Museum of Photographic Arts Given Grant to Organize 3 Shows

SAN DIEGO —  The Museum of Photographic Arts has been awarded a $400,000 grant to oversee the organization of a series of three exhibitions about immigration and the American Dream.

Titled “Points of Entry,” the shows are intended to “reveal ways immigrant communities became acculturated into the American mainstream,” according to officials at the museum, and will contain work by established photographers as well as recent work by lesser-known artists who are immigrants to the United States. The first of the three exhibitions will likely open in 1994.

The shows will be organized in collaboration with the Friends of Photography in San Francisco and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The grant was awarded by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, which in recent years has become one of the most important private arts-funding foundations in the United States, giving away more than $30 million annually.

The foundation also announced on Tuesday that it has awarded $200,000 to the San Diego Museum of Art for “Visions of a New World: Artists and Explorers of the West,” a national traveling exhibition of paintings a and video program focusing on the works of artists who accompanied explorers of the American West from 1803 to 1879. The show is scheduled to be presented at the San Diego Museum of Art in the summer of 1995; a spokeswoman at the museum would not reveal where the show travels afterward.