Opening Up the Arts and Humanities for All Americans

At Mellon, the arts and humanities have always been understood as essential to a robustly just, problem-solving, and forward-looking society. Now, as the biggest private funder of these sectors in the United States, we are even more determined that they remain as resilient and broadly accessible as possible to chart a path forward in the face of the acute fear and division our country faces.

We live in a nation of more than 340 million people with varied ideas, competing perspectives, and diverse experiences. This multiplicity definitively shaped our vibrant democracy’s past and drives the vital imagining of its future. As I know well from my years as an educator, the tools that enable this imagining are those that regular engagement with the arts and humanities provides: the abilities to think critically; to communicate effectively and across difference; to be fluent in complexity and informed historical comprehension. We all need unfettered access to those tools; together, we all need to wield them. 

For too long funding for the arts and humanities—if it existed at all—was concentrated at a small number of institutions to privilege a narrow set of topics and perspectives. That approach left too many innovative people and too much critical work without access to the resources of American philanthropy. Mellon has worked to thoughtfully and carefully expand the scale and scope of our support beyond those past parameters, evolving our own grantmaking so that American arts and humanities better reflect the fullness of American life.

Our particular approach—what we call “the roving spotlight of philanthropy”—is an expression of our values in action, as Mellon funding moves dynamically and inclusively across the fields we support. We are a catalyst for imagination and initiative, working to affirm—always—that recipients of Mellon grants are expanding the rich fabric of our country’s cultural and intellectual contributions, ensuring that it does not stay the possession of the few, but instead becomes the inheritance of many.

In short: we support the arts and humanities because they are essential to the health of our democracy.

Our mission is clearest in the work itself. The Literary Arts Fund is a coalition of funders driving a $50 million initiative to support our country’s not-for-profit literary presses and organizations, which are vital to broadening the reach of American literature and a fundamental part of our cultural heritage. There’s the Humanities Internship Program, which gives college students access to paid career development opportunities; the Ireichō, which memorializes by name every single person of Japanese heritage incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II in digital and sacred form, and invites all visitors to see and honor the generations-long impact of that collective experience; and Mellon’s jazz initiative, a $35 million effort to celebrate musicians and preserve this beautifully original American art form. These and other Mellon grants expand the scale and scope of American stories explored in our country’s cultural institutions, universities, and public spaces.

There are so many vibrant, vital voices researching and teaching the complexity of our American history. To give a few examples: With Mellon support, community college students throughout the United States ask the big and sometimes messy questions about what it means to be human and engage with their professors in new classroom dialogues about our shared purpose in our national and global communities. At the University of Wyoming, a Mellon grant helps bring together oral histories from across the state, celebrating the rich range of stories unique to Wyoming itself. In Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, cultural preservationists secure the records of our country’s distinctive and irreplaceable voices in public radio, film, and television, so that those in the future have access to the reporting and analysis of those in the past. And in Alabama, Mellon funding for the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice further empowers the place of art and narrative to deepen our collective understanding of racial injustice in our country, challenging and inspiring the millions of visitors who have explored them. It matters to us that people throughout the country experience directly the power of the arts and humanities, in places ranging from public libraries and local archives to community-envisioned and community-led monuments and memorials.  

Mellon’s commitment to the arts and humanities is unshakeable; our belief in their cultural and intellectual potency remains unchanged. These are still the same principles that have guided Mellon since its founding nearly 60 years ago. What is so important now is that we have opened our funding to so many more people who call this country home—an act that is especially critical as the fullness of our shared history is being attacked and erased in universities, museums, national parks, and historical sites throughout the United States. Erasures and destructions of history and entire areas of scholarly inquiry push open the door to dehumanization, which so often predicates and even foments violence. We believe that everyone in our country deserves meaningful access to the veracity, beauty, imagination, and continual revelation that the arts and humanities provide.

One of the great joys of leading Mellon is seeing how this engagement with the arts and humanities illuminates our democracy day by day, enriching our shared experience of civic life. Witnessing the tumult and violence of 2026 and what it might augur for the United States, we hope our partners in government, nonprofits, and the private sector support and broaden our many American stories even further, opening up their many different directions, and celebrating, together, the extraordinary possibilities they convey—the extraordinary possibilities of the people in this country themselves.