The Monuments Project FAQs

Launched in 2020, the Monuments Project is a multi-year, $500 million commitment aimed at transforming the nation’s commemorative landscape to ensure our collective histories are more completely and accurately represented. Starting as a $250 million initiative—and doubled in 2023 to a total of $500 million—the Foundation’s commitment to the Monuments Project reflects both the urgency and the gravity of fostering more complete and inclusive storytelling of who we are as Americans. The project is one of the Foundation’s signature initiatives under Mellon President Elizabeth Alexander. 

The project seeks to ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative 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 are distributed across defined areas of activity: 

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. This failure to represent our multiplicity impacts how we perceive, distribute, and demonstrate power in the US. 

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, power, and the learning and teaching of history. With the Monuments Project, Mellon seeks to dramatically scale this previous work to meet the demands of our unprecedented moment.  

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 Mellon’s enduring efforts to expand the historical and cultural record and affirms its mission to undertake grantmaking within a social justice framework. 

Mellon’s grants 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 works in deep collaboration with individuals: historians, artists, architects, memory workers, theorists, archivists, activists, and technologists, and in communities 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.  

No. The Monuments Project is a multi-year initiative, not a one-time open call. Although the Foundation occasionally releases targeted requests for ideas to further the reach of the initiative, most proposals are accepted by invitation only.

There is no deadline, as this is not an open call for proposals. Program staff invite letters of inquiry on a rolling basis. Grants are made on an ongoing basis. 

The Mellon Foundation makes grants to 501(c)(3) organizations in the United States and to a small number of grantees abroad. Through the Monuments Project, the Foundation funds a wide range of entities, including governments (federal, tribal, state, and local); community-based and grassroots organizations; arts and cultural organizations; and institutions of higher learning.

Please note that the Foundation does not generally fund tuition, K-12 education and programming, fundraising events, or funding for individuals. However, please note that the Foundation does support individual artists and scholars through its regranting programs and intermediaries. 

Program staff work with potential grantees to identify appropriate grant amounts.  

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