The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) was founded in 1910 when Issac Delgado offered a gift to the City Park Commission to create a “temple of art for rich and poor alike.”  The Museum, a neoclassical building, designed by Samuel Marx, opened as the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art to the public in 1911. Today, 100 years later NOMA has become the premier art museum in the Gulf South. An expansion in the 1970’s tripled the size of the Museum and in mid-1980 the Museum expanded once again.  In 1971, the Board of Trustees voted to change the Museum’s name to the New Orleans Museum of Art. In 1986 a capital campaign was started and the Trustees raised $23 million dollars to add to the building. In 1993 the” new” NOMA, a state of-the-art-facility of 130,850 square feet reopened to the public. The permanent collection has nearly 40,000 works of art including objects from the Italian Renaissance to the modern era. The Museum is known for its collections of European and American Art, African art, Japanese Edo-period painting, and Central American art from the pre-Columbian and Spanish eras.

Founded in 1995, the San Antonio Children’s Museum (SACM) is the city’s only museum exclusively devoted to children under the age of 10.  With three floors of interactive exhibits and a variety of early literacy, science, health and art activities, SACM’s vision is to be a premier educational resource that helps develop innovative thinkers capable of meeting the challenges of the 21st century. The museum’s mission is to grow minds, connect families and transform communities through joyful learning and discovery. The museum annually serves 158,000 visitors. It offers a wide range of educational programs in the sciences, creative arts and early literacy and music through outreach to schools, through its afterschool and home-school programs, summer camps and seasonal celebrations.

The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center is both an idea and a place.  Leadership from the University of Maryland and from the State envisioned an “arts village” under one roof that would benefit the academic programs directly through a Center for teaching and research in music, dance, and theatre.  Primary activities were to be learning and exploration.  This Center was also to serve as a key asset for the entire campus, including being a means of outreach to and attraction for area communities.   Moreover, by raising the profile of the performing arts on campus, the Center would complement the University’s existing prominence in academics and athletics and provide an inclusive environment to be enjoyed by all.

Applications are now Closed  - April 16th, 2013

Houston Grand Opera (HGO) was founded in 1955 through the joint efforts of Maestro Walter Herbert and cultural leaders Mrs. Louis G. Lobit, Edward Bing and Charles Cockrell. From its modest beginnings – HGO's inaugural season featured a mere two performances of two operas,Salome and Madame Butterfly – HGO has grown into a company of international stature. HGO's mission is to profoundly impact their community by creating operatic art that provides access to music’s boundless power and beauty. Its core values are excellence, relevance, and affordability. As one of the country's principal commissioners and producers of new works, HGO has introduced 48 world premieres and six American premieres since 1973. HGO has received a Tony Award, two Grammy Awards, and two Emmy Awards—the only opera company in the world to have won all three honors.

The Wolfsonian was set in motion by a big vision – to illustrate the nexus between material artifacts and society by looking at objects as both agents andexpressions of cultural, political, and technological changes. For Wolfsonian founder Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., it was “the spiritual manifestation within those objects” that ultimately led him to collect nearly one-hundred fifty thousand works and to establish the museum.

When the Akron Art Museum first opened its doors on February 1, 1922 as the Akron Art Institute, it was located in two borrowed rooms in the basement of the public library. The institute had severely limited financial resources but ambitious founders.