The Worcester Art Museum has received a $400,000 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities to help fund the installation of the John Woodman Higgins Armory Collection.
The grant will help cover the final design and conversion of 4,000 square feet of space into a permanent gallery installation dedicated to arms and armor, WAM said in a Tuesday announcement. The ultimate goal is to display the bulk of the 2,000-piece collection through what the museum called both traditional and non-traditional exhibition spaces.
WAM plans for the installation to open in 2024, which would come 10 years after it acquired the collection.
According to WAM, the Higgins collection is the second largest collection of its kind in the Americas. For more than eight decades, the collection was on display at the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, which closed at the end of 2013.
