Latest news with #MonumentsProject
Time Magazine
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Elizabeth Alexander
Few people have had careers that have championed diversity on as many fronts as Elizabeth Alexander. She has focused on the cause as a scholar, a writer, a teacher, an artist, and now as president of the $7.9 billion Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the arts and humanities in the U.S. So how does she feel about the rollback of diversity initiatives that she has spent most of her working life championing? 'Absolutely laser- focused, undauntedly focused, on the values that our work contains,' she says. 'And on the assertion that America is a richly and powerfully multi-vocal, multi-experiential democracy.' In April, after President Donald Trump's cost-cutting team deemed that much of the funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library studies was wasteful, Mellon stepped in. 'We had grantees calling us, panicked, some of them unable to continue their projects and run their organizations,' says Alexander. 'We made a $15 million grant to the Federation of State Humanities Councils, and they will redistribute that money in all of the states and the six territories, so that these projects for now can carry forward.' That won't keep the lights on at all the reading groups, literary festivals, and free college classes that American taxpayers previously funded. But it has already spurred at least one philanthropist to make a matching grant of $250,000 to the Alabama State Humanities Council—and that, Alexander says, is the goal. 'Always in philanthropy, we are hoping that because of our extraordinary teams, and the power of the grantees, that others will be more able to see what those folks are doing and get excited about it and think about supporting it,' she says. Since arriving at the Mellon Foundation in 2018, after stints in academia and a concurrent career as a writer—she read one of her poems at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration—Alexander has used a social justice lens to examine the institution's grantmaking. 'We are trying to tell and lift up as broad a swath of American stories as possible,' she says. One of her signature initiatives has been the $500 million multi-year Monuments Project, which memorializes lesser-known figures and events from American history in public spaces. These can take the form of museum installations, statues, murals, or even a book of calligraphy, as in the case of The Ireichō, which lists the names of the 125,000 Japanese Americans forcibly relocated to internment camps during World War II. In February, Mellon announced a $35 million grant to help preserve the legacy of jazz, a uniquely American art form. Also new in 2025: a fellowship program that provides older jazz musicians with a $100,000 grant, plus extra cash for housing and other needs, so they can make and preserve their music. Alexander is energized by her fellow philanthropists' responses to the federal funding cuts and elimination of DEI programs. 'As much as this is a challenging time, it's actually a very powerful time in philanthropy, because people are coming together,' she says. Her hope is that by bringing these stories to light, people will begin to appreciate that American life is made richer by the differences of its varied communities. 'How do we emphasize and support… the critical thinking that allows people to learn and understand that you can tell more than one story at a time?' she asks. 'That allows people to ask the questions of how power works and what has been included and what has not been included, and how we can tell and uphold all of our history.' Though her day-to-day focus can vary, Alexander sees her books, her scholarship, and her administrative and grant-making work as all of a piece. What has surprised her about philanthropy is how sweeping its effects can be: teachers' work lives on in their students, writers' work lives on in the minds and lives of their readers, but philanthropists' work has visible ripple effects for generations. 'The reach of the work that people are doing is infinite,' she says.
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
$1M to help reenvision Friendship Park
SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — The New York-based Mellon Foundation has given almost $1 million to Friends of Friendship Park in San Diego to pursue a cross-border meeting place at the western end of the U.S.-Mexico border just above the Pacific Ocean. 'Members of our fronterizo communities have been working for almost two decades to protect Friendship Park,' said John Fanestil, executive director of Friends of Friendship Park. 'The true potential of this site can only be realized through the creation of a truly international park at this iconic location, something akin to the Peace Arch Park at the western end of the U.S.-Canada border.' Until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Friendship Park provided a place where people could meet and talk with the border barrier between them as Border Patrol agents controlled and monitored visitors on the U.S. side. In recent years, the agency has been hesitant to allow access due to safety and staffing concerns. Construction of two new 30-foot barriers in the last 18 months has further limited public entry. Concerns grow that Border Patrol will never reopen popular beach park in California The cross-border park concept would take it a step further, giving people from both countries the opportunity to interact and walk freely in a site that straddles the border without any walls between them. 'We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for investing in this dream,' Fanestil said. 'We intend to pursue this dream with a hope-filled realism, the support from the Mellon Foundation comes from the organization's Monuments Project, an unprecedented multi-year commitment aimed at transforming the nation's commemorative landscape.' Fanestil admits building the cross-border park may take years, especially in the current political climate. 'We have to be able to demonstrate that this is a site of great significance so when those political stars come into alignment we can create something that will make a lasting difference and we think a site of international importance.' He says they will take the concept beyond San Diego as a way to build public support and understanding. New anti-climbing border wall prototype being installed in California 'Right now, they've put up two new 30-foot walls down there and it looks pretty grim if you're not familiar with it, so we have to be able to demonstrate the potential of the site, we have to start family reunions once again, so people can see the potential of site for bringing people together here,' he said. As a way to build awareness, Friends of Friendship Park is staging an art exhibit at the Bonita Museum and Cultural Center in Chula Vista from Feb. 8 through March 28. 'People will be able to come and see the different perspectives of Friendship Park and how photographers, performers, graphic artists have really generated a message the resonates from this site that resonates, we hope, far and wide.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
