Shelburne Museum, Incorporated

Shelburne Museum, Incorporated, a tax-exempt nonprofit organization based in Shelburne, Vermont, operates as a federal grant recipient (100% of recent awards) serving cultural heritage and museum infrastructure missions through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The museum does not hold federal contracts or contract vehicles; its federal footprint consists entirely of project grants focused on collections management, conservation, cultural preservation, and facility infrastructure.

Shelburne Museum's grant portfolio concentrates heavily on two agencies. The National Endowment for the Humanities accounts for 8 awards, and the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science also accounts for 8 awards, together representing 96% of the museum's recent grant activity. The Institute of Museum and Library Services has awarded 6 grants, the National Endowment for the Arts 4 awards, and the Department of the Interior National Park Service 1 award. This customer concentration reflects the museum's focus on humanities programming and collections stewardship rather than operational diversity.

Recent grant work illustrates the museum's capability portfolio. The Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded Shelburne Museum $715,998 under the Museums for America program (CFDA 45.301) on September 1, 2026 to migrate its collections database to web-based software and launch an online collections portal, with performance running through August 31, 2029. The project includes hiring a project cataloger, purchasing collections management software, conducting data cleanup, and establishing design specifications for an online portal initially featuring American paintings, folk art, wildfowl decoys, quilts, and needlework samplers. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the museum two project grants in 2024 and 2025 (each $1 million) to support the Perry Center for Native American Art, a 9,500 square-foot facility designed to house galleries, ritual spaces, demonstration facilities, and storage for indigenous material culture, with completion targeted for February 28, 2028 and October 31, 2026 respectively. The Institute of Museum and Library Services also funded a $229,448 conservation survey project completed in 2023 of the Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building's holdings of Impressionist paintings, Asian art, and American and English decorative arts. Earlier work included a December 2022 IMLS grant for assessment and research of a 200-item Native American collection and an October 2022 NEH planning grant to evaluate environmental conditions and HVAC infrastructure across two buildings housing fine arts collections.

Activity remains sparse and episodic — two awards in 2022, one in 2023, one in 2024, two in 2025, and one in 2026 — with combined dollars obligated totaling $7 million across 28 awards since 2007. Two awards carry ultimate completion dates within the next twenty-four months, representing the near-term recompete exposure.