Acclaimed tap dancer Michelle Dorrance will be featured in the 2016 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dance Festival. The festival recently received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dance Festival announced on Dec. 9 that it has received an Art Works award of $40,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, part of a total $27.6 million in the NEA’s first funding round of fiscal year 2016.

The grant will support a project titled Seeding the Field: Cultivating an Innovative Dance Community.

The NEA’s Art Works category supports the creation of work and presentation of both new and existing work; lifelong learning in the arts; and public engagement with the arts through 13 arts disciplines or fields.

“The arts are part of our everyday lives – no matter who you are or where you live – they have the power to transform individuals, spark economic vibrancy in communities and transcend the boundaries across diverse sectors of society,” NEA Chairman Jane Chu said. “Supporting projects like the one from the offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day.”

“We are extremely gratified to be selected once again to receive the prestigious NEA Art Works award,” Festival Director Laura Faure said. “The NEA provides an important stamp of approval and critical core support for our ongoing work as a laboratory for contemporary dance.”

The award helps the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dance Festival to build upon 32 years of fostering innovation, collaboration and community.

In summer 2016 the festival will bring more than 70 leading dance artists — including Michelle Dorrance, Kate Weare Company, Doug Varone and Dancers — together with more than 320 dance students to learn, create, perform, connect and recharge in a collaborative, supportive environment aimed at fostering vital artistic exchange and encouraging appreciation for contemporary dance.

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu visits the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art on Aug. 11, 2015. Also shown: museum Curator Bill Low, at rear; Julie Richard, executive director of the Maine Arts Commission; and at extreme right, Matt Auer, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dean of the faculty. (Josh Kuckens/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“She cheated! She worked ahead!” laughed Julie Richard, executive director of the Maine Arts Commission, as one of her companions in an art-and-writing exercise at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art took the lead.

The culprit was Jane Chu, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who was visiting the museum on Aug. 11 as part of a three-day tour of Maine arts presenters.

Anthony Shostak, the museum’s education curator, gave more than a dozen visitors in Chu’s party a demonstration of a unit in the Thousand Words Project. Offered to pupils in the local public schools, the project uses visual art to enhance learning across the curriculum.

The NEA’s Jane Chu admires a collage in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art exhibition “Maine Collected.” (Josh Kuckens/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Chu and the others were assigned to make a nouns-only list of the plants and animals that appeared in a still life. (The local students who complete the exercise layer on additional parts of speech as an incremental approach to learning to write about art.)

“I’d gladly work with you guys for a couple of hours,” Shostak told the visitors and their ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ hosts at the end of the brief exercise.

, Chu stopped at NEA-supported arts organizations in Portland, Brunswick, and Waterville as well as Lewiston.

In addition to Richard and an NEA aide, she was accompanied by staffers for U.S. Reps.  Chellie Pingree and Bruce Poliquin of Maine’s 1st District and 2nd District, respectively.

Pingree and the Maine Arts Commission invited Chu to the state.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum and the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dance Festival are longtime recipients of NEA support — 25 consecutive years’ worth for the latter, as Director Laura Faure pointed out to Chu. Faure showed two festival videos, while Shostak, museum Curator Bill Low and Director Dan Mills showed the visitors around the museum.

Also on hand were Michael Reidy, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ managing director of theater and dance, and Matt Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

The visit included a discussion about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ artistic offerings and particularly their community focus. “We have been more intentional than ever about trying to lift up community engagement,” said Darby Ray, director of the college’s Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

For her part, Chu described recent NEA initiatives, including . Timed to mark the signing of the legislation that created the NEA 50 years ago, the stories will be published starting Sept. 29.

The project “shows that the arts are thriving,” Chu said. “It really shows the formidable presence of the arts in our lives.”

With the theme Musical Legacies of South and Southeast Asia, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College students and faculty, as well as internationally esteemed performers, present the college’s World Music Week from March 5 through March 15.

Performers include the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra, Indian dancer Aniruddha Knight and Indonesian composer Nano S. (See the )

Sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ music department, festival events are open to the public at no cost. Except as noted, performances take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. For more information, call 207-786-6135.

“This year’s concept pays tribute to the profound traditional artistic roots of these regions, but at the same time acknowledges the strong innovative spirit evident in this year’s artists,” says festival organizer Gina Fatone, assistant professor of music. “The artists hold a deep reverence for their heritages, yet are driven to push the boundaries of tradition, creating something vibrant and new.”

Workshops begin the series on March 5. In a concert at 8 p.m. March 7, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Orchestra offers a program reflecting influences from around the globe, as well as works inspired by music of Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Hiroya Miura directs the orchestra.

Expert in the classical South Indian music and dance genre called “bharata natyam,” dancer Aniruddha Knight and his ensemble offer workshops on March 5 and 6, and a performance at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 8. On that occasion, Knight and the ensemble perform From the Heart of a Tradition, a new interpretation of this traditional form.

Knight’s dance reveals the profound musicality, mastery of technique and improvisational skill that distinguish his family’s hereditary style. But he also represents the face of young America: biracial, bicultural and, as an artist, completely contemporary. He and his ensemble were among 15 companies to receive production and touring support from the National Dance Project in 2007 and 2008, and their 2005 tour was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ residency of Knight and his ensemble is made possible by a grant from the National Dance Project, a program of the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Closing World Music Week is a performance by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra, joined by guest artists including Indonesian composer Nano S., at 8 p.m. March 15.

“Gamelan” refers to the large bronze percussion orchestras of Java and Bali, Indonesia. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra performs traditional and contemporary music of West and Central Java, as well as new music for gamelan by North American composers.

Nano S. is widely viewed as one of Indonesia’s most important and influential musicians. He has taught and toured extensively in Japan, Canada and the U.S. At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he is a Mellon Learning Associate, supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Also performing are drummer Undang Sumarna, bamboo flute player Burhan Sukarma and dancer Ben Arcangel.

From Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium opens at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ on June 12 and at ICA, site of the opening reception for both institutions, on June 18. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ hosts the closing reception and a performance by Gu on Oct. 9.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum is located in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St., and admission is open to the public at no cost. It is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and is closed Sundays and major holidays. For additional information about the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art call 207-786-6158. For more about ICA call 207-879-5742.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the Gu exhibition takes place in the museum’s Upper Gallery. In the Lower Gallery, also opening on June 12 are the shows New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography, which closes May 30, 2005, and Marsden Hartley: Photography and Identity, which closes Dec. 18 of this year.

Gu was active in the Chinese avant-garde before emigrating to the United States in 1987. He mines tradition and pursues innovation in works that explore globalism, diasporic art and transculturalism to present an idealized unification of humanity.

“Wenda Gu’s work is timely in its ambitious attempt to address in artistic terms the issue of globalism that dominates discussions of contemporary economics, society and culture. The enormous scope of his vision — conceiving of his artwork as existing over time and space and not constrained by convention, language or national boundaries — is remarkable,” writes Mark H.C. Bessire in the exhibition publication, the first major scholarly publication on Gu (MIT Press).

Bessire, director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum and former director of ICA, edited the publication and, with counterparts at museums in Kansas and Texas, co-curated the exhibition. It consists of two site-specific installations, two other installations and a performance.

“Words, languages, human hair, glue, calligraphy and stone carving are just some of the components of his installations that catalyze discussion and broaden awareness among viewers,” Bessire writes.

At the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ museum, Gu will create an installation titled “united nations — 7561 kilometers,” the 20th piece in his “united nations” series. An ongoing worldwide project begun in 1992, the series consists of “monuments” made of human hair, collected from barbershops across the globe, that the artist presses or weaves into bricks, carpets and curtains. The blend of hair from different nations is a metaphor for the mixture of races that Gu predicts will eventually unite humanity into “a brave new racial identity.”

For “united nations — 7561 kilometers,” Gu will construct a “temple” using thin and colored human hair braids. The structure will large enough for viewers to pass through and under the piece. Members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and local communities will be invited to participate in “united nations — we are united,” the artist’s performance in October.

Among his works at the ICA, Gu will present a second original installation, a new chapter in a series using stone steles marked with retranslated, rewritten Tang Dynasty poetry, as well as rubbings taken from the steles. Inventing and misusing words and language symbols in a variety of languages, Gu embraces mistakes and misunderstandings. He finds absurdity and unexpected beauty in the acceptance of illogical retranslations.

How does the art in the two locations function as a whole? In a sense, they express two opposed outcomes of the great international convergence of nation, race and culture. Gu’s idealistic intimation of an ultimate, corporeal and spiritual unification of humanity will be expressed in the spacious, ascendant monument at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ — a “temple” of hair — where the steles at ICA convey poetic gibberish to frustrate viewers’ attempts to secure their fundamental meaning and coherence.

A consortium of art college museums has organized the exhibition as a model to encourage collaboration among art colleges nationally. The catalog includes an introduction to Middle Kingdom to Biological Millennium, documentation of the complete “united nations” series to date and useful background for the exhibition.

The project was supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the museum’s Lower Gallery, New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography presents American, African and Chinese artists whose work transcends its local origins to achieve global relevance. The American photographers include Melonie Bennett, Tanja Hollander, Jocelyn Lee, Scott Peterman and Sa Schloff, all associated with the Bakery Photo Cooperative in Portland.

The Chinese photographers include the seven who showed work during the winter in the museum’s acclaimed Documenting China exhibition, as well as exhibit curator Gu Zheng. The breadth of contemporary African photography is represented by Samuel Fosso, Malick Sidibe, Jurgen Schadeberg, Bernie Searle (performance artist ) and Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall.

Also in the Lower Gallery, Marsden Hartley: Image and Identity taps the museum’s collection of materials pertaining to Hartley. In fact, the museum was established as a repository for the collection of drawings, photographs and documents by or about this key 20th-century modernist, a Lewiston native. Evidence of Hartley’s efforts to establish his name and locate himself within the collective memory of the public, his friends and family turns up throughout the collection.

Hartley’s personal archive not only provides ample information about the artist’s life, relationships and interests, but demonstrates an attempt to construct both a personal history and a public identity. The collection includes a large number of photographs, both personal snapshots and formal portraits by George Platt Lynes and Alfredo Valente.

It’s evident that photography allowed Hartley to remake himself in any image he desired: New York modernist, European aesthete, native Mainer. Hartley’s ongoing struggle to find his place — geographically, psychologically, artistically and as a gay man — is documented in his writing, reflected in his work and revealed through a study of his archive.

The public is invited to attend at no charge.

A member of the faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit, Baxter has won several Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Several of his stories have been selected for the annual anthology “Best American Short Stories.”

His collections include “Harmony of the World” and “Relative Strangers.” Baxter’s visit to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is sponsored by the college’s English department.