Aperture Awarded $25,000 NEA Grant for Aperture On Sight Program

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announces over $27 million in grant awards, including a $25,000 Art Works grant to Aperture Foundation for its educational outreach program Aperture On Sight: Teaching Visual Literacy Through Photography (AOS).

In its first fifty years, the NEA has awarded more than $5 billion in grants to recipients in every state and U.S. jurisdiction—the only arts funder in the nation to do so. To inaugurate the beginning of its next fifty years, today the NEA announced more than $27 million in grants, mostly through its Art Works program, which focuses on the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work, lifelong learning in the arts, and public engagement with the arts through thirteen arts disciplines or fields. A total of seventy-eight grants were awarded for arts-education programs, with nineteen going to organizations in New York State.

“These projects, from all over the nation, will make a difference in their communities,” said National Endowment for the Arts chairman Jane Chu. “We know from experience as well as through hard evidence that the arts matter, and these projects will provide more opportunities for people to learn, create, and experience the value of the arts in so many different ways.”

The AOS program was initiated as part of two after-school programs three years ago, and is currently part of an afterschool Beacon program through Grand St. Settlement, as well as after-school programming or daytime arts education curriculums at six middle and high schools in New York City. The grant from the NEA will fortify the AOS program, which allows students to explore storytelling and visual literacy through digital photography and photobook creation.

“This is an important grant,” said Aperture executive director Chris Boot. “With it, we at Aperture can bring our knowledge of photography and book making to young people at school, in diverse communities around New York, building enthusiasm for and knowledge of our medium. In our rapidly evolving visual culture, this in turn expands our institutional knowledge, and understanding of young people’s interests, helping us build publishing programs to meet their needs.”

For a link to the full grant announcement, click here.