The National Endowment for the Arts has announced $20,000 awards for the Sheldon Museum of Art and the Lied Center for Performing Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The award to Sheldon will support an initiative to photograph and digitize principal paintings in the museum’s collection. The award to the Lied will support the presentation of a theater series that will include the one-man play “The Things They Carried” and the musical “Puddin’ and The Grumble.”

Wally Mason, Sheldon’s director, said the grant will allow Sheldon to photographically document the permanent collection and provide online access to audiences.

“The digitization project is essential to the future of the museum in preserving and presenting its collection,” he said.

Sheldon houses a permanent collection of more than 12,000 objects, including paintings by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mary Cassatt, Jacob Lawrence, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Lee Krasner.

The Lied series will forge partnerships with veterans groups and the Food Bank of Lincoln to yield opportunities for discussion of the issues raised by the plays. The series will begin in fall 2015 and run through spring 2016.