Grant Resources

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
A specially designed bookshelf containing an assortment of books
A view of a specially created bookcase with four books displayed on the top of the case
In black and white, a portrait of a Black poet who is wearing a hat and looking at the photographer
Poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts, the founder of Freedom Reads, a Mellon grantee partner. In 2023, more than 170 Freedom Libraries (pictured) have been placed prisons and juvenile detention centers across the US. Photos: Alexander Saladrigas for Mellon Foundation

Taken together, grantmaking across our four program areas and the Office of the President made clear that even as the scope of what we support remains expansive, our focus as a forward-looking social justice philanthropy continues to be directed, purposeful, and pristine.

With the conclusion of the year came Mellon’s newest commitment: $500 million for the Monuments Project, representing our unprecedented investment to reshape the American commemorative landscape to better convey our country’s complex history. By doubling the initial commitment we made when launching the initiative in 2020, we at Mellon recognize the significant collective and collaborative effort that developing new American monuments and memorials requires. Over the past twelve months, Monuments Project grantees—including PRX, which launched the podcast “Monumental”; the Trust for the National Mall, which supported six new ephemeral monument installations in the heart of our nation’s capital; and nine American municipalities that are exploring how best to tell the American Story in their civic spaces—demonstrated the determination and dedication that reimagination of our commemorative landscape demands, and that continues to both inspire up and galvanize us as we lead this work.

Pulling Together

In Monumental Art, Discover Untold Stories of America

Partnerships with key allies further augmented the impact of our funding across 2023, and were made and reinforced in support of our shared vision of a more just future for the United States. These included partnerships not only with long-standing peer organizations like the Ford Foundation and the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, but also with new ones such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the US Department of the Interior, as Mellon supports a comprehensive oral history project for the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative; Washington National Cathedral, which revealed this past fall the new Mellon-funded stained glass windows created by Kerry James Marshall; and nonprofit institutions and government leaders both in the Puerto Rican diaspora and in the archipelago of Puerto Rico itself, where we at Mellon gathered in community this past spring to convene our Letras Boricuas fellows, celebrate the milestones of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellows program, and expand the transformative reach of our Puerto Rico initiative.

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Elizabeth Alexander
President

“Imagining Freedom brings directly into dialogue and into our national discourse those with firsthand knowledge of the inhumanity of incarceration.”

$125M

Imagining Freedom

Supporting work that centers the voices and knowledge of people directly affected by the US criminal legal system

See related grants 

Central to our robust and meticulously made partnerships was Mellon’s effort to preserve the legacy of Emmett Till through the establishment of the new Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Glendora and Sumner, Mississippi, and Chicago, Illinois. This essential and long overdue National Park Site, which was signed into creation by President Biden at the White House this past July, is in part the result of Mellon’s instrumental role in supporting as a collective partnership the National Park Foundation, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, and the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute. We are proud to have led and sustained this collaboration, and honored to have helped ensure that Emmett Till’s and Mamie Till-Mobley’s stories remain urgent, alive, and accurately understood by generations of Americans to come.

A view inside a courthouse room set with rows of wooden chairs and sunlight coming in from the tall windows on the right side of the room
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Monument

Three Landmarks and a Story Forever Protected

As we look to 2024, we at Mellon are determined to further hone our institutional focus as a social justice philanthropy, and to fortify our mission as the leading funder of the arts, culture, and humanities in the United States.

The imperative to do both seems likely to increase in the year ahead. The issues that lie at the heart of our mission are frequently assailed in public discourse, and the impediments to meaningful justice in our country are even firmer than they were when we reoriented our work three years ago. Book banning and the criminalization of learning and knowledge remain on the rise; the humanities in higher education are distrusted, disparaged, and often institutionally undernourished or deprioritized; diverse leadership on college campuses and the values of the liberal arts continue to be attacked; the question of who is American, and who gets to have a voice in American public spaces, is constantly contested; and the words and work of artists, writers, scholars, and culture-makers, whose thinking and creating are much needed antidotes to these ordeals, continue to be repressed.

In the face of these challenges, the values that this Foundation champions—those of unencumbered empathy, rigorous inquiry, curiosity and openness, beauty and creativity, and astonishing revelation—are the most potent we possess to counter fear, hatred, and despair.

Entering 2024, we will never cease to use them to combat these forces of dehumanization. We will never stop believing in these values and the power they hold, and we will never cease to celebrate, and to honor, the promise of humanity that they illuminate.

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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