With its latest announcement, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is making a $125 million splash in a comparatively small pool — the world of arts and humanities created by currently and formerly incarcerated people.
Launched last week, the goal of Imagining Freedom is to support arts and humanities groups “that engage the knowledge, critical thinking and creativity of millions of people and communities with lived experience of the U.S. criminal legal system and its pervasive forces of dehumanization, stereotyping and silencing,” according to Mellon’s announcement. As part of the launch, the foundation announced $2.4 million in grants to four organizations, including the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative’s Flashlights Project, and Study and Struggle, a collective based in Mississippi that organizes political education, study groups and mutual aid.
On the surface, the launch of Imagining Freedom seems to be a further step in Mellon’s existing commitment to arts and humanities work that aims to challenge the carceral system by “catalyzing [society] to address the damage it causes, and envisioning and enacting just responses to harm,” in the words of Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander. One of the grantees that received some of the more than $40 million that Mellon moved prior to formalizing Imagining Freedom, Empowerment Avenue (EA), partners incarcerated writers with outside journalists. EA-sponsored incarcerated journalists are not only able to earn incomes well above those paid by the jails and prisons that keep them captive; their writing has also appeared in mainstream publications like the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, thus substantially lifting the voices of incarcerated people.
Despite the potential political and personal impacts of the projects funded by the initiative, Alexander said in a statement provided to IP that “the art, the archival and intellectual work” isn’t being created for “advocacy or economic ends.” Rather, she said, “This initiative is meant to support those working to ensure a broad public history and, critically, primary source records of mass incarceration and its impacts by lifting up the perspectives and voices of those directly impacted by the criminal legal system.”
There’s a larger goal at work here to help the culture better understand incarceration as a concept, including the damage it causes. In that sense, it’s not unlike a funding initiative by the Ford Foundation to change the way we think about border communities, and other philanthropic efforts to reshape narratives in ways that could impact social issues in years to come.
“While we recognize the vital importance of advocacy work and believe firmly that artists, writers and others with lived experience in the criminal legal system should be remunerated for their work, as any of us should be, the broader context of this initiative is helping both individuals and communities use the tools of the arts and humanities to envision the systems now in place so we can all forge new paths toward justice,” Alexander said.
Expanding funding for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists
Mellon’s Imagining Freedom initiative greatly expands an existing world of funding for programs that support the work of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated artists. Other funders in this arena include the Art for Justice Fund, which is managed by Ford in partnership with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and has moved $85 million as of 2022. California’s Prison Arts Collective has received funding from government sources and the National Endowment for the Arts. The University of Michigan houses a Prison Creative Arts Strategic Fund to support its Prison Creative Arts Project and the Right of Return Fellowship provides fellowships to individual, formerly incarcerated creators. Maryland’s Justice Arts Coalition’s 2021 annual report shows $150,000 in revenue from foundation supporters including the Art for Justice Fund and the Cornelia Bessie Memorial and Fringe foundations.
Many of these funders either include, or focus on, art as a vehicle for criminal justice advocacy. Likewise, funding for advocacy-related art is just one facet of the money being moved for criminal-justice-related initiatives, which ranges from traditional advocacy to helping formerly incarcerated women get back on their feet. Particularly since 2020, we’ve seen growing interest among funders — coming from a variety of political ideologies — in curbing mass incarceration, reforming policing, ending cash bail and other criminal justice reform strategies.
A natural evolution
Mellon’s latest move is a logical extension of the work it has been doing since June 2020, when the funder announced it would shift its focus to prioritize social justice in its grantmaking. Other examples of this shift include the 2022 announcement of its Humanities for All Times grants to liberal arts colleges and the expansion of its National Park Service Mellon Humanities fellowships, also announced in 2022. Clearly, Alexander and Mellon are determined to expand the range of voices and perspectives that are allowed to contribute to the country’s dialogue around social justice issues. With more than $8.2 billion in assets to its name as of its 2020 tax filing, the funder has the means to do so.
Mellon’s pivot has been one of the more compelling moves by big foundations in recent years, and it will be interesting to watch further developments as it continues to support criminal justice reform from a progressive social justice perspective. This corner of philanthropy has become a textbook example of politics and strange bedfellows. The more progressive Mellon joins political peers like Ford and the Open Society foundations, but also conservative organizations like the Charles Koch Foundation and the Nolan Center for Justice, whose website says it “provide[s] leadership for the growing conservative consensus” that the current system is badly broken.
While those developments are unfolding, we’ll be waiting to see whether Mellon’s Imagining Freedom announcement raises the profile of, and thus funding for, groups taking an artistic approach to tackling the system.