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Museum receives National Endowment for the Humanities grant
Museum receives National Endowment for the Humanities grant
Listen to this articleThe George Eastman Museum has received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its Preserving and Improving Access to the Boyer Collection project.
The NEH grant, from its Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Program, will allow the museum to catalog and digitize the entire Alden Scott Boyer collection, giving the public complete access to images of the objects, and will enable the museum to hire two project staff, a cataloguer and an object photographer, for the term of the grant.
“The Boyer collection is one of the largest and most diverse gatherings of 19th-century British photography outside of the United Kingdom and features photographs by key American figures such as Southworth & Hawes and Carleton Watkins,” said Bruce Barnes, the museum’s Ron and Donna Fielding director. “The collection itself had a profound impact on the genesis and development of the history of photography as a discipline and served as a touchstone for institutional and private collection-building across the continent.”
Boyer, a Chicago-based chemical manufacturer, in 1951 donated his private collection of photographs to the George Eastman Museum. At the time, the Boyer collection represented one of the finest and most extensive private collections of photography in the U.S., and now is one of the most significant public collections in the country for the study of 19th-century life, history and culture.
The project will be overseen by Heather Shannon, associate curator of photography, and is slated for completion by the spring of 2022.
The George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the largest film archives in the nation. Located on the historic estate of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the East Avenue museum was founded in 1947 and is undergoing a host of renovations.
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