Museums and Historical Organizations

"The Sweatshop Apartment" at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan interprets the 19th-century home and workplace of Harris and Jennie Levine. The Levine sweatshop illuminates patterns of work, family, and industry in New York's garment trades. An NEH implementation grant enabled the Museum staff to collaborate with scholars, former garment workers, and Levine family members to develop the permanent installation and accompanying audio tour, web site, curricular materials and citywide public programs.

The Children's Museum of Boston received both planning and implementation grants to develop a permanent, interactive exhibition exploring the diversity of Boston's Black communities. Designed for children ages four to ten, as well as their adult caregivers and educators, the exhibition will include multi-media and multisensory neighborhood vignettes to reflect various aspects of Black Boston culture. Working closely with scholars, community members, and children, the museum staff is developing an exhibition that will explore complex issues of identity, community, race, and ethnicity.

Barn Again, a traveling exhibition on regional barn architecture, features a scaled-down version of a National Building Museum exhibition as a way of better reaching small museums throughout the country. The exhibition also serves as the base for additional local public programming.

Maymont, a post-Civil War historic house in Virginia, has brought new insights into the families that lived there by expanding its interpretive focus to include the contributions of the domestic help. By telling a more inclusive story about the house, the curatorial staff hopes to shed new light on local history and better represent people's roles in the community.

Visitors to the Wrapped in Pride: Asante Kente and African American Identity exhibition organized by the Fowler Museum of Cultural History were encouraged to think of the textiles as works of art, as clothing, and as documents through which African and American history can be traced. To this end, a combination of interpretive labeling and photographs recreated weaving studios and textile shop environments. Maps, videos, and hands-on components created a multi-dimensional framework for presenting information.

Mystic Seaport Museum proposed to create a virtual exhibition that only exists on the World Wide Web and that draws on the collections of twenty historical organizations. Using immersive and interactive experiences that would be difficult to duplicate in an actual museum, the exhibition would be designed to appeal to audiences who could not visit each individual museum.