The Chrysler Museum has been awarded a $500,000 Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a major Collection Care Initiative. This initiative is a crucial component of the Museum’s current $40 million Campaign for the Future. The $2.5 million in new funds raised through the Challenge Grant will allow the Museum to create two $1 million endowments. Income from one would support the salary of the Museum’s Conservator; the second would provide support for an ongoing series of public education programs designed to highlight the humanistic and scholarly implications of fine art conservation. An additional $500,000 will be used to upgrade the Museum’s conservation laboratory and to create new study/storage areas where the public, curators, and conservators can gather to explore humanities issues growing out of the physical history, subject matter, and provenance of original works of art.

In order to qualify for the release of the $500,000 in challenge funds, the Museum must raise $2 million in matching gifts before the end of July 2007.

The endowment for the Conservator position will yield $50,000 yearly, supplementing funds from an existing endowment to ensure the Museum’s ability to staff this key position in perpetuity. The Conservator works in close collaboration with outside scholars and with the Museum’s curatorial staff to study works of art as physical objects. He/she examines the inevitable physical changes which occur in a work of art after it leaves the artist’s studio and determines how these changes can affect our understanding of the meaning of that artwork within a broad historical and humanistic context. The Conservator also ensures that appropriate steps are taken to ensure the long-term safety and preservation of the objects in the Museum’s care.