Amherst College's Mead Art Museum has received a $1 million matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to endow its coordinator of college programs position, ensuring the continuation of the museum's successful initiatives to integrate its collection into the college's curriculum.

As a condition of the grant, Amherst must raise at least $1 million within three years. To that end, the college hopes to raise an additional $500,000 to underwrite museum-based academic programs, overseen by the coordinator, that engage 90 percent of Amherst's student body each year. The grant follows a December 2008 award of $500,000 by the foundation to create the coordinator position, a museum-based scholar charged with spurring and facilitating curricular engagement with the collection.

"In the three brief but busy years since the museum received its first grant from the Mellon Foundation, the initiatives that it funded have transformed teaching and research at Amherst," said the museum's director and chief curator, Elizabeth Barker. "Classes from virtually every academic discipline now regularly use the Mead's collections in a range of inquiries — from exploring medieval systems of musical notation to considering our genetic ties to other animals; from researching artists' materials to investigating the world's religious traditions. The foundation's new grant — the largest in our museum's history — promises to ensure that this extraordinary recent success will come to be seen as the baseline, rather than as the high watermark, for this innovative work."