By Tori Lee
May 30, 2025

Photo by Michael Tropea

The University of Chicago has received a $2.45 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. through its Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative. 

The grant will support the four-year project, Afterlives: Engaging Objects of Religious Origin in Museum Collections, a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art and the Divinity School’s Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.

In its first phase, the project will focus on conducting provenance research—tracing an object’s history from its origin to the present day—on objects of religious origin within the Smart’s permanent collection. The museum recently repatriated a sacred 18th-century painting discovered to have been stolen from an order of Buddhist monks in South Korea. 

“This transformative grant enables the Smart Museum to deepen its commitment to ethical stewardship, rigorous research and transparency,” said Vanja Malloy, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum. “Provenance research helps us restore historical context, honor the religious and secular communities connected to our collections, and contribute meaningfully to a growing field of scholarship.” 

The Smart will partner with the Marty Center to bring together scholars and members of the wider public to discuss how religion connects to urgent social issues.

“Religion and art are both intimately entangled with what it means to be human. They invite us to reflect on some of life’s most fundamental questions: Why are we here? What kind of person should I be?” said Emily D. Crews, executive director of the Marty Center. “Research on objects of religious significance housed in the Smart’s collection will offer rare insight into how diverse traditions, from medieval Chinese Buddhism to 20th-century American Judaism, have wrestled with such questions and the role that creating and engaging with art and material culture has played in that process.” 

In addition to adding graduate student, postdoctoral and professional staff positions to the Marty Center and the Smart, Afterlives will also feature a symposium in the spring of 2026, a multi-year Religion and Arts Consortium and a major exhibition in the fall of 2027.

UChicago is one of 33 organizations from across the United States receiving grants through the latest round of the Lilly Endowment’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative. The aim of this initiative is to support museums and other cultural organizations as they strengthen their capacity to provide fair, accurate and balanced portrayals of the role religion has played and continues to play in the U.S. and around the world.

“The United States is widely considered to be one of the most religiously diverse nations today,” said Christopher L. Coble, Lilly Endowment’s vice president for religion. “Many individuals and families trust museums and other cultural institutions and visit them to learn about their communities and the world. We are excited to support these organizations as they embark on projects to help visitors understand and appreciate the diverse religious beliefs, practices and perspectives of their neighbors and others in communities around the globe.”

Originally posted on UChicago News.