Four Maine organizations awarded $328K in NEH grants

File Photo / Tim Greenway Mark Bessire, director of the Portland Museum of Art

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By Staff

The National Endowment for the Humanities is awarding $328,000 in grants to Maine Humanities Council, Portland Museum of Art, Trustees of St. Joseph's College and Maine State Museum.

U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine District 1, announced the awards in a news release on Thursday. Pingree is vice chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, which overseas funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since 2018, she has served as the co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Arts Caucus — a group of congressional lawmakers focused on promoting the nation’s creative economy.

NEH grants are highly competitive and involve a rigorous peer-review process to ensure that the projects represent the highest level of humanities quality and public engagement.

Here are descriptions of Maine’s four NEH grants and what they will be supporting:

Maine Humanities Council: $98,779 to support “Dialogues on the Experience of War,” which supports literature programs for veterans.
Portland Museum of Art: $100,000 to support the upcoming exhibition “In the Vanguard,” about Haystack Mountain School of Crafts 1950-1969, which “explores how an experimental school in rural Maine transformed art, craft, and design in the 20th century and helped define the aesthetics of the nation’s counterculture.” The exhibit opens May 24 and runs through Sept. 8.
Trustees of St. Joseph's College: $34,995 to support Humanities Connections Planning Grants, which support academic programs integrating multiple disciplines.
Maine State Museum: $95,000, a matching “infrastructure and capacity building challenge grant” to generate private support for a humanities project.

“I’m excited to announce that four of Maine’s cultural institutions have been offered significant grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities,” Pingree said in a statement. “These competitive grant awards speak to the quality of the organizations and Maine’s remarkable leadership in the arts and humanities. It’s important to recognize that federal investments, like these grants, help to support cities and towns across Maine and drive economic opportunity.”