Mellon Dedicated a Quarter-Billion Dollars to Monuments in the U.S. What's the Game Plan?
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A Confederate monument is removed near North Carolina’s capitol building in Raleigh. Photo: Bryan Regan/shutterstock
During the early years of the 20th century, the ongoing imposition of Jim Crow laws in the South coincided with a flurry of Confederate monument-building. Constructed both as memorials to the dead and as overt assertions of white supremacy, many of these markers were—and are—the direct products of civil society’s private dollars. One civil society association in particular, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), sponsored hundreds of monuments at that time and continued doing so at a slower clip throughout the century.
Whether it flowed through the UDC or other channels, private money bankrolled many of the memorials that have been so incendiary in our current debate over institutional racism. And philanthropy has also played a key role in the creation and preservation of innumerable, less-controversial monuments and public art installations.
As the nation’s largest funder of the humanities, culture and the arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation isn’t a surprising grantmaker to see working in this space. But Mellon’s new Monuments Project, unveiled at the beginning of October, is worth a closer look, both for its scale—$250 million—and for what it tells us about where this funder’s headed in the wake of the biggest popular demonstrations for racial justice since the 1960s, or perhaps ever.
The Monuments Project is the brainchild of Mellon President Elizabeth Alexander, a Black poet and academic who arrived at the foundation in 2018 after a previous stint at Ford. Over the past two years, Alexander has gently steered this low-key humanities giant toward a more overt social justice stance, which it embraced at the end of June with the announcement of a new strategic direction. Amounting to a quarter-billion dollars over five years, Mellon’s monuments work will figure strongly in how that evolution plays out.
It’s still in its early stages, but depending on how it develops, Mellon’s Monuments Project may also yield insights into how well big foundations can fare when they delve into one of philanthropy’s more nebulous precincts—storytelling and narrative change.
Mapping terra incognita
It’s been quite an eventful year for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Beginning in March, the foundation started taking major steps to prop up vulnerable arts and cultural nonprofits in the face of the pandemic. That began with its role in collaborative vehicles like the NYC COVID-19 Response and Impact Fund and Artist Relief, and continued with a commitment in June to boost 2020 grantmaking from $300 million to $500 million. Following Mellon’s strategic pivot, it launched funding programs to support prison education and disbursed more aid to arts nonprofits serving communities of color.
The launch of the Monuments Project saw Mellon turn its focus, at least in part, from direct relief to the future. As we’ve seen with other recent social justice overtures from big foundations, this summer’s racial justice reckoning was a clear influence upon the program, even if it traces its origins back several years.
In an October article published in Salon, Alexander lamented the incomplete “map” of U.S. history presented to most people, one that “includes only faint marks for the majority of our fiercest trailblazers.” At the same time, she goes on, “too many in our country have been taught for too long with a warped atlas that charts a few members of our society as superior, and distorts or erases others as subhuman.”
So far, Mellon has painted its monuments grantmaking in broad strokes. It’ll use three main strategies to illuminate the terra incognita of U.S. history: funding new monuments, providing context to some existing monuments, and relocating others. The overall aim is to expand the breadth and diversity of Americans’ collective historical understanding. “Success would mean that future generations inherit a monument landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story,” a Mellon spokesperson said.
Though the plan is to support “visionary artists and cultural organizations” in that endeavor, the Monuments Project isn’t an open call for proposals. Mellon has characterized it as an expansion of previous monuments-related grantmaking. Since Alexander’s arrival in 2018, that support has included funding for the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, backing for monuments to figures like Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, and the maintenance and construction of other racial-justice-oriented monuments in New York City. The foundation also paid to build a new center for art education and interpretation at Montgomery, Alabama’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and funded Charleston, North Carolina’s International African American Museum.
One initial grantee
While Mellon expects these grants to support the relocation of at least some existing memorials, the foundation isn’t eager to lean into this controversy. “It is not for the Mellon Foundation to decide which monuments ought to be removed or relocated,” Mellon’s spokesperson said. “That is the collaborative job of the communities, community groups and artists that live with and among specific monuments to determine.”
Rather than adjudicating the nation’s existing stock of memorials, the project’s focus appears to be on creating new monuments and preserving existing “sites of memory.” Mellon’s vision for what these new spaces might look like is an expansive one, by no means limited to statues and plaques.
In her Salon piece, Alexander wrote that the Monuments Project will seek to “expand the very meaning of monuments themselves to include the word, the act and the unexpectedly preserved spaces that move us to awed silence.” As an example, she cited footage of activist filmmaker Bree Newsome removing a Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston shooting, an act that led to Newsome’s arrest.
To date, Mellon’s first and only major grant through the Monuments Project went to Monument Lab in Philadelphia, which describes itself as a public art and history studio dedicated to participatory approaches to public engagement and collective memory. Since getting started in 2012, Monument Lab spent several years curating and supporting Philadelphia’s public art scene. Lately, it’s been expanding its geographic scope with collaborative work in over a half-dozen major cities. Besides Mellon, Monument Lab’s philanthropic backers include the Knight Foundation, the Surdna Foundation and the Independence Media Foundation.
A grant of $4 million through Mellon’s Monuments Project will enable Monument Lab to realize its national aspirations, supporting 10 field research offices and allowing the nonprofit to hire full-time staff. With those resources, Monument Lab is conducting an audit of the nation’s monument landscape. The goal is to assemble a more complete picture of what narratives and subjects the nation’s monuments celebrate and which ones they leave out. The audit is also assembling data on monument-related protest.
Monument Lab’s national audit is ongoing, and the group plans to release findings in the spring of 2021. At that point, the organization will draw on Mellon’s grant once again to build out its 10 field offices.
More clarity to come
Mellon will rely on Monument Lab’s audit to inform the direction of its grantmaking going forward. For that reason, the foundation’s spokesperson said, additional grantees have yet to be named. When they are, it’ll be interesting to see how much—if at all—Mellon will get behind efforts to challenge the current monument landscape, rather than just adding to it.
The deliberate pace of this work is one indication that the foundation wants to avoid ruffling too many feathers. It’s in keeping with Mellon’s tendency toward a measured approach. Alexander, a veteran of the more activist Ford Foundation, suggested as much in a July interview in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, in which she rebuffed the notion that Mellon’s new social justice rubric will push it into a more policy-forward role. But she also pointed to the innate politics of “under-resourcing large swathes of the population” and stated that “in the sense of being of the polis,” Mellon’s more progressive stance flows from its intention to make society more fair and just.
In another indication that Mellon’s work might take a more activist bent, the press release for the Monument Project included a quote from former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a vocal proponent of Confederate monument removal. “One of the major impediments we had in taking down the Confederate statues in New Orleans was finding funds for removal and for what would replace them,” Landrieu said. “This significant commitment from the Mellon Foundation will help communities across the country correct the landscape.”
Whichever strategy Mellon’s grants eventually favor the most—construction, contextualization or relocation—the Monuments Project suggests a possible path forward for smaller funders who want to do something about historical injustice without diving into edgier movement work.
Paying for historical memorials might seem staid, or even a distraction, next to the kinds of activist grantmaking we’ve written so much about this year. But as the United Daughters of the Confederacy recognized so well a century ago, the power of physical monuments lies in their indelible impression on the successive generations that live in their midst. They’re long-lasting, and unlike, say, a tweet, they’re troublesome to remove.
