Neuberger Museum Receives $45K Grant

From Neuberger Museum of Art: Tracy Fitzpatrick, Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art, announced today that the Museum received a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to help fund the exhibition “Romare Bearden: Abstraction,” opening on September 10, 2017. Organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, and curated by Dr. Fitzpatrick, the exhibition will focus on Bearden’s extraordinary abstract, large- and small-scale watercolors, stain paintings, and mixed media collages, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue. Collaborating on the exhibition are the Estate of Nanette Bearden, the Romare Bearden Foundation, and DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Established by Congress in 1965, the NEA is the independent federal agency that has awarded over 100,000 grants to further creative excellence in the United States. NEA Chairman Jane Chu commented: “The NEA is committed to advancing learning, fueling creativity, and celebrating the arts in cities and towns across the United States. Funding new projects like the Romare Bearden exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art represents an investment in both our local communities and our nation’s creative vitality.”

Dr. Fitzpatrick said: “We are enormously grateful to the NEA for making possible this exhibition and related programming possible. For over fifty years, the NEA has played an invaluable role in our country, recognizing and supporting the arts, and giving Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. With its very existence under threat by reactionary forces, it us up to all of us to acknowledge the NEA’s importance in enriching our lives by making possible invaluable programming, exhibitions, and performances in our community.”

She also noted that when Roy R. Neuberger, founding patron of the Neuberger Museum of Art, was president of American Federation of Arts, he was an early and vocal advocate for federal funding of the arts. As he observed in a letter to editor, published in the New York Times on July 20, 1958 when discussions about the need for a “Federal Arts Bureau” were on the rise, “the arts need and deserve the support of private individuals, corporate and industrial entities as well as the Federal Government.”

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