The Newark Museum in New Jersey announced today that a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation will allow it to expand and reinterpret its permanent collection of American art. The grant also supports the appointment of William L. Coleman as the institution’s new associate curator of American art, and the establishment of an artist-in-residence program.

Coleman is a nineteenth-century landscape painting specialist and a former postdoctoral fellow at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Delaware. “William will help us develop and make a reality this important transformation, which represents an essential next step for the development of the museum,” said director and CEO Steven Kern.

The two-year grant will go toward the renovations of the twentieth-century galleries and the rehanging of modern and contemporary American art, as well as historical and contemporary American Indian art, in the recently renamed Seeing America galleries. Two catalogues are also expected to be published when the new galleries open in February 2019.