Federal grants database

The National Endowment for the Arts recently awarded the last of its grants for fiscal year 2000. The grants total $50.2 million and comprise 63 percent of the agency's $79.6 million budget for grant-making. They were given in the categories of Access ($4.4 million), Education ($6.2 million) and Heritage & Preservation $3.8 million). The bulk of the agency's funds--$33.3 million, 40 percent of its budget--were given as Partnership Grants to state arts agencies which make grants to regional recipients, and $2.5 million went for Leadership Initiatives.

Among the 208 recipients in Heritage & Preservation are the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, $45,000 for a project to preserve and increase access to the Edward Weston archive; the Cambridge Arts Council, $42,000 to organize the first national conference on public-art conservation; Rhizome Communications, $17,000 for the development of a database for on-line art; the Guggenheim Museum, $15,000 to support a conservation-research project on copper-alloy sheet metal sculptures by Donald Judd; Dia Center for the Arts, $10,000 to document Michael Heizer's earthwork in Garden Valley, Nev.

The 208 recipients in the Access category include the Whitney Museum, $40,000 to support traveling exhibitions of works from its collection; the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, $20,000 for its exhibition "Unnatural Science"; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, $30,000 for a Pepon Osorio exhibition and catalogue; and the Skystone Foundation, $12,000 to support a symposium on James Turrell's Roden Crater Project. Grants for education projects went to 244 organizations. Among the museums are the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston ($65,000), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, ($75,000) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ($50,000).