The Hood Museum of Art received a $1.25 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund the further incorporation of the Hood's resources with the College's curriculum, according to a College press release. The donation which is specifically earmarked for supporting and creating programs with this mission will provide the funds necessary to hire two additional members of the Hood staff.
The additional staff members will be a coordinator of academic programming and a part-time art handler, who will be responsible for allowing the Hood to "help meet the rising demand of faculty seeking to use the collections as a teaching resource," the release said.
"These new Mellon-funded staff positions will enable the museum to engage even more faculty members in the use of our collections, thus expanding the number of disciplines we serve," Katherine Hart, associate director of the Hood, said in the press release.
Although the grant will provide the College with $1.25 million, a portion of that grant $1 million will be used to form an endowment that will support the new positions in future years. The College and the Hood are also expected to raise enough funds to match this $1 million in three years or less, according to the release.
The rest of the money received in the grant, $250,000, will be available to the College "immediately" and will be used to initiate the creation of the integrated programs between the Hood and academic curricula, the release said.
"Faculty members from a wide range of disciplines that are outside of the museum's core constituents, such as philosophy, environmental studies, and comparative literature, have increasingly requested short-term use of objects in the study-storage classroom," Brian Kennedy, director of the Hood, said in the press release.
Kennedy, who announced earlier this month that he will leave the Hood to become the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Toledo Museum of Art in September, encouraged further integration of the Hood with College academic curricula in a previous interview with The Dartmouth.
"I hope that the Hood can expand with more classrooms," Kennedy said.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a private endowment that awards grants to higher education institutions in five different core areas of interest higher education and scholarship, scholarly communications and information technology, museums and art conversion, the performing arts and conservation and the environment according to the foundation's website.
