Midwest Art Conservation Center, Inc.

Midwest Art Conservation Center, Inc., a Minneapolis-based nonprofit tax-exempt organization, is a federal grant recipient focused on preventive conservation, collections care, and emergency preparedness services for cultural heritage institutions across the Upper Midwest and nationwide. The organization operates exclusively as a prime recipient — all seventeen awards in the source footprint are prime grants or service purchases — and holds no subcontracting relationships. MACC operates outside traditional federal contracting set-asides and competes in full-and-open federal grant competitions.

The National Endowment for the Humanities dominates MACC's customer concentration, funding thirteen of seventeen awards under the Promotion of the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access program (CFDA 45.149). Three additional awards come from GSA Public Buildings Service Region 5 (two awards, $27 thousand combined potential value), the Smithsonian Institution (one award, $15 thousand), and the Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service Region 3 (one award, $5 thousand). While NEH represents 76% of award count, the two customer rankings converge — NEH's thirteen grants carry modest individual potential values, whereas the smaller set of GSA, Smithsonian, and Interior awards bundle higher per-award ceilings.

MACC's core capability is the Regional Preservation Field Services Program, a preventive conservation initiative serving hundreds of cultural repositories in the Upper Midwest through collections care workshops, disaster planning and training services, preservation surveys and plans, and collections care information resources. NEH has funded this program across multiple grant cycles: March 2022 through February 2024 ($212,979), March 2025 through February 2027 ($300,000), and March 2026 through February 2028 ($314,503). The organization also pursues grant work in emergency preparedness and risk assessment for public art collections. A $212,979 NEH Project Grant (March 2024 through February 2026) supports development of remote risk assessment tools and a free national toolkit for public art emergency planning. An earlier $212,979 planning-phase grant (March 2022 through February 2024) in partnership with the Washington State Arts Commission surveyed emergency preparedness needs nationwide and developed a framework for remote risk assessment using GIS mapping technology. Beyond grants, MACC performs specialized conservation services: a $19,950 purchase order from GSA Region 5 (awarded July 2021) covered cleaning and waxing of Otterness bronze sculptures in Minneapolis.

Activity has remained modest and sporadic — two awards in 2021 and 2022, one in 2024, one in 2025, and one in 2026. Two awards reach completion within the next twenty-four months and face recompete exposure. The combined potential value across all seventeen awards stands at $48 thousand, but obligated dollars total $4.2 million — a reflection of NEH's funding pattern of modest ceiling values against substantially higher actual expenditures over multi-year grant periods. MACC's footprint is tightly specialized in heritage conservation services for nonprofit and federal cultural institutions, with no federal contracting vehicles, no parent IDIQs or GWACs, and no prime or sub relationships with defense or civilian IT contractors.