Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

OVERVIEW: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is an iconic arts, culture and humanities funder in the United States, supporting a variety of funds and grant programs in this space.

IP TAKE: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a must-know for anyone working in the sprawling arts, culture, and education ecosystem in the U.S., from community arts organizations to museums and universities large and small. Particularly for the liberal arts, Mellon is “the mothership funder,” IP arts reporter Mike Scutari wrote, providing “cash that can feel like a windfall from heaven, especially for smaller colleges, given the scarcity of major funders that care about the humanities and related areas.” Since 2020, Mellon has increased its prioritization of diversity, inclusion, and social and racial justice. This funder has deep pockets, with over $8 billion in assets and a range of active funds and grants programs. It's known for large university grants, but also gives to smaller, community-based organizations, particularly those supporting underrepresented or marginalized groups. 

While uninvited grant proposals are not accepted, organizations can submit letters of inquiry, and detailed information about each core grant program is available at Mellon’s well-organized website. Importantly, though Mellon funds organizations and intermediaries that support artists, educators, and students, it does not make grants directly to individuals.

PROFILE: Founded in 1969, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is one of the most significant arts and humanities funders in the United States. It was created through the consolidation of two existing foundations—the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation—by the children of Andrew W. Mellon to honor their father, the banker, industrialist, politician and philanthropist who passed away in 1937. The Foundation’s mission is to “build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Mellon’s grantmaking is conducted through four focus areas with overlapping concerns: Higher Learning, Arts and Culture, Public Knowledge and Humanities in Place. In addition to these focus areas, Mellon also funds three smaller Presidential Initiatives—the Monuments Project, Puerto Rico and Imagining Freedom.

In 2020, the Foundation announced a shift in strategic direction, signifying a renewed emphasis on social justice and which represents a partial reinvention. Going forward, it will prioritize social justice across all of its grantmaking. Mellon’s programs and subprograms can change quickly, so grant seekers are advised to check its site often.

Grants for Higher Education and Social Justice

The Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning initiative supports higher education with an emphasis on “advanced humanistic inquiry and social justice.” A main goal of the program is to support programs that “broaden our understanding of American history.” The foundation also expresses strong interest in innovative methodology, institutional equity and the development of “transformative academic leadership.” Grants tend to support higher education programs that are inclusive and appealing to a broad range of students and populations.

One grant supported the expansion of the American Indian Studies program at Black Hills State University in South Dakota. At the University of Maryland, funding supported the “reframing” of the school’s Asian and Asian American Studies programs. Other grants have gone to the Intersectional Deaf Studies program at Gallaudet University and New York University’s Prison Exchange Program.

This initiative accepts inquiries throughout the year, but proposals are accepted by invitation only. The program links detailed proposal guidelines to its webpage.

The Higher Learning initiative also runs fellowship and competition programs.

  • The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program seeks to remedy the problem of underrepresentation among higher education faculty, and to make it easier for students to engage with and learn from the perspectives of diverse faculty members. It also works to increase the numbers of Ph.D. students from underrepresented minority groups and to encourage Ph.D. students who are not from underrepresented groups to commit to diversity and representation. This program is open to students at participating institutions. Eligibility requirements are linked to the program page.

  • New Directions Fellowships “assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest.” The program aims to encourage high standards in cross- and inter-disciplinary research and emerging areas of interest. Guidelines are provided on the program page, and lists of past fellows are linked here.

  • The foundation’s Sawyer Seminars bring together “faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences.” These yearlong events facilitate “comparative inquiry” on specific topics and themes. The foundation awards support for one postdoctoral fellow and two graduate students to participate. Institutions may apply to host Sawyer Seminars, and the foundation provides guidelines and FAQs on the program page. As many as ten Sawyer Seminars run at colleges and universities in the U.S. each year. See descriptions of past seminars here.

Grants for Arts and Culture and Arts Education

The Mellon Foundation conducts most of its arts grantmaking through its Arts and Culture program, which “celebrates the power of the arts to challenge, activate, and nourish the human spirit.” Grantmaking focuses on “exceptional creative practice, scholarship, and conservation of arts and culture, while nurturing a representative and robust arts and culture ecosystem.” This includes giving for the visual arts, music, theater and dance across the program. The foundation names three strategies for its arts grantmaking.

  • The foundation is committed to supporting “visionary artists and practitioners and the participatory roles they play across institutions and communities.” The focus here is on work that has the potential to “catalyze change in our world” and “acknowledge[s] the dimensional nature of an artist’s work and place in society.”

  • The foundation also prioritizes “exceptional organizations and artists that have been historically under-resourced.” The foundation is equally committed to the creation of new work and the preservation of past work that supports “an understanding of broader histories, narratives, and aesthetic traditions.”

  • Finally, the foundation articulates a strong interest in “scaffolding for experiments with new economic paradigms and institutional models that center equity and justice and creative problem-solving in arts and culture.” Specifically, the foundation seeks to fund “new operating and funding models” for the arts and culture sector.  

Arts and culture grants have supported organizations of all sizes, but medium- and small-sized organizations are well represented here. Grantees include the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College in New York, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company and the Chicano Park Archives at the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in San Diego.

Mellon does not accept proposals for funding, but arts organizations may submit initial inquiries to the foundation via its application portal. Grantseekers should read through the proposal guidelines prior to submitting inquiries.

The foundation also runs several subprograms for the arts.

  • The Foundation established the Creatives Rebuild New York initiative in 2021 as a localized response to the effect of the pandemic on New York City’s arts infrastructure. It is described as a “guaranteed income program [that] will provide monthly, no-strings-attached payments to up to 2,400 artists with financial need.”

  • The Latinx Arts Fellowship awards $50,000 each to a multigenerational cohort of 15 Latinx visual artists each year for an initial commitment of five years. This opportunity is administered through the US Latinx Art Forum in collaboration with the New York Foundation for the Arts and supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The award is “the first significant prize of its kind and celebrates the plurality and diversity of Latinx artists and aesthetics.”

  • Separate from its COVID-19 response grantmaking, the Mellon Foundation established its Monuments Project in 2020. A five-year, half-billion-dollar project, this initiative aims “to recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition.”

  • During COVID-19, the Mellon Foundation also had an Art Museum Futures Fund that supported mid-sized art museums with emergency grants to help them navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and avoid permanent closures. This, in addition to the constantly evolving programs, funds, and sub initiatives at Mellon are evidence that the Foundation works quickly to provide evolving opportunities in real-time in order to meet the needs of the world it seeks to serve.

Additionally, the Mellon Foundation also supports arts and culture through a series of Regranting Programs through which arts service organizations are able to re-grant funds to individual artists and arts practitioners in the areas of Creation and Production, Travel and Cultural Exchange, Professional Development and Other Areas.

  • Under the Regranting section’s Creation and Production subprogram, past grantees include the First Peoples Fund, Chamber Music America, the MAP Fund, and, in partnership with Alternate Roots, the Partners in Action program.

  • Under Regranting’s Travel and Cultural Exchange section, grantees include Opera America’s New Works Exploration Grants and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s USArtists International.

  • The Mellon Foundation’s Professional Development regranting programs include a partnership with artEquity to fund a National Facilitation Training program to “build meaningful discourse on issues of inclusion, equity, and the role of art makers.”

  • Finally, Mellon maintains funding for arts regranting via its Other Funding Opportunities for opportunities to support organizations and projects that do not fit into its other regranting programs. Past grantees include the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which supports African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund; the New York Community Trust’s Mosaic Network and Fund; and the Academy of American Poets, to support its City and States Poets Laureate programs.

Grants for Humanities Research and Community Development

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities in Place and Public Knowledge focus areas invest deeply in initiatives for equity and access in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. While humanities funding has traditionally supported teaching, learning and research within academic institutions, current work in this area pushes humanities research further into the public realm, including support for community initiatives, public libraries and other participatory and open access projects and initiatives.

  • The Humanities in Place program seeks to support “a fuller, more complex telling of American histories and lived experiences by deepening the range of how and where […] stories are told and by bringing a wider variety of voices into the public dialogue.”

    • Through its funding of “bold, innovative rethinking of past practice, and visionary new approaches,” grantmaking in this space works to “collectively understand, uplift, and celebrate more complete stories” about Americans, individually and collectively within society. 

    • In practice, the program supports a broad range of humanities research, preservation and community development programs and initiatives.

    • This program offers detailed proposal guidelines, but grantseekers should start by submitting an inquiry through the foundation’s application portal.

  • The Foundation’s Public Knowledge focus area maintains the lofty goal of supporting “the creation and preservation of the cultural and scholarly record—vast and ever-expanding—that documents society’s complex, intertwined humanity.” A secondary but equally important aim of the program is “to increase equitable access to deep knowledge that helps to build an informed, heterogeneous, and civically engaged society.” The foundation names three strategies for this work:

    • The preservation of “original source materials” emphasizing “materials from historically underrepresented cultures and populations”;

    • Support for “innovative maintenance and sustainability of technology” as a means of expanding and improving access to information related to research, teaching and learning; and

    • Support aimed at “strengthening networks for the interdependent sharing of resources, services, and collections.”

    • Grants from this initiative have supported a academic, community and public organizations.

    • This program accepts initial inquiries via the foundation’s application portal and links guidelines to its program page.

    The Public Knowledge program also supports a number of Regranting Programs where the foundation distributes funds through service organizations that, in turn, distribute grants to other organizations.

Grants for Criminal Justice, Racial Justice and Indigenous Rights

Since it transformed all of its giving areas in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered, the Mellon Foundation asks itself, “what is the liberatory power of the arts and humanities?” Seeking to move beyond incarceration, Mellon’s giving works to understand how “arts, culture, and humanities work that centers the voices and expertise of people directly affected by the American criminal legal system can uniquely deepen our shared understanding of the system, catalyze us to address the damage it causes, and move us toward justice.”

  • Imagining Freedom is a $125 million initiative that works to reinvent the criminal justice system. The initiative supports “artists, writers, thinkers, humanists, memory workers, and storytellers whose lives have been impacted by the criminal legal system, as well as those working to bridge carceral and non-carceral spaces, foster connections between people, and bring together broader intellectual and imaginative communities.”

  • Mellon’s Monuments Project is a $500 million multi-year commitment to support “efforts to express, elevate, and preserve the stories of those who have often been denied historical recognition.” Grants fund “publicly oriented initiatives that are accessible to everyone and promote stories that are not already represented in commemorative spaces.”

    • This program offers grants for the creation or restoration of permanent or temporary installations in a range of media and disciplines.

    • This program accepts inquiries via the foundation’s application portal and links detailed proposals guidelines to the program page.

    • Mellon recently awarded a five-year $15 million grant to create the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The institute will conduct research into the areas of policy reform, K-12 education, social justice work, public health and criminal justice.

    • Finally, as part of its Regranting Programs within the Arts and Culture focus area, Mellon partners with Alternate Roots to fund the Partners in Action program, which supports collaboration between artists and non-arts partners to create work that furthers social justice.

Other Grantmaking Opportunities:

Mellon runs a funding initiative for Puerto Rico which “supports higher education, museums, and grassroots organizations in their efforts to enrich and sustain Puerto Rico’s vibrant cultural and humanities ecosystem.” The initiative seeks to provide support and training to grassroots organizers in order to expand the public expression of art and cultural programming.

In addition to its grant programs and initiatives, Mellon gave more than $200 million in both 2020 and 2021 to arts and humanities organizations for relief and recovery efforts in response to COVID-19. This includes support for smaller museums and cultural institutions in danger of permanent closure resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

Puerto Rico grantees include the Alianza de Museos de Puerto Rico, the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras and Fondo Adelante, which received funding for Hurricane Fiona response.

Read the program’s proposal guidelines before submitting grant inquiries for the Puerto Rico program through Mellon’s application portal.

Important Grant Details:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s grants range anywhere from $25,000 to $15 million to organizations of all sizes in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

  • While this funder supports its share of iconic arts and culture organizations and top universities, it also provides significant funding to smaller, community-based organizations in the arts and humanities.

  • Mellon works with many regranting organizations, presenting additional opportunities for smaller organizations to receive support.

  • Funding is mainly limited to the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

  • While many of the foundation grantees have enjoyed ongoing, multi-year support, the foundation’s recent refocusing toward issues of social justice and inclusivity will likely bring many new grantees into its fold.

  • Mellon does not accept unsolicited proposals, but will respond to promising inquiries with an invitation to apply.

  • Grantseekers should review general grantmaking policies as well as guidelines for individual program areas before submitting grant inquiries via the foundation’s grantee portal.

For general inquiries, the foundation can be contacted via email or telephone at 212-838-8400.

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