Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant of $366,292 to support the upcoming exhibition "A Room of Their Own: The Artists of Bloomsbury."

The traveling exhibition is scheduled to open in 2009 at the Johnson, one of 13 museums nationwide to receive a Public Programs/Museums Implementation grant from the NEH in this funding cycle. Nancy Green, the exhibition's organizing curator at the museum, has also been awarded research grants for this project from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

"A Room of Their Own" will be accompanied by a major catalog, a free visitors' guide, multimedia elements, online versions of the exhibition and catalog, and a full range of programming, culminating in a scholarly symposium at Cornell.

The exhibition comprises more than 120 paintings, watercolors, drawings, books from Hogarth Press and decorative works from the Omega Workshop. The works represent a fertile period when artists collaborated closely with dancers, choreographers, musicians and writers to create startling new works and art forms.

The Bloomsbury Group formed in 1905 around literary friends Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and E.M. Forster, who were joined by writers including D.H. Lawrence; philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore; psychoanalysts Alix and James Strachey; poets T.S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon; and such artists as Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, critic and painter Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey's talented cousin Duncan Grant and longtime companion Dora Carrington.

Together they confronted issues that are still current: international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women's rights, environmental protection and the search for the true, the good and the beautiful in their art and their lives. The exhibition provides a valuable mirror on how people can address similar concerns today.