The Mellon Foundation has announced grants totaling $25 million to nine municipalities in support of projects to design and construct new public artworks, launch community initiatives, and develop policies addressing historical commemoration.

The grants are part of the foundation’s five-year, $250 million Monuments Project, which provides support for public efforts that “more completely and accurately represent the multiplicity and complexity of American stories.” The latest grants represent the first time such funding has been directed to municipalities and not to nonprofit and other organizations.

The nine cities receiving grants are Asheville, North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; Columbus, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Los Angeles and San Francisco, California; Portland, Oregon; and Providence, Rhode Island. Funded projects range from a racial equity audit of the city’s civic art collection (San Francisco); the redevelopment of a public square to better represent the multicultural history of the community (Ashland); and a program to foster dialogue around existing monuments and encourage new narratives (Boston).

Two cities will see the creation of new monuments—Los Angeles will construct a memorial to the victims of an 1871 massacre of Chinese people in the city, and Denver will create a public space to commemorate a 1978 disability rights protest. Three cities—Columbus, Denver, and Portland—will engage in community initiatives to address the disposition of monuments toppled or removed in the wake of the racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

“Through the monuments and memorials that mark them, our civic spaces are where many of us first learn about the American Story,” said Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander. “These grants strengthen new possibilities for commemoration in American cities so we can better understand that story and the history that informs it, and so we can celebrate the collective achievements and extraordinary acts these new monuments and memorials will honor in civic spaces across the country.”

(Photo credit: Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie/courtesy of the San Francisco Arts Commission)