The Monuments Project

FAQs

What is the Monuments Project? 
Launched in 2020, the Monuments Project is a five-year, $250 million commitment to reimagine and rebuild commemorative spaces and transform the way history is told in the United States. The project is one of Mellon’s signature initiatives under President Elizabeth Alexander. 

What will the Monuments Project do? 
The project seeks to ensure that future generations inherit a memorial landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American experience, and tells a fuller, more inclusive story of our history and our many different forbearers.  

All grants under the Monuments Project will be distributed across defined areas of activity: 

• Fund new monuments, memorials, or historic storytelling spaces; 
• Contextualize existing monuments through installations, research, and education;  
• Support the relocation of an existing monument in the context of reparative actions that are part of a community-driven vision for a particular site; and 
• Produce books, films, websites, and scholarship to inform the public understanding of how commemorative landscapes communicate, shape, and teach our history.  

Why has Mellon decided to pursue this initiative now? 
Monuments and memorials instruct us in our understanding of the past. They shape powerful national narratives that say some of us ought to be visible and celebrated, and some of us ought to be invisible and ignored. Our country’s current monument landscape offers an incomplete—and even inaccurate—picture of the nation’s complex and diverse history. 

An expansion of Mellon's preservation-related grantmaking, the Monuments Project has taken on greater urgency in recent years. Action and public debate have intensified rapidly as many monuments stand at the center of an impassioned national conversation about race and power. 

How does the Monuments Project connect to the Mellon Foundation’s mission? 
Mellon is deeply committed to knowledge and scholarship, and the power of history, the arts, culture, and the humanities in the public sphere. Through this initiative, we aim to help shape a commemorative landscape that celebrates the contributions of the many diverse communities that make up the United States. The Monuments Project builds further on the Mellon’s enduring efforts to expand the historical and cultural record and affirms its mission to undertake grantmaking within a social justice framework. 

Has the Mellon Foundation undertaken monument grantmaking before? 
Yes.  Since 2018, the Foundation has made several meaningful grants to help reshape the American public history and memory landscape, including to the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which distributes preservation funds to important sites of African American history; to the Mayor’s Fund for the City of New York to build a new monument honoring the abolitionist Lyons family in Central Park; and to the center for education, interpretation, and art at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. With the Monuments Project, Mellon seeks to dramatically scale this previous work to meet the demands of our unprecedented moment. 

How will Mellon decide which artists and/or organizations will receive these Monuments Project grants?  
Mellon’s grants will support visionary, creative, conversation-shaping work that will catalyze the transformation of our nation’s histories—these are truly public, community-facing initiatives, not individual passion projects.  

The initiative will unfold in deep collaboration individuals: historians, artists, architects, memory workers, theorists, archivists, activists, and technologists, and in communities along with nonprofit organizations, grassroots organizers, municipalities, and other agencies who have laid the critical foundations for conversations and who have interrogated the politics of race, public space, and memorialization. 

Is the Monuments Project an open call for proposals? 
No. The Monuments Project is a five-year initiative, not a one-time open call. As with most of the Foundation’s programs, proposals are accepted by invitation only. If you would like to submit a grant-related inquiry, please do so through Fluxx. 

What is the deadline for applying to the Monuments Project? 
There is no deadline as this is not an open call for proposals. 

Who is eligible to apply for funding? 
The Mellon Foundation makes grants to 501(c)(3) organizations in the United States and to a small number of grantees abroad. The Foundation does not provide grants directly to individuals. 

What amount of funds can applicants request? 
Program staff work with potential grantees to identify appropriate grant amounts. 

Is the Monuments Project restricted to US institutions? 
The major focus of the Monuments Project is on US institutions.  However, in certain circumstances, the Monuments Project may include grants to strategically resonant projects abroad. 

Can individuals outside of the US apply or do they need to have links to US academies? 
The Mellon Foundation does not provide grants to individuals.