News and Media

Published: Jul 6, 2010

SAVANNAH, Ga.— The SCAD Museum of Art has been awarded a major Conservation Project Support grant from The Institute of Museum and Library Services of $149,300. The grant will assist the museum with rehousing its painting collections in a new storage facility with new storage furnishings.

The grant to SCAD was not only one of the largest given by IMLS to a single institution, but was also the only one awarded in Georgia. Additional grant recipients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

“We are thrilled to see the rising number and caliber of conservation applications. There’s a clear correlation between states’ increased conservation efforts, which have been stimulated by IMLS’s Connecting to Collections conservation initiative, and museums taking action at the institutional level,” said Marsha L. Semmel, acting director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

IMLS took immediate action to launch Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action, a multi-year conservation initiative to increase public awareness of the importance of collections care after a report was conducted by the Heritage Preservation and support from IMLS called The Heritage Index. This report showed that collections of irreplaceable artifacts are at high risk of being lost. IMLS is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development.

“We are extremely grateful to the IMLS for their generosity,” said Maureen Burke, SCAD Museum of Art executive director and dean of academic initiatives.  “The museum’s painting collections form one of the Southeast’s most important visual and cultural resources. Preserving them will ensure that future generations of SCAD students and regional museum visitors as well as the heritage tourists who visit Savannah will be able to enjoy the paintings and gain a deeper appreciation for the artworks, their creation and their context.”

The SCAD Museum’s new paintings storage facility will be located in the expanded museum complex currently under construction and scheduled for completion in Fall 2011. At this time, there are more than 350 paintings being housed by the museum off site. Rehousing the artwork will help to preserve it and bring it to a more accessible site for research and exhibition. The SCAD museum is a teaching museum and with this project hopes to teach the importance of conservation to SCAD’s community.

The SCAD Museum of Art is located at 227 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., in the former 1856 Gray Building headquarters of the Central of Georgia Railroad. It is open to the public free of charge Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, 1-5 p.m. (closed Sundays for the summer). For information about the museum, call 912.525.7191.