2023 Annual Report Header ImageAnnual Report • President’s Letter
An artist standing on scaffolding while installing a sketched artwork on a wall with another person crouches on the floor next to it
An African American man in a dark sport coat stands on the viewers left, and on the right is an African American woman in a maroon sweater with glasses. They are in front of a gold leafed tree.
A vibrantly painted totem pole set against a backdrop of a foggy forest landscape
A lush rainforest landscape with greenery and red tropical flowers set among mountains on a bright sunny day
An African American man dressed in a dark suit reaches up with this right hand toward a section on a brick wall

As the year concluding passes into one marked by global strife and domestic polarization, our work at the Mellon Foundation has never been more urgent. Throughout 2023 we sharpened our grantmaking to be as strategically impactful as possible, strengthening the ethos of problem-solving that animates our funding and that has remained the best defense against many of the challenges we and our grantees have collectively confronted in this dynamic time. The cumulative force of Mellon’s support during the turbulent past year underscores the need for even more pointed grantmaking in the year to come, as we continue to reinforce the power of the arts, culture, and humanities to do robust justice work in the United States.

In 2023, we stood firm and stayed vocal on behalf of the fields we fund by rigorously consolidating and judiciously deploying significant resources in Mellon’s signature initiatives and program areas.

The year began with the launch of our newest initiative, Imagining Freedom, a $125 million commitment to counter the dehumanization of the American criminal legal system through the arts and humanities. Among other vital endeavors, Imagining Freedom supports incarcerated artists, writers, and thinkers who are building out creative and intellectual communities among those both inside and outside the system; documents and archives the experiences of those who are impacted by it; and, crucially, brings directly into dialogue and into our national discourse those with firsthand knowledge of the inhumanity of incarceration and a future-minded commitment to imagining a better system to address harm in our country.

Month by month and grant by grant in our program areas, we maximally reinforced Mellon’s mission throughout 2023, upholding a results-oriented approach at every turn to best support our grantees. This work ranged from further enacting Higher Learning’s fulsome vision to strengthen and expand Native American Studies programs at colleges and universities across the United States; to edifying digital justice efforts at the American Council of Learned Societies under the auspices of Public Knowledge; to providing critical design, construction, and programming support for the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago through Humanities in Place, to ensuring the preservation of the vibrant legacy of Just Above Midtown (JAM) at MoMA in New York through Arts & Culture.

Images above from top: A mural as part of “Painting in the River of Angeles: Judy Baca and The Great Wall,” at LACMA. Photo: Carlos Jaramillo; Brent Leggs, left, and Tiffany Tolbert, of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Photo: Yael Malka; The Yanyeidí pole, part of Kootéeyaa Deiyí, a totem trail in Juneau, Alaska. Photo: Acacia Johnson; A view from Paraíso Las Lunas in Puerto Rico. Photo: Christopher Gregory-Rivera; The Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, Illinois. Photo: Jess Ingram. All photos for Mellon Foundation

Explore inspiring work by visiting our Grants Database to view a list of our grantee partners who received grants in 2023

View 2023 grants and recipients

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