Khady Mbaye of Senegal performs an African dance for Groton Elementary School third-graders as part of the Johnson Museum's OMNI program. Charles Harrington/University Photography
The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded $18,000 to Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art to support the Objects and their Makers: New Insights Program (OMNI). The grant provides funding for the program through the year 2000.
"It is a great honor for the Johnson Museum to have received this major grant," said Museum Director Frank Robinson. "OMNI introduces thousands of schoolchildren every year to cultures distant in time and place from the Southern Tier, and it is exciting to have it receive national recognition in this way. We are deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency that has done so much to support the arts in this country for the last three decades."
OMNI, now in its seventh year, has grown to include learning units on the arts of China and Africa for grade three, pre-Columbian art from Peru for grade five, Native American art for grade seven and units on the arts of Japan and Southeast Asia for grade nine. More than 4,000 schoolchildren and teachers in 16 area school districts participate in OMNI each year. OMNI is also supported with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.
According to Cathy Klimaszewski, assistant director of education for the museum, OMNI was initiated in 1989 to provide broader access to the museum's global collections to local schools, especially in the rural areas of the Southern Tier. "The program has grown dramatically over the years," she said. "The development and expansion of OMNI would not have been possible without funding from these federal and state agencies."