In a year filled with layoffs and budget cuts, New York City’s cultural institutions
got some good news on Tuesday: The Department of Cultural Affairs announced
that it would award $47.1 million in its newest round of grants, which this year will go to more than 1,000 of the city’s nonprofit organizations.

The grants include $12.6 million in new investments, nearly $10 million of which is
designated for coronavirus pandemic relief and arts education initiatives. Funding
will increase over the prior year for grantees, including larger increases for smaller
organizations, the department said.

The allotment includes a $3 million increase for 621 organizations in low-income
neighborhoods and those most affected by the pandemic, and $2 million for five
local arts councils that will distribute the funds to individual artists and smaller
nonprofits. Twenty-five organizations providing arts education programming will
receive a share of $750,000 allotted for that purpose.

The Apollo Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Chinese in America
will be among the 93 organizations to receive some of the largest grants, in excess of
$100,000 each. Both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, which
recently made headlines for negotiations with their unions, will receive grants over
$100,000. The funding will go to 1,032 nonprofits in total. 

​The department also made changes to its process that will make it easier for
organizations to receive multiyear grants, which had previously only been available
to groups with annual budgets of more than $250,000. Nearly all of the groups that
received funding for the fiscal year ending in June 2021 will receive support at a
comparable level for the year ending in 2022, pending the adoption of the city’s
budget, the department said.

​NEW YORK, NY, December 10, 2020 – With the financial state of US museums in peril amid the ever-changing global pandemic, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today announced the second round of the Art Museum Futures Fund, distributing additional emergency COVID-19 grants totaling $3 million to provide much-needed support to small arts and cultural institutions across the US. 

As COVID-19 continues to surge across the US, art museums are losing millions of dollars in revenue, leaving about one-third of all institutions at risk of permanent closures, according to a recent survey by the American Alliance of Museums. Smaller institutions are far less able to rely on endowments to survive the financial burden of the COVID-19 crisis. The Art Museum Futures Fund’s second round of grants will be distributed to 14 small-sized arts museums with strong and long-standing commitments to the local community and social justice. Grants will be used to support general operations. 

“America’s small-sized arts and culture institutions sustain their communities by providing access to transformative and wide-ranging artistic contributions while also preserving many different histories and cultural legacies,” said Elizabeth Alexander, President of the Mellon Foundation. “As the pandemic continues to threaten the future viability of museums that have long been underresourced, we must do our part to strengthen support for these organizations and the trenchant work they tirelessly undertake to enrich and expand our American story.”

The Mellon Foundation launched the Art Museum Futures Fund in September 2020 with the distribution of nearly $24 million to 12 midsized arts museums and cultural organizations across the country facing unprecedented financial obstacles as a result of the pandemic. With today’s announced grants supporting smaller museums, Mellon’s contribution to the Art Museum Futures Fund totals $27 million, furthering the Foundation’s commitment to funding the recovery of art institutions as they adapt to the ongoing financial obstacles posed by the pandemic. 

The group of galleries will be named for the collector, whose 91-object gift is the
museum’s most significant since 1942.

​For more than 40 years, Ronald S. Lauder collected knights in shining armor. Now he has decided to be one.

At a time when cultural institutions all over the world are struggling in the
pandemic, the cosmetics magnate and philanthropist is giving 91 pieces of arms and
armor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which the New York institution is calling
the most important donation of its kind in 80 years.

The Arms and Armor galleries have long been one of the museum’s main
attractions, a gateway to culture for children captivated by the majestic warriors on
horseback and an internationally renowned collection of chain mail, helmets and
breastplates from Europe, Asia, America and the Middle East.

Those galleries will be named after Mr. Lauder. “When I was collecting, I was collecting with the Met in mind,” he said in an interview. “Many of the things I bought were things the Met did not have.”

Mr. Lauder, who declined to disclose the donation’s value, said he decided to give at
a time when so many museums were worried about the future. “It’s important to
say, ‘We still care about institutions,’” he said. “It’s an important symbol.”

​NEW YORK, NY, December 3, 2020 – The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and William Penn Foundation today announced $8 million in emergency funding to 37 Philadelphia cultural organizations reeling from COVID-19.  

As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the country, arts institutions are particularly vulnerable to extraordinary financial fallout and face potentially permanent closures as a result. The emergency grants from Mellon and William Penn in combination, ranging from $50,000 to $400,000, will support organizations at the heart of the Philadelphia arts ecosystem with 12 months of immediate funding as they adapt to unprecedented obstacles posed by this worldwide health crisis.  

Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city in the United States, has an internationally admired heritage of arts and culture. Both Mellon and William Penn have long supported arts and culture organizations in the city. The William Penn Foundation is the largest funder of the sector and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the second-largest funder of Philadelphia arts, and both organizations’ support for the arts is often closely aligned.
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As a companion to grants recently made by the William Penn Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has committed $4 million in matching funds. This joint funding infusion marks the first time the two foundations have collaborated and comes at a moment when new COVID-19 restrictions have been placed on Philadelphia museums, requiring them to close until January 1, 2021.   

At a time when cultural institutions around the country are wrestling with the challenges of the pandemic, including limited attendance, as well as issues of racial equity, the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday for the first time elected two trustees to jointly lead the board, one of whom will be its first woman chair.

Hamilton (Tony) E. James, the executive vice chairman of the investment firm Blackstone, and Candace K. Beinecke, the senior partner at the law firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed, will succeed Daniel Brodsky starting Jan. 12. Mr. Brodsky’s third three-year term was set to expire in September but was extended because of the pandemic.

“These are exceptionally challenging times,” Mr. Brodsky said, “and the opportunity to have two leaders with strong yet different experiences is a win-win for the museum.”
The pair will be taking over stewardship of the museum at a time when the Met has projected a $150 million revenue loss through June resulting from the virus outbreak. To address this deficit, the museum has reduced programming, made executive pay cuts, downsized staff and raised about $25 million from trustees for an emergency fund.

Ms. Beinecke, a trustee since 2010, has served as chairman of the museum’s legal committee since 2011, and was co-chair of the search committee that recommended the Met’s current director, Max Hollein. Mr. James, who also joined the board in 2010, has been chair of the museum’s finance committee since 2014.

The folk and traditional arts run deep in American culture and provide us with diverse and dynamic artforms that span back generations within families and communities. The National Endowment for the Arts has been committed to serving the folk and traditional arts since the agency’s founding in 1965. Not only does the agency believe that all people are endowed with a rich and unique culture, but our founding legislation also states that honoring and preserving our nation’s multicultural artistic heritage is vital to the health of our democracy.

In 2019, the Arts Endowment released a report, Living Traditions: A Portfolio Analysis of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk & Traditional Arts Program, which examines the agency’s folk and traditional arts portfolio. The report revealed that states and cities with strong folklife programs help to attract more federal arts dollars to their home regions. The report also identified significant gaps in the map of national arts funding for the folk and traditional arts, and highlighted the need to connect related organizations and individuals to promote and strengthen the folk and traditional arts field. Based on this data, we are pleased to announce two important expansions of Arts Endowment funding, which will enrich our commitment to the field of folk and traditional arts.

The Arts Endowment will make a $1,000,000 investment in a National Folklife Network to develop new folklife infrastructure in spaces where it does not currently exist. The National Folklife Network will be managed through a cooperative agreement to cultivate the development of seven pilot folklife programs—four in rural areas, and three in urban areas. The four rural regions are the Northern Plains, Southern Plains, Inter-mountain West, and Alaska, while the three urban folklife programs will be in cities on, or east of, the Mississippi River. Each location faces its own unique challenges, including weak infrastructure, a diffuse population, and deeply ingrained poverty.

The initiative, the largest in the organization’s history, will support the creation of
new monuments, as well as the relocation or rethinking of existing ones.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the
United States, has pledged to spend $250 million over five years to help reimagine
the country’s approach to monuments and memorials, in an effort to better reflect
the nation’s diversity and highlight buried or marginalized stories.
​
The Monuments Project, the largest initiative in the foundation’s 50-year history,
will support the creation of new monuments, as well as the relocation or rethinking
of existing ones.

And it defines “monument” broadly to include not just memorials, statues and
markers but also “storytelling spaces,” as the foundation puts it, like museums and
art installations.

“The beauty of monuments as a rubric is, it’s really a way of asking, ‘How do we say
who we are? How do we teach our history in public places?’” Elizabeth Alexander,
the foundation’s president, said.

​“So much teaching happens without us going into a classroom, and without us realizing we’re being taught,” she continued. “We want to ask how we can help think about how to give form to the beautiful and extraordinary and powerful multiplicity of American stories.”

The New York-based Helen Frankenthaler Foundation announced today that it was disbursing $1.5m in grants to cultural organisations this autumn, many of them deriving from a $5m Covid-19 relief effort announced last spring.

Those coronavirus-related grants will go to small art museums and toward direct support to artists. The remainder of the $1.5m involves new two-year grants that promote equity in and access to the arts, including digital initiatives and professional opportunities for college students and recent graduates.

Among the small museums receiving funding are the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, Guild Hall, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Montclair Art Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Other Covid relief will involve $50,000 grants for the organisations Artist Relief and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants Covid-19 Fund.

The new two-year grants include $500,000 for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s online initiative offering access to its collections; $500,000 for the Digital Curation Initiative’s parallel online collection access effort; $150,000 for ArtsConnection’s Teen Reviewers and Critics Program, which fosters creativity among students in underserved communities; and $60,000 for ArtTable’s expanded fellowship program.

Other two-year grants route $100,000 to the roving House of SpeakEasy Bookmobile, which offers art books and programming to writers and artists in deprived New York communities; $112,00 to the Studio Institute for intern programmes for students of diverse backgrounds; and $350,00 to the Studio Museum in Harlem’s plan to bolster its educational website offerings.
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“Support for cultural institutions is ever more critical in the face of these current crises,” says Elizabeth Smith, executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, whose core mission is to bring Frankenthaler’s art to a wider audience. She adds: “Our ongoing commitment to research and education provided a new pathway forward to help promote equity and accessibility within the arts.”

One of the most famous American painters and illustrators, Norman Rockwell produced pithy artwork to promote democracy and civic engagement in his time. Now, a museum in Massachusetts dedicated to him asked artists to design "get out the vote" posters for 2020.

​The Unity Project debuted on Tuesday, National Voters Registration Day, on the Norman Rockwell Museum's website. It features six original pieces specially commissioned for the campaign from a diverse group of artists: Mai Ly Degnan, Rudy Gutierrez, Anita Kunz, Tim O'Brien, Whitney Sherman and Yuko Shimizu.

On the same page, voters can register for the 2020 election and share the artwork to promote the cause. Among those who were inspired to share the campaign on their social media profiles is 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who posted about the initiative on Instagram.

"This idea was sparked in conversation with patrons who said, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was an artist who could paint a poster like Rockwell did during World War II that would inspire everybody to vote?' And it led me to think -- we can do that," Norman Rockwell Museum Director Laurie Norton Moffatt told CNN.

​The project came together in a matter of six weeks, Norton Moffatt explained, and it was the first time the museum worked with illustrators to commission and publish artwork in a digital format.

"At a time when many of us feel life has closed in, during this pandemic, we found a way to burst those walls wide open and put the museum's work to good in the world by inspiring everyone to vote," Norton Moffatt said.

The posters will be exhibited online and at the museum until Election Day, and physical copies will enter the museum's permanent collection.