The University of Utah was awarded a $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation last December. It's the first time the organization recognized the university's arts and humanities program.
“So the grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is going to be used to really transform the relationship between the Marriott Library, here at the University of Utah, and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts,” said museum director Gretchen Dietrich. “The grant is meant to fund a project which will hopefully transform the ways in which the library and the museum collaborate.”
The project called Landscape, Land Art, and the American West is the Joint Research and Engagement Initiative that they will work on during the next four years.
“Looking at from a very big picture point of view, what landscape art is, the ways in which we think about land, use land, interact with land, and even the way we envision the future of the west and of the western landscape, we just decided that that was a great sort of way to focus the work that is in the collections on research and learning that would be really meaningful to people.” Dietrich said.
Through their developing technology, organizers plan to make documents about the American West available digitally, benefiting teachers, students and communities around the world.
