The Mellon Foundation is doubling its funding commitment for its Monuments Project to $500 million.
WASHINGTON, DC July 25, 2023: US President Joe Biden signs a proclamation to establish the Emmett … [+]
The project is “aimed at transforming the nation’s commemorative landscape to ensure our collective histories are more completely and accurately represented,” the foundation said.
The investment, the foundation continued, “comes at a critical time in our nation’s history with book banning and criminalization of knowledge increasing in schools, universities, and libraries across the country. By committing $500 million —the largest such commitment in the foundation’s history — Mellon aims to expand capacity for the continued creation of and community engagement around new monuments and commemorative spaces that tell our shared past and collective futures.”
The foundation launched the project in 2020 with a $250 million commitment; since then it has provided over $170 million in funding to 80 projects.
Among these are an oral history project that is part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the U.S. Department of the Interior; the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, in Tallahatchie MS and Chicago; preservation, activation and expansion of artist Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles, a monument to interracial harmony through civic engagement and muralist training; Harriet Tubman and Underground Railroad Monument in Newark NJ.; and the Irei Names Monument, a comprehensive, accurate list of names of those of Japanese ancestry whom the U. S. government incarcerated during World War II that will be housed at institutions across the U.S., plus an interactive website.
Also receiving funding are the Kinfolk Foundation, which is developing augmented-reality monuments; Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s augmented-reality monuments and murals led by local artists and technologists; Memphis River Parks Partnership’s redesign of Tom Lee Park, honoring the heroism of Lee, a Black river worker who saved 32 people after a steamboat capsized; Public Memory projects in Richmond, Va.; Sacred Red Rock project (Iⁿ’zhúje’waxóbe) in Lawrence KS, honoring the Kanza people of the Kaw Nation; Totem Pole Trail (Kootéeyaa Deiyí) in Juneau AK, which will create ten totem poles for Juneau’s public waterfront; the 2023 exhibition, Beyond Granite, a set of six dynamic installations on the National Mall in Washington DC; and Kerry James Marshall’s racial justice-themed “Now and Forever Windows” at Washington National Cathedral, also in Washington DC.
