July 12, 2011

NEA Announces $6.5 Million in “Our Town” Grants

This afternoon, Chairman Rocco Landesman and Design Director Jason Schupbach announced the National Endowment for the Arts‘ (NEA) inaugural “Our Town” grants. In total, the NEA is allocating more than $6.5 million in funding to 51 communities in 34 states, from coast to coast. Selected from nearly 450 applicants, the recipients have created “public-private partnerships to strengthen the arts while shaping the social, physical, and economic characters of their neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions.” Click here for the official NEA press release.

Among the 51 recipients is a partnership spearheaded by Emerging Terrain, the Omaha-based research and design collaborative profiled here yesterday. This new Emerging Terrain project focuses on Sarpy County, Neb., which borders the city of Omaha and has “faced rapid suburbanization without a central core as a cultural base,” according to their proposal. Through interviews and installations in an abandoned Walmart store parking lot, Shifting Thresholds, as the project is called, will “engage the Sarpy County community in the relationships among people, land, and land use from its early 1850s settlement to present in order to critically inform long-term civic development.”

Credit: Rendering above courtesy of Emerging Terrain.

Tags: Emerging Terrain, Jason Schupbach, NEA, Omaha, Our Town, Rocco Landesman
Posted in Announcement, Funding