A little more than a week after filing a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and his administration over a revoked grant, the Woodmere Art Museum has received word from the federal government that it is getting its money.<\/p>\n
Woodmere filed the suit<\/a> Aug. 26 after a $750,000 grant that was promised, but not fully paid, from the Institute of Museum and Library Services was canceled by Trump officials. The Chestnut Hill museum, which focuses on Philadelphia artists, had previously appealed the April cancellation<\/a> and even enlisted the intervention of elected officials \u2014 but after months, had received no response from IMLS, the lawsuit stated.<\/p>\n The federal government appeared ready to face Woodmere at a Sept. 12 hearing slated at the federal courthouse at Sixth and Market Streets. But the museum says it received notice Thursday that the appeal for its IMLS grant had been completed, and the grant was being reinstated.<\/p>\n Woodmere director and CEO William R. Valerio said Friday that he was \u201cover the moon thrilled\u201d that the museum would be getting its money after all, and that he had no theories about the reasons or impetus for the reinstatement.<\/p>\n The reinstatement came nearly four months after Woodmere had requested the appeal. IMLS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n The museum has now filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. <\/p>\n Woodmere has already been paid about $195,000 of the grant money, and the lawsuit sought the balance plus additional expenses. The grant, given through IMLS\u2019 Save America\u2019s Treasures program, was awarded to pay for conservation of important works, expand storage and update cataloging, and to digitize works from the collection. The improvements to the museum\u2019s collections are to benefit both Woodmere\u2019s current building and Maguire Hall, an addition set to open<\/a> Nov. 1 and 2.<\/p>\n The terms of the grant required that Woodmere raise matching funds, a requirement the museum completed.<\/p>\n IMLS was established by Congress in 1996 and was among a number of agencies defunded by Trump early in his second term. Several Philadelphia groups had their grants canceled, but two \u2014 Historic Germantown and the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel University \u2014 later received notification that their grants were being restored<\/a>.<\/p>\n It is unclear what criteria the federal government used in making its determinations for cancellations and reversals of cancellations, creating an atmosphere that more than one Philadelphia nonprofit leader has described as \u201cKafkaesque.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A little more than a week after filing a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and his administration over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":126949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,69731],"class_list":["post-126948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-woodmere-art-museum-trump-lawsuit-imls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/126949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}