $840,000 grant to establish a new electronic portal on which curated and customizable art and architectural history content will be made available to consumers and institutions.

The grant will allow Yale University Press, one of the world’s leading publishers of art and architecture books, to expand both the utility of and the readership for its award-winning and critically acclaimed art and architecture backlist by making text and images available electronically at a reasonable cost or for free. Users also will be able to customize the content, making course packs or creating other digital publications from a variety of texts.

Christopher Bedford, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, has announced two major grants, both for $100,000, from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Warhol Foundation grant will support the exhibition “Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood,” opening in September 2015. The Mellon Foundation grant will support three years of programming triggered by the hiring of a Curator of Academic Projects, an innovative position specifically designed to integrate the Rose’s collections and programs into teaching and learning at the university, according to Brandeis.

This is the first time that the Rose Art Museum has received a grant from either foundation.

The New Museum in New York announced that it has received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of scholarship in contemporary art. The grant is among three new scholarships that will help the museum continue to encourage and facilitate discussion and debate around contemporary culture. Founded in 1977, the New Museum was the first institution devoted to contemporary art established in New York City after World War II. Since its inception, the New Museum has been dedicated to creating a broad dialogue between artists and the public.

The Mellon Grant, which will be awarded over three years, will support a research fellow position as well as public and private seminars focused on contemporary art issues.

El Greco’s Vincenzo Anastagi, acquired a century ago by Henry Clay Frick, is one of The Frick Collection’s most celebrated paintings and one of only two full-length portraits by the master. It was executed during the artist’s six-year stay in Rome, before he moved to Spain, where he spent the rest of his career. Much of the force of this work emanates from the resplendent half-armor worn by Anastagi. Rich highlights applied with broad brushstrokes accentuate the steel, its metallic sheen contrasting with the velvety texture of Anastagi’s green breeches and the dark crimson curtain. To mark the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death, the Frick will pair Vincenzo Anastagi with the rarely seen Jacopo Boncompagni by the artist’s Roman contemporary Scipione Pulzone. With its gleaming, highly detailed polish, Pulzone’s portrait of Boncompagni, on loan from a private collection, epitomizes the elegant style that dominated high-society portraiture in Rome during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. El Greco’s painterly portrayal of Anastagi stands in stark contrast, underscoring the artist’s innovative departures from convention. The exhibition, held in the Frick’s East Gallery, is organized by Jeongho Park, Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow. It is generously funded by gifts from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Sidney R. Knafel and Londa Weisman in memory of Vera and Walter A. Eberstadt. The Frick will continue its celebration of El Greco this autumn and winter with a collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Detroit Institute of Arts has been pledged a  total of $13 million by New York-based The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Los Angeles-based J. Paul Getty Trust. The pledge will be put toward the DIA’s commitment to raise $100 million as part of a “Grand Bargain” that will help the city of Detroit emerge from bankruptcy, support city pensioners and protect the museum’s art collection for the public.

The $13 million consists of up to $10 million from the Mellon Foundation and $3 million from the J. Paul Getty Trust. Mellon has pledged $5 million immediately, with the full amount contingent on the museum raising sufficient matching funds to meet its $100 million fundraising requirement.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will grant the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries $1 million to help conserve Chinese paintings housed in the museum’s galleries of Asian art. The Smithsonian says that it is the only institution in the United States to offer a program that teaches conservators how to care for fragile Chinese paintings. The new grant will endow a position for an assistant Chinese painting conservator to provide support for the program.

While there are thousands of delicate Chinese paintings in American museums, there are only four expert conservators. Smithsonian officials said that the number of experts trained to care for Chinese paintings is dwindling, which is troublesome as these works are challenging to care for. Many Chinese paintings are very old and made up of layers of varying materials including paper, silk, fabric and paste, which all require different preservation methods.

The Mellon grant requires that the Smithsonian match the funds with an additional $750,000 by 2016 in order to endow the position.