HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS RECEIVES TWO NEH GRANTS

Released October 4, 1996

The Harvard University Art Museums is pleased to announce that it has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of two special exhibitions. An implementation grant in the amount of $100,000 was awarded for the special exhibition KOTAH: Its Gods, Kings, and Tigers, and a planning grant in the amount of $35,700 was awarded for the special exhibition Art in the Service of Social Action: Ben Shahn's New York Photographs, 1932-1936. The National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency, is dedicated to expanding American understanding of history and culture. Grants are awarded to exhibitions that demonstrate a strong collaboration among curatorial, education, and design staff in the development of projects that are directed to broad and diverse public audiences. "Receipt of these grants should remind us all of the crucial role the National Endowment for the Humanities plays in the cultural life of our country and in the production of important scholarship," noted James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "And they come at a crucial time, when such support is declining everywhere and even, in some cases, being eliminated all together. We are honored to have received these generous special exhibition grants. We take them as both acknowledgment of the seriousness of our purposes as a teaching and research museum and a sign of true value of federal support for the arts and humanities."

KOTAH: Its Gods, Kings, and Tigers, which is scheduled to open at the Art Museums in fall 1997, is organized by the Harvard University Art Museums in collaboration with The Asia Society, New York. It is the first exhibition in the United States devoted to artistic production from a single Rajput court. The exhibition will include paintings and objects from the Royal Collections of the former state of Kotah, one of the most prolific artistic centers in north India from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The exhibition will explicate these visual arts of Kotah through historical, religious, anthropological, and art historical perspectives. As the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary presentation of visual arts from a single Rajput court, this exhibition will serve as a paradigm for future investigations of art and culture in pre-modern India. KOTAH: Its Gods, Kings, and Tigers is curated by Stuart Cary Welch, curator of Islamic and later Indian art Emeritus, Harvard University Art Museums. The exhibition, which will tour internationally, has also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Art in the Service of Social Action: Ben Shahn's New York Photographs, 1932-1936 is scheduled to open in 1998 to celebrate the centenary of Ben Shahn's (1898-1969) birth. The exhibition focuses on the meaning of Shahn's artistic production within the larger New Deal culture -- giving exposure to a long overlooked aspect of the work of this major American artist. It examines Shahn's experimentation with the emerging field of social documentary practice, and his adaptation of his photographs into both small and large-scale public projects, wherein he presented to broad audiences arresting visual paradigms for many of the dominant reform programs of the 1930s. The exhibition will consist of approximately one-hundred works by Shahn, primarily photographs, supplemented by works in other media. Art in the Service of Social Action: Ben Shahn's New York Photographs, 1932-1936 is organized by Deborah Martin Kao, the Charles C. Cunningham, Sr., Assistant Curator of Photography at the Harvard University Art Museums, and Laura Katzman, assistant professor of American Art and Culture at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. The exhibition will tour internationally.

Both exhibitions will be accompanied by extensive public programs and fully-illustrated catalogues.