Displaying items by tag: federal funding

Three Maine museums have received nearly $1 million in federal funding to improve storage at the Monhegan Museum and Maine Historical Society and reinstall the collection at the Portland Museum of Art.

The PMA received $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities; Monhegan and the historical society each received $250,000, with the condition that each raises $50,000 in matching grants.

The Smithsonian Institution said on Monday that it planned to raise $1.5 billion by 2017 in its first institution-wide fundraising campaign and had already raised more than $1 billion of that sum from private individuals, foundations, corporations and other donors.

In an era of tighter federal funding the Smithsonian is increasing its private fundraising efforts to pay for its stepped-up ambitions at its sprawling network of museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park and research centers, one of the largest collections of museum and research centers in the world.

The U.S. government is revising its count of the nation's museums, saying there is double the number of museums compared with a 1990s estimate.

The agency responsible for providing federal funding to museums issued a count Monday of 35,144 museums nationwide. That's compared to an estimate of 17,500 museums in the 1990s.