WILLIAMSTOWN, MA.-The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a grant of $235,000 and the opportunity to qualify for another $30,000 in Federal Matching Funds to the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) to help implement the upcoming exhibition "Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy.” WCMA is one of only thirteen museums and historical organizations across the nation that will receive NEH funds from the current round of applicants. The grant, the first awarded to WCMA by the NEH, is also one of the largest the museum has ever received.

"Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy" will be the first exhibition to explore the pivotal contribution of the American couple Sara and Gerald Murphy to the transatlantic exchange of ideas about modern art in the 1920s and 1930s. This interdisciplinary exhibition will convey the Murphy’s gift for inspiring and encouraging brilliant innovators and artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Cole Porter, and Dorothy Parker. The exhibition presents relevant works by these figures, demonstrating how the Murphys wove a spirit of artistic adventurousness into the fabric of their life and promoted some of the most noteworthy literature, music, theater, and art of the last century. In addition, the complete existing body of work by Gerald Murphy will be shown including paintings from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.

The exhibition was conceived and organized by Deborah Rothschild, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art who noted: “The Murphys’ created an ideal world that was modern in its apparent simplicity and ease. It inspired some of the last century’s finest achievements, including novels (Fitzgerald, Hemingway) painting, (Picasso and Léger), poetry (Archibald MacLeish), plays (Philip Barry), ballets (Cole Porter) and memoirs (John Dos Passos). For many creative artists, the life the Murphys invented came as close to perfection as any of them would find in the real world. Further, that life itself became a seminal work of art prefiguring modernists such as John Cage, Josef Beuys, Alan Kaprow, and David Hammons, who view the artist as a vehicle for expanding our awareness of life—someone whose role is to re-define the terms and conventions of artistic practice without necessarily leaving a single object behind.”

"We're thrilled by the show of support from the NEH," said Director Lisa Corrin. "The story of the Murphys provides an important case study in the self-creation of modern identity. The exhibition is going to be a landmark in the field, with programming that is dynamic, engaging, and extremely insightful for visitors. The NEH's award will help us fully realize the interdisciplinary aspects of the exhibition."

The NEH Foundation judged the proposed exhibition to be “an exciting, holistically interdisciplinary exhibition about the development of the modern arts in the fertile period between the two world wars.” "Making It New" will be on public view at WCMA from July 8, 2007 through November 11, 2007. The exhibition will then travel to Yale University Art Gallery and the Dallas Museum of Art.