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.
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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