The National Endowment for the Arts Awards The Cultural Landscape Foundation $60,000 in Art Works Grants
Media Contact: Nord Wennerstrom | T: 202.483.0553 | M: 202.225.7076 | E: nord@tclf.org
Funding Provided for What’s Out There Weekends and the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Video Oral History Project
Washington, DC (May 6, 2015) – The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) today announced it has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Works grants totaling $60,000. The grants provide $35,000 to fund research and documentation of designed landscapes in Denver, CO, and Austin, TX, and to host free What’s Out There Weekend tours in each location in the fall of 2015; and $25,000 for the completion of interviews and related activities for the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Video Oral History Project to document, collect, and preserve first-hand information from the pioneering landscape architect Harriet Pattison.
“We are honored the NEA has chosen to award What’s Out There Weekend and the Pioneers Video Oral History Project critically needed funding,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s founder and president. "TCLF will now be able to provide essential documentation along with free tours of designed landscapes in Denver and Austin, and to complete a video oral history with landscape architect Harriet Pattison.”
Funding for What’s Out There Weekend
The Art Works Design grant helps cover research, documentation, production, and dissemination of information about historic designed landscapes in Denver, CO and Austin, TX; and the hosting of What's Out There Weekends in each location. The documentation is part of TCLF’s ever expanding What’s Out There free, online, carefully vetted database of the nation’s landscape legacy, which currently features more than 1,700 sites, 900 designer profiles and 10,000 images. TCLF will work with university partners as well as local individuals and organizations, to identify, research, and document appropriate sites. In addition to the online content, TCLF is working with local chapters of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) to organize free, expert led tours in both cities in the fall of 2015 and to produce guidebooks with contemporary photography and detailed narratives. Available to researchers, site stewards, and the general public, PDF versions of each guidebook will be accessible as free downloads from TCLF’s Web site and as print versions from TCLF’s and local partners’ bookstores.
Funding for The Pioneers of American Landscape Design Video Oral History Series
The Pioneers of American Landscape Design Video Oral History Project, launched in 2003, is the leading collection of video-recorded oral histories documenting the lives and careers of significant and influential landscape architects, in their own words. Each oral history features first person interviews with the subjects in their homes and/or studios and offices, interviews with colleagues and/or family (as appropriate), archival material, as well as location shoots at significant built works.
This Media Arts grant will be used to complete an oral history with Philadelphia landscape architect Harriet Pattison. Over the course of her half-century career, Pattison collaborated with some of the most notable architects of the 20th century, including Robert Venturi and Louis I. Kahn (her son, Nathaniel Kahn, created the documentary “My Architect” about Louis Kahn). Appreciated for her design work at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Four Freedoms Park on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York, and the Hershey Food Corporation’s Pennsylvania headquarters, Pattison wrote about Beatrix Farrand and is a significant pioneer in Modernist landscape architecture.
About the National Endowment for the Arts Art Works grants
Art Works grants support the creation of art that meets the highest standards of excellence, public engagement with diverse and excellent art, lifelong learning in the arts, and enhancement of the livability of communities through the arts. In the second major grant announcement of fiscal year 2015, the NEA will make 1,023 awards totaling $74,326,900 to nonprofit arts organizations in all 50 states plus five U.S. jurisdictions. Funding in this round is awarded through the NEA’s Art Works and State and Regional Partnerships grant categories.
For a complete listing of projects recommended for Art Works grant support, please visit the NEA Web site at http://arts.gov.
About The Cultural Landscape Foundation
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), established in 1998, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit foundation that provides people with the tools to see, understand and value landscape architecture, its practitioners, and our cultural landscape legacy in the way many people have learned to do with buildings and their designers. Through its Web site, lectures, outreach and publishing, TCLF broadens the support and understanding for cultural landscapes nationwide to help safeguard our priceless heritage for future generations. TCLF makes a special effort to heighten the awareness of those who impact cultural landscapes, assist groups and organizations working to increase the appreciation and recognition of cultural landscapes, and develop educational tools for young people to better connect them to their cultural landscape environs.
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