Elizabeth Alexander
President
In a year defined by national political instability and growing global conflict, the Mellon Foundation remained focused on the transformative and vital power of the arts, culture, and humanities. Our grantmaking was grounded in the programs and institutions that, along with Mellon itself, collectively serve as cornerstones for unfettered and diverse creative work, scholarship, and accurate and inclusive preservation and commemoration efforts in the United States. Throughout 2024, we made certain our work did its part to further strengthen our grantees and organizational partners—and remain ready to do so in the months to come.
The nearly 650 grants issued in 2024, totaling about $540 million in grantmaking, broadly fueled activation and engagement among the vastly different American communities we support. Many of these collectively undertaken efforts are addressing problems and generating possibilities for artistic expression, historical inquiry, and academic freedom. They include groups ranging from literary writers to civic leaders; they take place in spaces such as rural geographic regions and academic fields of study; and they are born from collaborations like those between local arts and culture institutions and the people they directly serve.
Mellon’s new Frontera Culture Fund, an initiative launched this year through our Arts & Culture program, is advancing the artistic visions driven by cross-cultural and transnational communities sharing both common objectives and complex challenges in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Public Memory Labs, which were funded this year at local libraries through Mellon’s Public Knowledge program area, are preserving personal histories “from Appalachia to the American Southwest,” often with community members who do not otherwise have the resources to bridge the digital divide or whose cultural histories have been underrepresented in American archives. Art installations that were funded under the auspices of Mellon’s Puerto Rico initiative have been taking shape in the archipelago’s El Yunque National Forest, where community members are invited to engage with these unexpected perspectives on creativity and the local ecosystem.
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Images above from top: “El Portal del Yunque: Presence and Lichen” by Ivelisse Jiménez displayed in 2024 in the El Yunque National Forest. Photo: Christopher Gregory-Rivera; The UCSD Community Stations, led by Fonna Foreman and Teddy Cruz, take a multi-disciplinary approach to civic planning, merging the fields of architecture, urbanism, and political theory. Photo: Camila Falquez; Ho’oleia Ka’eo, a graduate student in the Native Hawaiian and Indigenous Health program at the UH Mānoa. Photo: Brendan George Ko; The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and protects the most comprehensive collection of audio and visual media materials in the world. Photo: Stefan Ruiz; Through his “Monument to Listening” in Memphis, Tennessee, Theaster Gates wants hero Tom Lee to be remembered as “a human who saw other human lives as equally valuable, if not more valuable, than his own.” Photo: Joshua Asante. All photos for Mellon Foundation
El Yunque
An art walk in Puerto Rico’s national forest
Through the Foundation’s Imagining Freedom grantmaking, Mellon deepened its commitment in 2024 to Writing Freedom, our fellowship with Haymarket Books to support writers who are a part of the community that has been affected by the American criminal legal system. Our Humanities in Place program area funded museum programming that will explore and elevate the cultural history of American Indian communities in the Northern Plains and Rockies. With the launch of its Affirming Multivocal Humanities initiative, Mellon’s Higher Learning program area is expanding the community of scholars and students who want to learn more about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in the context of American society’s past, present, and future.
Elizabeth Alexander
President
President
“Throughout 2024, we made certain our work did its part to further strengthen our grantees and organizational partners—and remain ready to do so in the months to come.”
As it reaches the halfway point of its $500 million commitment to reimagine and reshape the American commemorative landscape, the Mellon Monuments Project fortified its support this year for communities across the country that are engaged in public memory work, including the Forecast Public Art for Midwest Memory project in the rural Midwest; the Oregon Remembrance Project in southern and eastern Oregon; and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which co-led the Road to Healing oral history project with the US Department of the Interior. We also made sure to celebrate the milestones Mellon grantees marked in this work in 2024. The opening of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center in June was an occasion to bring together the community of supporters who championed its physical place in the national consciousness of our collective American history. Another milestone was the summit organized by Monument Lab—the Monuments Project’s first ever grantee—which this summer brought together in Philadelphia Mellon staff members, artists, memory workers, and community leaders from around the country, and which underscored Mellon’s ongoing role as a driver of the knowledge and subject matter expertise in this growing field.
With the National Parks Service and the National Parks Conservation Association, grantee Pride Live supported the national campaign to bring about the Stonewall National Monument and Visitor Center, which opened in 2024. Photo: Courtesy of Pride Live
Photo: Courtesy of Pride Live
The specificity of intention of the grants Mellon issued in 2024 juxtaposed with the longevity of their visions is essential and exciting. Our grantmaking this year was illustrative of multivocality on the ground, in our neighborhoods and across our nation, in the person-to-person engagement of community members working, studying, and creating together across difference with shared purpose. We were fortunate to hold discussions and dedicated engagement of this kind throughout 2024 at Mellon itself, in community in our physical spaces, at convenings we hosted with grantees and thought partners drawn from our various program areas and presidential initiatives. These gatherings provided much needed reflection and direction for subsequent action as we continue to elevate the impact of Mellon’s support for communities in the arts, culture, and humanities throughout the United States.
Telling the American Story on Our Public Lands
That dynamic relationship between reflection and action more broadly was fundamental to our institutional focus this year—as it will be in the next one—and has ensured that the cadence of our support stays ahead of any moments of crisis for our grantees. At the same time, the transitions that shaped 2024 for Mellon took place not only in our national and global landscapes, but also within our own grantmaking. This was the year, for example, that saw the culmination of Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY), the artist relief program Mellon envisioned and launched in 2020 at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. The financial scale and scope we at Mellon committed that year to funding CRNY had been largely unprecedented in philanthropy.
Four years later, as CRNY reaches its successful close, I find myself reflecting once more on unprecedented challenges and our subsequent actions. What have we learned by creating and implementing different visions for progress in times of fear and instability? What insights have we gained, and how can they best be put into service on behalf of American communities going forward? What will be the best, most impactful actions we can take?
Standing at the forefront of 2025, I look forward to addressing these questions with Mellon’s community of grantees, partners, and peers. Our commitment to ideas and imagination, to the power and potential of the arts, culture, and humanities remains fierce—as does our dedication to doing our part, always, to create a more just future.
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