Elizabeth Alexander News

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced $10 million in emergency grants to six United States Regional Arts Organizations (RAOs) to help launch a new United States Regional Arts Resilience Fund to support small to midsized arts organizations across the country.

Today, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a joint commitment to increase their payouts to nonprofit organizations with more than $1.7 billion within the next three years to help stabilize and sustain a nonprofit sector facing devastating economic effects due to the global pandemic and the epidemic of social injustice. This financial commitment represents new funding above the previously approved budgets by each foundation's board. Each foundation will determine priorities for the distribution of the new funds based on its grantmaking guidelines and priorities.

The Academy of American Poets has announced its 2020 Poets Laureate Fellows.

The Academy of American Poets will present Shelter In Poems: A Virtual Reading on Thursday, April 30, at 7:30 pm EDT, the organization's first-ever virtual poetry reading, inspired by the overwhelming number of people turning to poetry for comfort during the current global crisis.

A coalition of national arts grantmakers, consisting of Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National YoungArts Foundation, and United States Artists, has announced the launch of Artist Relief, which will provide rapid, unrestricted $5,000 relief grants to assist artists.

A coalition of national arts grantmakers, consisting of Academy of American Poets, Artadia, Creative Capital, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National YoungArts Foundation, and United States Artists, announces the launch of Artist Relief, which will provide rapid, unrestricted $5,000 relief grants.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced the election of Jonathan Holloway to its Board of Trustees. Holloway is the president-elect of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; he will assume the presidency on July 1, 2020. He is currently provost and professor of history and African American studies at Northwestern University.

The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that on each Saturday in March, its popular Poem-a-Day series will feature a new poem that was commissioned for Project 19, the New York Philharmonic's initiative to mark the centennial of the 19th Amendment, and a curated collection of further reading that explores the 2020 Poetry Coalition theme of #PoetryandProtest. Poem-a-Day is distributed to more than 500,000 readers each morning via email, social media, and syndication.

The Apollo Theater announced today its first multi-work commissioning initiative dedicated to the creation of a diverse, 21st century American performing arts canon, Apollo New Works. Made possible with the support of a $2 million grant from the Ford Foundation for the creation of new work by artists of color, the initiative is also funded by a $1 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Apollo's Master Artist in Residency, a central component of the program.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation today announced that Alondra Nelson, president of the Social Science Research Council and the Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, has been elected to its Board of Trustees.

The Academy of American Poets has received what is believed to be the largest grant ever made by a philanthropic institution to support poets in the United States-$4.5 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The unprecedented grant will enable the Academy of American Poets to fund its Poets Laureate Fellowship program for the next three years.

Dance Theatre of Harlem announced today a $4 million gift from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the organization's capacity building efforts, including improvements to salaries for artists and staff, investments in fundraising infrastructure and leadership, and innovative artistic and community-building initiatives. The grant includes a $1 million matching gift to be raised by the Dance Theatre of Harlem Board of Directors, led by Board Chairman Ackneil Muldrow, III, bringing the total support to $5 million. The timing of this gift comes at the culmination of DTH's extraordinary 50th Anniversary Celebration, with its New York City Center homecoming engagement and Vision Gala April 15-18, 2020. For more information, please visit www.DanceTheatreOfHarlem.org.

Legendary choreographer, National Medal of Arts (2013) MacArthur a?oeGeniusa?? Award (1994) recipient, and artistic director of New York Live Arts (Live Arts), Bill T. Jones comes together in discussion with esteemed poet, essayist, scholar and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Elizabeth Alexander.

Bill T. Jones, MacArthur Genius Award and National Medal of Arts awardee and Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, and Janet Wong, Associate Artistic Director, announced the New York Live Arts' fall 2019-2020 season today. 'Is there such a thing as 'we'? How and why do we come together?  What makes a community? These questions are on our minds as we enter our 9th season. How do artists embody and shed light on these questions?', said the team.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced the appointment of Emil Kang as Program Director for Arts and Cultural Heritage. In this role, Kang will lead the Foundation's grantmaking program that seeks to nurture exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship, and art conservation practices while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for the arts.

Celebrated actress Ellen Burstyn,who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, will share some of her favorite poems as part of Poetry & the Creative Mind, a performance in celebration of National Poetry Month to be held April 24, 2019, at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. 

Kathryn Hall will succeed Danielle S. Allen as the Chair of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Board of Trustees, the Foundation announced today. Allen announced her retirement after eleven years of service, the last four as Chair. The Foundation also announced the election of museum director Thelma Golden and investor Joshua S. Friedman to the Board of Trustees.

In what is believed to be one of the largest awards made to support poetry in the United States by a philanthropic institution, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has made two grants to the Academy of American Poets totaling $2.2 million. The funds will enable the work of several poets serving in civic Poets Laureate positions, and of more than 20 poetry organizations who comprise a national Poetry Coalition.

The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce that Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey have been named its newest Chancellors, an honorary position that has been held by some of the most distinguished poets in the United States, including W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, Adrienne Rich, and Mark Strand. Poets elected to the Board of Chancellors become an important part of the history of Academy of American Poets and as of 2019, only 115 poets have been elected to this board since it was formed in 1946.

Minneapolis-based Bharatanatyam dancer/choreographer Ashwini Ramaswamy, celebrated for her ability to "[weave] together, both fearfully and joyfully, the human and the divine" (The New York Times) discusses her multidisciplinary original work Let the Crows Come featuring collaborator and "genre-busting" (The Guardian) composer/DJ/author Jace Clayton and Twin Cities dancer Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, who "embodies the power of dance to create deep and lasting connections where words cannot" (Dance Magazine, "25 to Watch"). Using the mythography of crows as a framework to explore memory as a source of guidance and dislocation, the work layers Ramaswamy's visceral interpretation of ancestry, ritual, and tradition with a genre-defying evolution of movement and music across cultural and corporeal boundaries. Presented at the newly-renovated Parkway Theater in South Minneapolis, the work-in-progress conversation is part of the SPCO's Tapestry19 Festival and will include video footage of Ramaswamy's Space Residency at The Baryshnikov Arts Center.