The Midwest Museum of American Art has received a $500,000 capacity building grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to support five interconnected organizational priorities: staff and workforce development, technology infrastructure, board governance, fundraising capacity, and strategic planning.
The grant is one of 12 invitational grants that Lilly Endowment is making to help Indiana art museums strengthen and enhance their ability to contribute to cultural vibrancy in their communities and regions.
“For 47 years, the Midwest Museum of American Art has served this community with remarkable dedication and heart; and with a team and a mission that deserves the very best organizational foundation we can build,” said Jennifer Abrell, Executive Director. “This investment from Lilly Endowment is a rare and transformational opportunity for us. We will emerge from this grant period with modern systems that protect our collection and deepen the visitor experience, a professional fundraising program that builds real financial sustainability, a strategic plan that charts a bold and shared course for our future, and a staff and board that are better equipped than ever to lead this institution. We are deeply grateful for Lilly Endowment’s confidence in us and profoundly committed to honoring it — for the artists we celebrate, the students we inspire, and the community that has made this Museum its own for nearly five decades.”
This three-year grant will fund five interconnected capacity-building priorities that address the Museum’s most critical organizational needs. The largest share of funding will modernize the Museum’s technology infrastructure, including migration of the Museum’s 6,500-work permanent collection into a fully operational digital collections management system, implementation of a best-fit donor CRM, a smartphone-based audio guide system, interactive digital displays for visitors, a new integrated point-of-sale and online registration platform, updated gallery lighting, and a comprehensive internal security camera system. This grant will help build the Museum’s fundraising capacity through a new multi-year development plan, a major gifts program, and expanded corporate sponsorship efforts. The grant also provides money for staff and workforce development, including formalized performance management, individualized professional development plans, and a mentorship program as well as strengthening board governance through training, governance audits, and structured recruitment of new board members, and a strategic planning process that will produce a five-year institutional plan guiding the Museum through 2031.
About the Midwest Museum of American Art
The Midwest Museum of American Art (MMAA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit cultural institution founded in 1979 and located in the heart of downtown Elkhart, Indiana. For 47 years, the Museum has served as a cultural anchor in Elkhart County, dedicated to its core mission: to collect, preserve, and present American art and to inspire a love for the arts through education, diversity, history, and culture. That mission guided every exhibition mounted, every student welcomed through the Museum’s doors, and every artist celebrated on its walls since the Museum’s founding.
MMAA is housed in one of downtown Elkhart’s most distinguished landmarks, the former St. Joseph Valley Bank building at the corner of Main and Marion Streets, a Neoclassical Revival limestone structure built in 1922. In 1978, local orthodontist, philanthropist, and arts champion Dr. Richard Burns, Sr. and his wife, Billye Jane Burns, purchased the building and donated it to become the Midwest Museum of American Art. An act of extraordinary generosity that set the Museum on the path it has followed ever since and reflects the deep civic spirit that has sustained MMAA through 47 years of service.
MMAA’s facility encompasses approximately 20,000 square feet, housing six permanent galleries and seven rotating and special exhibition galleries across two floors. There are more than 6,500 works in the Museum’s permanent collection, approximately 1,200 of which are on display at any one time. The Midwest Museum of American Art is recognized nationally for its superb permanent collection that tells “The Story of American Art” over a 200-year time period. Most notable is the largest public collection of signed and numbered collotypes by Norman Rockwell in America; the world’s largest public collection of “Overbeck Art Pottery” created by four sisters from Cambridge City, Indiana; and one of only two original paintings in Indiana by Midwestern artist, Grant Wood. The Museum welcomes approximately 6,500 visitors annually, employs four full-time staff, and operates with an annual budget of approximately $500,000.
About Lilly Endowment Inc.
Lilly Endowment Inc. is an Indianapolis-based private foundation created in 1937 by J.K. Lilly, Sr. and his sons Eli and J.K. Jr. through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. Although the gifts of stock remain a financial bedrock of the Endowment, it is a separate entity from the company, with a distinct governing board, staff, and location. In keeping with the founders’ wishes, the Endowment supports the causes of community development, education, and religion. While the Endowment funds programs throughout the United States on an invitational basis to support these causes, especially in the field of religion, it maintains a special commitment to its founders’ hometown, Indianapolis, and home state, Indiana.