Mellon Foundation Announces $25 Million Fund Supporting Arts at the US-Mexico Border

TheMellon Foundation, the US’s largest philanthropic organization devoted to the arts and humanities, hasinaugurateda $25 million fund aimed at supporting arts organizations in the US-Mexico border region. TheFrontera Culture Fundwill offer flexible funding to artist-led projects, cultural organizations, and grassroots community groups in the US and Mexico, and will additionally “support Indigenous, binational, and Black networks that are facilitating regional and cross-border knowledge exchange and working to defend cultural rights.”

The initial cohort of thirty-two grantees includes twenty-four on the US side of the border and eight on the Mexico side. Recipients include the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in San Diego, which will use the money to assess, conserve, catalogue, and digitize archives documenting the work of generations of Chicano artists and activists; Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras in Tucson, which supports a network of Indigenous organizations and communities on either side of the border; La Semilla Food Center in Anthony, New Mexico, which runs a community farm; the federally unrecognized Carrizo Comecrudo Nation in Floresville, Texas, which will use the money in aid of a trust protecting 170 acres of Rio Grande ancestral land and an education center; and Azul Arena in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, a gallery and project space near the US-Mexico border that will expand its artistic programming and preserve contemporary narratives of the Chihuahuan region.

“The US-Mexico borderlands are home to an abundance of cultures and creative traditions, yet remain a region minimally funded by arts philanthropies in the United States,” said Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander in a statement. “Our long-term support for the artists, culture-builders, and stewards of creative expression among these communities will help amplify and sustain the profoundly varied arts and histories taking place in the borderlands.”