Mellon Foundation awards $500K to ASU Herberger Institute’s Projecting All Voices initiative

Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University received a $500,000 grant this academic year to support its Projecting All Voices initiative.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the grant as part of its Arts and Cultural Heritage program, which supports “exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship and conservation practices in the arts, while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for these disciplines,” according to its website.

With the funds, the Herberger Institute will continue to give minorities and first-generation students opportunities for design and arts careers and to explore issues of equality and inclusion in the arts.

The Mellon Foundation grant will help support the creation of a cohort of artists from diverse communities as part of the Projecting All Voices initiative. Those artists will have access to mentorship, opportunities to develop new work both in the community and on our stages and galleries, exposure to key methodologies for expanding their capacities as artists to work in new ways, and opportunities to be part of critically important conversations about power, race, class, cultural policy and the reshaping of our educational and cultural institutions to advance equity and inclusion. 

The cohort is just one of several programs of the Projecting All Voices initiative. The Herberger Institute plans to research, design, prototype, implement and disseminate a new system of programs for confronting field-level issues of equity and inclusion in both higher education and the arts.