Grants Awarded by MUUS

In addition to our efforts to preserve and share the most outstanding American photography of past decades, we here at the MUUS Collection also find ourselves looking forward as we recognize that there are countless photographic works of vital importance still to be created. We hope that, in awarding these grants to grassroots organizations working in the arenas of education, research, and access & preservation, we can help build and secure the future of the photographic arts.

10x10 PHOTOBOOKS: Encouraging Research Grant

10x10 Photobooks is a not-for-profit organization with the mission to foster engagement with the global photobook community through an appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of photobooks. In 2020 MUUS Collection supported 10x10 with two research grants to encourage scholarship on under-explored topics in photobook history. What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999, an important project examining the role of women in photobook history, was a product of that support and won the 2021 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Catalogue of the Year Award.

APERTURE: Encouraging Research Grant

Aperture, a not-for-profit foundation, connects the photo community and its audiences with the most inspiring work, the sharpest ideas, and with each other—in print, in person,and online. Created in 1952 by photographers and writers as “common ground for the advancement of photography,” Aperture today is a multi-platform publisher and center for the photo community that produces, publishes, and presents a program of photography projects internationally. MUUS supports Aperture Foundation as a 2022 member of their Magazine Council.

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM: Supporting Access & Preservation Grant

A museum and independent research library located in the heart of New York City, the Morgan Library & Museum began as the personal library of financier, collector, and cultural benefactor Pierpont Morgan. The Morgan houses one of the world's foremost collections of manuscripts, rare books, music, drawings, and ancient and other works of art. These holdings, which represent the legacy of Pierpont Morgan and numerous later benefactors, comprise a unique and dynamic record of civilization, as well as an incomparable repository of ideas and of the creative process. Its mission is to preserve, build, study, present, and interpret a collection of extraordinary quality, in orderto stimulate enjoyment, excite the imagination, advance learning, and nurture creativity. MUUS supported the Morgan’s photography department in 2022 with an unrestricted grant.

PENUMBRA FOUNDATION: Fostering Education Grant

Penumbra Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that brings together the art and science of photography through education, research, outreach, public and residency programs. Its goal is to be a comprehensive resource for photographers at any level, artists, students, professionals, historians, researchers, conservators and curators. The MUUS Collection / Penumbra Foundation Risograph Print & Publication Residency was underwritten by MUUS in 2020 and 2022. The Residency provides the opportunity for four artists to produce a photographic project in print form, at Penumbra’s risograph facilities in New York City. It is particularly well suited to the production of small edition artist’s books, photobooks, zines, and risograph print series, posters and portfolios. The grant also provides honorariums to three jurors.

THE WALLACH DIVISION, NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY: Supporting Access & Preservation Grant

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, a small department within the New York Public Library, is committed to preserving and increasing access to its holdings of artworks, as well as reference materials on painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography and the history of architecture from prehistoric times to the present. The Photography Collection comprises approximately 500,000 photographs, including examples of almost every photographic process from the earliest daguerreotypes to contemporary digital images.

A 2020 grant from supported the digitization of vintage prints, including 2,000 images from Berenice Abbott’s project Changing New York, as well as approximately 40,000 images from the Farm Security Administration, a collection that includes hundreds of photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and others