University of Baltimore is One of 64 National Endowment for the Arts 'Our Town' Projects Selected Nationwide
May 9, 2016
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
The University of Baltimore is one of 64 organizations across the United States to receive an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The grant will support the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance—part of the Jacob France Institute in UB's Merrick School of Business—in a new effort to establish and explore the city's arts and cultural opportunities in neighborhoods across Baltimore. BNIA's ongoing Vital Signs city data analysis will be informed by this new project. According to the NEA, the Our Town program supports creative placemaking projects that help to transform communities into lively, beautiful, and resilient places with the arts at their core. The NEA will provide $75,000 to BNIA-JFI for its new arts and cultural mapping tool.
"We are tremendously excited to use this grant in our efforts to help transform Baltimore," said University of Baltimore Provost Darlene Smith. "We take pride in not just being the University of Baltimore, but the University for Baltimore, engaging our students, faculty and staff into the fabric of the city to improve quality of life in Baltimore."
"Arts and cultural opportunities within our neighborhoods help create aesthetic spaces and common experiences," said Seema D. Iyer, associate director of the Jacob France Institute who oversees BNIA-JFI. "We are thrilled to have the resources that come with the Our Town grant to help identify and quantify cultural vitality for Baltimore's neighborhoods."
The cultural mapping tool will serve as a central access point for organizations, businesses, policymakers, planners, developers, activists, artists, and audiences to gather and analyze Baltimore’s arts and culture-related data. With the growth of Baltimore’s cultural ecosystem in recent years, the cultural mapping project will not only serve as an arts resource, but will also engage stakeholders not traditionally engaged in the arts and enable all users to work together towards a dynamic set of creative placemaking goals that contribute to the overall health of the city.
Through the NEA's support and partnerships with a number of Baltimore arts organizations, BNIA-JFI will be able to continue expanding its arts and culture data for use in the cultural mapping tool. BNIA-JFI currently houses over 150 annually-updated Vital Signs indicators, including growing set of arts and culture indicators, that measure the quality of life in all of Baltimore's neighborhoods. By incorporating additional data from areas such as housing, workforce, and transportation into the cultural mapping tool, users will be able to visualize the impact of the arts and creative placemaking throughout Baltimore, strategically foster new ways of improving the city and its neighborhoods over time, and use data to determine how to equitably distribute resources to support a cultural economy.
NEA Chair Jane Chu announced 64 Our Town awards totaling $4.3 million supporting projects across the nation. The NEA said it received 240 applications for Our Town grants this year and will make awards ranging from $25,000 to $100,000.
"For six years, Our Town has made a difference for people and the places where they live, work, and play," Chu said. "Projects such as the one led by the University of Baltimore and the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance help residents engage the arts to spark vitality in their communities."
Learn more about BNIA and the cultural mapping tool.
The University of Baltimore is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the College of Public Affairs, the Merrick School of Business, the UB School of Law and the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.