DES MOINES, IOWA.- Rory MacPherson, senior program officer for The Wallace Foundation of New York, appeared at the Des Moines Art Center today to announce that the Art Center has been selected as one of six arts institutions nationally to receive an Excellence Award in its inaugural year. The Excellence Awards program was created by The Wallace Foundation to recognize organizations that have effectively built participation in the arts with imaginative efforts to broaden, deepen, and/or diversify their audiences.

The Art Center is being honored with a $1 million endowment gift from The Wallace Foundation for establishing audience participation building and enrichment programs in partnership with more than 60 community groups. The grant will be used to expand the Art Center endowment to include a fund that supports continuing participation-building activities, such as the center’s annual “Day of the Dead” celebration which draws in up to 2,000 diverse participants annually, with an emphasis on the Latino community.

“The goal of The Wallace Foundation Excellence Awards is to encourage organizations to sustain and expand the impact of their work with local constituencies and to draw national attention to the importance of participation- building to the health and growth of the arts field,” said Christine DeVita, President of The Wallace Foundation. "The Excellence Awards honor organizations that have made a commitment to engage people more deeply in the arts as part of their organization's DNA. The Awards are an important part of our efforts to develop and share effective ideas and practices for enhancing arts participation and bringing the transformational benefits of the arts to all.”

In 2000, the Art Center received a $1.25 million Wallace Foundation Leadership and Excellence in Arts Participation (LEAP) grant which was spread over a four-year period. As a result of the work that was done with that money, the Art Center was notified by the Wallace Foundation earlier this year that it would be among only six other organizations nationally to receive the Excellence Award.

“We were excited and honored in 2000 to receive the LEAP grant,” said Art Center acting director, Jeff Fleming. “To follow that up with this $1 million Excellence Award as a result of what we were able to accomplish with the LEAP grant is just an incredible honor for us. We are extremely grateful to The Wallace Foundation for this recognition, and for the opportunity to significantly grow our endowment.”

The Art Center is required to match the grant on at least a one-to-one basis and create permanent endowments or revolving cash reserves that will be committed to continuing participation-building initiatives.

Gifts of the Muse research findings presented: Following the Excellence Award announcement, local leaders of arts and culture organizations and Iowa community foundations were given the rare opportunity to hear MacPherson present findings from Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts — a research study commissioned by The Wallace Foundation which concludes that giving individuals repeated rewarding experiences with the arts over time is a necessary first step before other, more public benefits of the arts can be realized. These other benefits include exposure to new perspectives, sharpened learning skills among young people, expanded capacity for empathy, and stronger social bonds in communities.

“We believe with the Des Moines Art Center that reaching out to new audiences and inspiring our youngest to ‘fall in love’ with the arts is vital to the health and growth of our society,” said MacPherson. “We commissioned the Gifts of the Muse study because, after a decade of helping to draw new audiences to the arts and building knowledge about how to do that, we saw a need to better understand Why the arts are so important to individuals and communities.”