Narrative Section of a Successful Application - National Endowment for ...

Narrative Section of a Successful Application

The attached document contains the grant narrative and selected portions of a

previously funded grant application. It is not intended to serve as a model, but to

give you a sense of how a successful application may be crafted. Every successful

application is different, and each applicant is urged to prepare a proposal that

reflects its unique project and aspirations. Prospective applicants should consult the

Division of Preservation and Access application guidelines at

for

instructions. Applicants are also strongly encouraged to consult with the NEH

Division of Preservation and Access staff well before a grant deadline.

Note: The attachment only contains the grant narrative and selected portions, not

the entire funded application. In addition, certain portions may have been redacted

to protect the privacy interests of an individual and/or to protect confidential

commercial and financial information and/or to protect copyrighted materials.

Project Title: Creating a Sustainable and Energy Efficient Storage Space for Art and

Artifacts of Western New York

Institution: Genesee Country Village and Museum

Project Director: Patricia M. Tice

Grant Program: Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections

1100 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Rm. 411, Washington, D.C. 20506

P

202.606.8570

F

202.606.8639 E preservation@



Genesee Country Village & Museum

3. Narrative

Introduction:

GCV&M seeks $400K to turn two galleries at the John L. Wehle Art Gallery (AG) into a safe,

secure, energy-efficient, sustainable storage wing. This will provide the museum with its first collections

storage facility and will significantly advance our ability to preserve the collections, as recommended by a

1998 IMLS General Survey undertaken by conservators Richard Kerschner and Ralph Wiegandt, and a

2006 NEH Environmental Assessment of the Art Gallery and Carriage Museum by conservator Barbara

Moore (see Appendix 1). This project is GCV&M¡¯s highest collections care priority because, quite

simply, without good storage, the museum cannot fulfill its mission or function properly as an institution.

Lack of acceptable storage has bottlenecked operations, negatively impacting GCV&M's ability to care

for existing collections, to acquire and refine collections, and to borrow artifacts for exhibition as the AG

lacks a secure holding area and falls below accepted facility standards. Lack of storage has hindered

implementation of our newly revised interpretive plan, developed under a 2004 IMLS grant, which calls

for interpreting the second floor rooms of the Historic Village houses, and making them accessible for the

first time. Many of these rooms, as well as an historic barn, are now inappropriately used for collections

storage, making access to the collections virtually impossible for researchers and the public. The prime

motivation for the project, however, is the fact that many objects are deteriorating due to the storage

conditions. This project has therefore been given utmost priority by the museum¡¯s Board and

administration because without a suitable storage area, GCV&M cannot achieve its mission to preserve its

collections for future generations, nor can it accomplish its new interpretive plan.

Collections Overview:

The museum¡¯s holdings include an outstanding collection of sporting and wildlife art, a collection

of portraiture, landscapes, genre, and still life representative of the popular art collected and appreciated

by people living in western NY in the 19th century, a superlative 19th century clothing collection,

important documentary artifacts and 3-D objects. Many of these objects are provenanced to western New

York. All of these objects directly support GCV&M¡¯s mission and programming which includes gallery

exhibitions, school lessons and outreach, adult education, special event weekends, and the living history

experience that explores our cultural past. Recent programming themes have included changing

interpretations of nature and land management as seen through art, the impact of the Civil War upon

civilian life, a study of changing food customs, specifically the impact that widespread sugar production

had upon American health and diet, and an exhibition that used clothing and art to examine accepted

ideals of masculinity. We will treat rites of passages particular to women from cradle to grave next

season. In the future, we will reinterpret a tenant house as representative of an African-American

farmstead.

Our diverse collections invite an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation, analysis,

synthesis and presentation of our historical and cultural heritage. The collections support humanitiesrelated research, education and programming, particularly in the arts, history, and social studies relating to

the settlement and development of 19th century America in general and western New York in particular.

The preservation and interpretation of these collections is critical because GCV&M is the only major

institution in our area that actively interprets, collects and preserves such artifacts. We are the keepers of

our region's history, the ¡°history place¡± for schools, and an important community partner for humanitiesbased programming which reaches diverse, and often, underserved rural and urban populations.

Institutional Profile:

Ranked the 3rd largest open air museum in the United States and the largest, most comprehensive

living history museum in New York State, GCV&M maintains 68 historically significant structures,

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relocated from thirteen surrounding counties to recreate a village setting at the museum. In addition,

GCV&M operates an Art Gallery (AG) and a Nature Center located on its 700 acre campus. It serves

adjacent rural counties, as well as the cities of Rochester and Buffalo with an annual visitation 125,000.

The museum currently employs 32 full time staff, 17 part time staff, and 238 seasonal staff members, 550

volunteers, and has an annual operating budget of $3,489,338. Our mission is to interpret and preserve

objects that document 19th century life in western New York and America through its historic buildings,

landscapes, art collections, and three-dimensional artifacts.

All acquisitions are overseen by the Collections Management Committee of the Board of

Trustees, following staff review. Development in the collections is guided by our mission, a long-range

interpretive plan, and the collections management policy. We are actively shaping our collections to better

support our mission and areas of inquiry. For example, we have recently engaged to purchase the Susan

Greene Clothing Collection, a stellar collection that will fill a long-standing gap in our own clothing

collection and will foster new exhibitions, inform our historic costuming program, help build affiliations

with other living history museums, and make us a center for 19th century clothing research.

2. Significance of the collections:

The new storage facility will house our collections of fine arts, clothing and textiles, documentary

artifacts, and 3-D objects:

Fine Arts: GCV&M owns 950 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures within the sporting and

wildlife art collections. Hailed by Wildlife Art Magazine as ¡°the premier public collection of sporting art

in America and one of the finest of the world¡± and by artist Robert Bateman as ¡°New York¡¯s hidden

treasure,¡± this collection dates between 1650-1985. These works represent leading American and

European artists, serving as a veritable who¡¯s who of the genres. (See Appendix 2 for artist list) Within

this collection are notable subcollections, such as eight paintings by Swedish naturalist Bruno Liljefors,

the largest collection of his work outside of Sweden. Liljefors is considered the most important wildlife

artist of the late 19th century and a major influence upon American wildlife painters, including Carl

Rungius and Bob Kuhn. There is also a superb sculpture collection with lifetime casts of Frederick

Remington¡¯s most popular sculptures, The Bronchco Buster, The Outlaw and The Rattlesnake. These

complement sculptures by Antoine Louis Barye, Isidore Bonheur, Pierre Jules Mene, Christopher Fratin,

Charles Russell, Solon Borglum, as well as James Earl Fraser¡¯s End of the Trail. Art historians have

deemed End of the Trail and Broncho-Buster as America¡¯s most popular sculptures of the 19th and early

20th centuries.

GCV&M¡¯s sporting/wildlife art collection is the only one of its type in New York State. Indeed,

there are only a handful of collections in the nation which are comparable. The Whitney Sporting Art

Collection at Yale University Art Galley is the closest in scale, with 1,000 objects and the Yale Centre for

British Art has strong holdings in British sporting art. Shelburne Museum, Burlington, VT, has an

excellent but considerably smaller collection with approximately 150 British, American, and French

works, while The Paul Mellon Collection of Sporting Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts includes

42 British works. Both the Morris Museum, in Augusta, Georgia and Pebble Hill Plantation in

Thomasville, Georgia include small but excellent collections of sporting art which focus primarily upon

the Southern experience. The National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole, WY has excellent

examples of wildlife art, but does not collect sporting art.

In addition to sporting art, GCV&M¡¯s collection contains a stellar group of paintings by the Taos

Society of Artists who strove to create a truly American school of art and whose work helped shape

America¡¯s vision of the west. Included in this group are works by Robert Henri, John Sloan, Joseph

Henry Sharp, Ernest Blumenschein, Oscar Berninghaus, Eanger Irving Couse, Lafayette Dixon, Walter

Ufer, Ernest Jennings, Victor Higgins, and Frank Tenney Johnson.

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These works benefit humanities research through their demonstration of the art historical,

stylistic, and technical development and through the subject matter depicted. In the artwork, we see the

evolving relationship between people and animals who were viewed as servants, friends, foe, and

untamed symbols of nature, We see changing views of fashion, class, sports, leisure, evolving ideals and

principles of land management and conservation, animal rights, the vision of the West, and the view of

the Native American. Love, fear and fascination of Nature and wilderness are recurrent themes in

American culture, one readily accessible through these collections.

GCV&M's 19th century art collection includes approximately 200 paintings, drawings, prints, and

assemblages. Fifty-three portraits bring visitors face to face with former residents of the region and invite

us to think about family relationships, fashion, class, rites of passage, childhood and old age, ideals of

beauty, value systems, gender roles, and how people wished to be viewed by others. Many of the

paintings relate directly to the village structures, such as five MacKay family portraits (MacKay House),

seven Brooks, Brown and Savage family portraits (Brooks Grove Church. Brooks Grove Post Office and

Store). Other portraits relate to collection objects made or owned by the subject, (portrait of Ann Failing

Brown and her exquisite 1870s quilt). These works document the artistic achievements of professionally

and self-taught portraitists, including Ezra Ames, D. Brokow, Jonathon Buddington, Jerome Fielding,

Deborah Goldsmith, Edwin Weyburn Goodwin, Milton Hopkins, Randall Palmer, Abraham Tuthill and as

well as itinerant artists whose identities await discovery. We know from 19th century newspaper accounts

that art exhibitions engaged area residents with paintings depicting landscape, religious subjects, and still

life, and so these genres are also represented in the collection, both by amateur artists and by nationallyrecognized local talent including Frank Eastman Jones and Helen Searle. These works often show us the

prevailing tastes, aspirations and fashions which gave us our world today. Sometimes, this artwork shows

us customs now obsolete, such as calligraphy artwork that includes an outstanding 8 x 3 foot banner by

calligraphy teacher/artist William O. Place, created in 1858, Alfred, NY, and calligraphy by George

Washington Eastman, father of George Eastman (Eastman¡¯s Boyhood Home) who included decorative

writing in his business-school curriculum. Home-crafted art (wax and hair wreathes, scherenschnitte (cut

paper), tinsel, sand, and embroidered pictures) contrast with mass-produced prints by lithographers

Currier and Ives and other firms. Prints based on works by local artists (Joseph Young) depict the scenic

and iconic views that defined our region. (Genesee Falls, Lake Ontario, Erie Canal, Portage Bridge, etc).

GCV&M is the only area museum which regularly exhibits regional 19th century art. The collections of

the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester span antiquity to contemporary art; the Albright

Knox Art Gallery and Burchfield Penney, Buffalo, NY focus upon modern art. At GCV&M, we focus

upon our art which was known and valued in western NY.

While founder John Wehle directed GCV&M, the AG exhibited only the Wehle art collections.

With the professionalization of the staff in the last decade, however, the AG began mounting changing

exhibits which included Robert Bateman: A Retrospective (2002), Birds in Art (2003), About Face (2003)

How Fetching! Dogs in Art (2004), Quilts Uncovered (2005) Happy Birthday GCV&M! 30 years of

Collecting (2006), Sweet! Dessert in America (2007), Under Open Skies: Painting Nature Past and

Present (2008) and The Sporting Life: Sport in Art and Fashion (2009). Many of these exhibits resulted

from community collaborations. The Genesee Valley Quilt Club helped mount and staff Quilts

Uncovered, and with a local firm, sponsored ¡°Quilt Day¡±, a program featuring quilt historians who

provided lectures on 19th century quilting and who identified quilts belonging to program participants.

Under Open Skies juxtaposed 19th century and 21st century plein air painting, providing a place for The

Genesee Valley Plein Air Painters to exhibit their work. This talented group also taught plein air painting

classes outside the AG. More recently, the AG has attracted the Rochester Chapter of the Jane Austen

Society of North America, which presented three lectures in the Sporting Life exhibit, melding art and

literature together, exploring relationships between the landscapes portrayed in sporting art and Austen's

views on the Enclosure Acts, male fashion, and upon animals as reflections of their owners. We have

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sponsored other scholarly programming, such as the New York State Council for the Arts-funded

symposium, Artists of Western New York (2006) where keynote speaker William Gertz analyzed the

regional art traditions and where six curators from Buffalo and Rochester institutions presented current

research on local artists to 102 participants. We accommodate advanced students studying botanical and

illustration art at nearby Rochester Institute of Technology. Students routinely visit the art gallery to study

wildlife art from Audubon to Zogbaum. Interior Design students visit GCV&M regularly as part of their

history of design curriculum. Each March, Art Education Month, GCV&M sponsor a themed, student art

show, offering a venue where student art can be proudly exhibited and viewed by students, their families,

and the public. On a less formal level, we offer many collection-based ¡°hands-on¡± crafts to our visitors.

For example, this past season, visitors experienced painting with sponges, feathers and stencils, recreating

the decorative painting documented on 19th century boxes on exhibit. We also offer spinning, weaving,

dying, knitting, quilting, basket making, wood working, tin smithing, cooking, and pottery making. We

anticipate extending art lessons in the 2010 season through GCV&M's Sampler program, Art and Nature,

and through a new program where visitors will participate in creating ¡°schoolgirl art¡± (watercolors,

calligraphy, needle arts) in the 1855 Romulus Ladies' Seminary in the Village.

GCV&M has loaned works to regional and national museums, including New York State

Museum, Albany, NY; Albany Museum of Art, Albany, NY; The Fraunces Tavern Museum, New York,

NY; National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC.; Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art

Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, VA; The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY; The National Museum of

Wildlife Art, Jackson Hole, WY; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NB; San Diego Natural History Museum,

San Diego, CA; Thomasville Cultural Center, Thomasville, GA; Wildlife Experience, Parker, CO; The

McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; The Dunnegan Gallery of Art, Bolivar,

MO; Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH; Bergstrom-Mahler Art Museum, Neenah, WI; R. W. Norton

Art Gallery, Shreveport, LA; The Spartanburg Art Gallery, Spartanburg, SC; Elizabeth de C. Wilson

Museum, Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, VT and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum,

Tucson, AZ. More local loans include the George Eastman House, Rochester Museum and Science

Center, Memorial Art Gallery, Landmark Society of Western New York, Strong National Museum of

Play (all Rochester, NY); Ontario County Historical Society, Canandaigua, NY; The Leroy Historical

Society, LeRoy, NY; and The Batavia Land Office Museum, Batavia, NY.

GCV&M's art collections have been sought for books and exhibit catalogs which include David

Wagner's American Wildlife Art, (2008), F.Turner Reuter's A History of American Sporting and Wildlife

Art (2008), Wild Life Art Magazine, and exhibit catalogs including Sheila Hoffman¡¯s Eanger Irving

Couse, A Place in the Sun. In 2006, GCV&M published its first exhibit catalog, A Stitch in Time by

Elizabeth Davis, based on Quilts Uncovered although Victoria Schmidt, former AG curator, had

presented an overview of the sporting art collection in 1984 in Four Centuries of Sporting Art. The Eagle,

GCV&M's membership magazine, also features articles by staff members on the museum's collections.

The museum has also been featured in Americana (1982) and Early American Homes (1997).

Documents and family archives illustrate the region¡¯s development. The Garbutt family papers

(1813-1981) consists of approximately 130 documents, 1,250 store ledgers, papers and receipts which

trace the history of the Garbutt Store, considered the best country store west of the Genesee River, from

1818-1910. (This store supplied local residents and settlers headed westward with foodstuffs, medicines,

ready to wear shoes and clothing, tools, luxury and dry goods.) Also included are accounts of the

Garbutt¡¯s plaster and grist mills, and Garbutt's Tailor Shop (now in Village.) The 47 letters between the

Garbutt family and James Garbutt, the area¡¯s first Civil War volunteer and death, would provide excellent

material for a doctoral dissertation. Garbutt¡¯s Bible, oil-cloth kit, and the home-made flag flown by the

Garbutts during James¡¯ military service also reside in the collections. GCV&M also holds the Altay Store

papers, which consist of over 500 papers and receipts dated 1851-1852 that document the wide array of

goods sold or bartered at this country store, once located in Altay, NY (and now also in Village.) The

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