News and Updates
MUSEUM LOAN NETWORK UPDATE
Spring 2006
MLN Awards 10 Special Travel Grants to Institutions in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Travel grants of $4,500 each will be given to the following museums affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in Louisiana: African American Museum, St. Martinville; Amistad Research Center, New Orleans; Imperial Calcasieu Museum, Lake Charles; Louisiana Children's Museum, New Orleans; New Orleans Museum of Art; The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and in Mississippi: Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi; Museum of Mississippi History, Jackson.
By offering these special grants, the MLN hopes to provide museum staff the opportunity to think about the future with colleagues in other places, as well as explore collection-sharing options and develop long-term goals. "We had to downsize our staff from nineteen to six,” said Marjorie Gowdy, executive director of the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, MS, one of the grant recipients. “Thanks to the MLN grant,” she said, “we were able to get out of disaster mode for a while and plan for the future.”
Energizing the Study of Early American Art (EEAA) Objects Added to MLN Directory
The MLN is pleased to announce that nearly 500 early American portraits have been recently added to the MLN Directory thanks to a grant from The Henry Luce Foundation. Contact the MLN for a password to view these works and 16,000 more objects of art and cultural heritage available for loan from museums throughout the United States.
Collecting Stories: Connecting Objects Website and Online Toolkit Ready to Launch
Collecting Stories: Connecting Objects, funded by The Nathan Cummings Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is a museum/community-focused initiative designed to engage communities in cataloguing by connecting oral histories with cultural objects. As a result of working with museums across the country, the Collecting Stories website will launch in April 2006 providing a toolkit, demonstration projects and other online resources.
Sharing Connections: A Decade of the Museum Loan Network
Published with support from Knight Foundation, the MLN has published a book celebrating and reflecting on a decade of the work of the MLN. The publication, filled with stories from the field and dedicated to Stephen Weil, will be available during the AAM meeting in late April.