New Mellon initiatives undertaken last year expressed that same visionary ethos. In February of 2025, we launched a $35 million fund dedicated to the legacies and innovations of jazz—an original American art form that has driven cultural innovation since its emergence in the years after the Civil War. The Jazz Legacies Fellowship honors luminaries of the genre with financial support and personalized career resources, while other funding issued under the initiative supports scholars and performance groups who are engaged in both the preservation and ongoing evolution of American jazz traditions. 

Last October, Mellon led a coalition of the nation’s leading funders to launch the $50 million Literary Arts Fund. With the aim of strengthening the nonprofit presses and organizations vital to American literature, this support will help sustain book festivals, public readings, and writing fellowships in communities across the country. More broadly, the fund underscores the centrality of the American literary arts to our history, reminding us of their significance as a voice and vehicle for democracy as we near the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 

Significant Mellon grant renewals last year further expanded the breadth and depth of American storytelling, scholarly inquiry, and public engagement with the arts, humanities, and culture. Under our Imagining Freedom initiative, we announced the second cohort of Writing Freedom Fellows, highlighting exceptional literary work by writers impacted by the U.S. carceral system. Building on our sustained support for the cultural infrastructure of Puerto Rico, Mellon announced the fourth cohort of Puerto Rican writers through the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, along with renewed investment in Maniobra, providing stable employment to cultural workers throughout the archipelago. 

Particularly notable was Mellon’s substantial grantmaking in Alaska, which stands among the states least funded by American philanthropy overall. An Alaska Institute for Language, Culture and Society is now underway with support through Mellon’s Higher Learning program, as are public art projects highlighting the state’s Black and Filipino communities through our Humanities in Place program. Via Public Knowledge, we are helping Alaskan Indigenous community members in Chickaloon Village, northeast of Anchorage, as they digitally preserve the cultural and historical knowledge and practices of their peoples. In Juneau, we are funding new public interpretations efforts through a Monuments Project grant to the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes, which represents more than 38,000 Native people living around the globe.  

At $500 million, the Monuments Project remains the single largest commitment in Mellon’s history, and as of 2025 we have issued more than $250 million in grants under its auspices. Grantee work last year includes the national tour of the Ireichō, a sacred book holding the names of all 125,284 people of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated by the United States government during World War II. In communities across the country, the Ireichō brought together Japanese American elders and their descendants to mark their loved ones’ names within the book. Also taking place in 2025 was the opening of MONUMENTS, an exhibition co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art and The Brick in Los Angeles, which presents decommissioned Confederate statues both alongside and reimagined into new works, reflecting how the memories and legacies of the Civil War live on in American culture today. 

Mellon’s support for the empowerment of working artists in the United States remains robust, informed in part by the insights and outcomes of Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY)—a statewide $125 million guaranteed income and employment program the Foundation helped establish in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and which concluded last year. Drawing on the scope and scale of CRNY’s impact, Mellon commissioned NORC at the University of Chicago to conduct a National Survey of Artists. This study, completed last year, offers a comprehensive overview of American artists’ livelihoods, and will allow philanthropy writ large to develop strategically targeted support for artists in our country going forward. 

We at Mellon are deeply proud of the work our grantees envisioned and led in 2025. We look forward to the extraordinary creativity, artistic expression, and scholarly exploration of all who engage with the arts, culture, and humanities—and which are already well underway in 2026.