High Desert Museum scores two NEH grants

The museum's grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities will help fund projects on desert climate change and a website exploring the culture and nature of the High Desert. A third grant to historian Julie Weise will help underwrite a book on migrant workers in the U.S. and beyond.
Entry to the High Desert Museum in Bend. Photo: Chris Murray
Entry to the High Desert Museum in Bend. Photo: Chris Murray

The High Desert Museum in Bend has been awarded a pair of grants totaling $240,337 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the federal agency announced on Tuesday. In addition, Dr. Julie Weise, an associate professor of history at the University of Oregon, was awarded $60,000 for research and writing on a book project about migrant workers, a divisive and often misunderstood topic in current political debate.

The grants were among 219 awarded for humanities projects across the nation, totaling $22.6 million. You can see the full list and descriptions of the projects here.

The High Desert’s larger grant, for $140,795, will help fund a project on climate change in the Oregon desert. Titled “Our Changing Climate: Cultural Resiliency in Oregon’s High Desert,” the project will “create 30 long-form video interviews with individuals from diverse backgrounds in central and eastern Oregon who are experiencing climate change,” according to the NEH release. The second grant, for $99,542, will help fund a project titled “Stories of the High Desert: Diverse Perspectives in Space and Time,” which will provide a prototype for “a website that explores the landscapes, wildlife, histories, and cultures of the High Desert region.”

The two new grants follow the NEH’s $500,000 grant in April 2024 toward the Bend museum’s revitalization of its permanent exhibition dedicated to the Indigenous cultures of the region.

The High Desert Museum explores a broad array of artistic, cultural and scientific inquiry, blending art, natural history, and installations on its region’s natural environment. “The Museum is the only institution in the nation dedicated to the exploration of the High Desert, and these grant awards allow the Museum to dive deeper into our mission to serve as a resource about and for the region,” Executive Director Dana Whitelaw said in a prepared statement. “We hope the projects will help promote dialogue and connection in communities.”

Among the museum’s current exhibitions are “Rick Bartow: Animal Kinship,” featuring paintings by the late Oregon Wyot artist from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, through Feb. 9; “Blood, Sweat & Flannel,” which “explores the region’s labor history though the lens of the beloved fabric,” through June 29; and “Neighbors: Wildlife Paintings by Hilary Baker,” which “explores the complex relationship between manmade spaces and native wildlife,” through April 6.

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Historian Julie Weise. Photo: University of Oregon
Historian Julie Weise. Photo: University of Oregon

The other Oregon grantee in this round of NEH awards, the Universiy of Oregon’s Julie Weise, was granted $60,000 for research and writing of a historical book titled Guest Worker: A History of Ideas, 1919-75.

Weise, who describes herself on her University of Oregon webpage as “an interdisciplinary historian of migrations in the Americas and the world,” says her book project “deeply probes migrants’ own visions of labor migration’s role in their lives and shows how their choices and perspectives joined policymakers’ to establish the state-managed temporary worker as a seemingly intractable feature of the modern world.”

Dr. Weise’s book will look at three 20th century migration case studies: Mexicans in the United States, Spaniards in France, and Malawians in South Africa.

Bob Hicks, Executive Editor of Oregon ArtsWatch, has been covering arts and culture in the Pacific Northwest since 1978, including 25 years at The Oregonian. Among his art books are Kazuyuki Ohtsu; James B. Thompson: Fragments in Time; and Beth Van Hoesen: Fauna and Flora. His work has appeared in American Theatre, Biblio, Professional Artist, Northwest Passage, Art Scatter, and elsewhere. He also writes the daily art-history series "Today I Am."

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