Mellon Foundation Continues Support of Morgan State University Arts and Humanities Efforts, Awarding $710,000 in New Grants

Funding Will Support the Inventory and Digitization of University Museum Artwork, Commission New Sculpture, and Advance Academy-Community Connection Initiative and Exhibit

BALTIMORE — Thanks to new funding from the Mellon Foundation— the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities — Morgan State University is advancing key liberal arts initiatives on and off campus. The Mellon Foundation awarded the University two grants totaling $710,000: one in the amount of $660,000 to support the inventory and digitization of the collection housed within the James E. Lewis Museum of Art (JELMA) and the recommissioning of a Mel Edwards sculpture to be located prominently on campus, and the other for $50,000 to support the Morgannale: Academy-Community Connection for Repairing Our Places project. Since 2015, the Mellon Foundation has awarded approximately $3.4 million in grant awards to support the arts and humanities efforts of Morgan, one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing Historically Black Colleges or Universities (HBCUs).

“We are incredibly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their continued generosity and support of Morgan State University. For nearly a decade, the Foundation’s unwavering commitment to advancing the arts and humanities at our institution has been transformative,” said David K. Wilson, president of Morgan. “The latest two grants will significantly enhance our capacity to provide enriched educational experiences and foster innovative scholarship. These funds will empower our faculty and students to explore new frontiers in their fields and contribute meaningfully to the broader academic and cultural landscape. We deeply appreciate the Mellon Foundation’s belief in Morgan’s mission and their partnership with us in cultivating a vibrant intellectual community.”

Since its founding, the Mellon Foundation has purposefully and carefully identified organizations and institutions to support with selective grant awards. The grants awarded fall within the focus areas of Arts and Culture, Higher Learning, Humanities in Place, and Public Knowledge. Morgan’s most recent funding comprised Arts and Culture and Humanities in Place grants.

Morgan’s digitization and sculpture project falls within the Foundation’s Critical Collections initiative, which supports the preservation and accessibility of museum collections. With the resources received from the Mellon Foundation, the University will train students to inventory and digitize approximately 2,500 pieces of artwork housed and overseen by JELMA, including flat art: 2D and 3D wall hangings such as paintings, sculptures, photography, prints, documents and manuscripts. The intention of the project is to create an incubator to empower students with practical technical innovative media skills, advancing their emergence as digital communications experts, all the while preserving and maintaining Morgan’s art assets.

The effort also includes re-creation of a sculpture by renowned artist Melvin Edwards, a pioneer in the history of contemporary African American art and sculpture. Edwards’ art reflects his engagement with the history of race, labor and violence, as well as with themes of the African diaspora, using welding as his preferred medium to produce creative works steeped in abstraction and minimalism. The new sculpture will be fabricated from steel and installed on Morgan’s campus.

The Foundation also awarded a $50,000 grant to Morgan to support public exhibitions of place-based research, art and design projects and community programming. The Morgannale project serves as a pilot primer. The inaugural exhibitions produced under this initiative focus on improving the Park Heights neighborhood in Baltimore and are planned as an alternate course of study linking Morgan and Baltimore City communities. The project aims to connect Morgan students with multigenerational community members and urban farmers engaged in repairing open places to conduct urban farming. The area, which serves as the site of the Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm, was selected to enable Morgan to build on the success of an existing collaboration among urban farmers, community members and Morgan State University students.

This past summer, students from the University’s School of Architecture and Planning constructed and erected information panels illustrating their proposed designs for visionary modifications at the sites of intervention. The Plantation Park Heights urban farmers are repairing vacant open spaces and attracting dedicated volunteers who are themselves often looking to the farm for healing.

In addition to the aforementioned grants, to date, the Mellon Foundation has supported a variety of Morgan humanities initiatives, including: 

• A $500,000 grant to launch Black Queer…Everything, a pioneering initiative that seeks to enrich the discourse of race and racialization nationwide with a specialized focus on the interplay of racialized Blackness in relationship to the rich tapestry of sexual orientations and gender identities woven into the human experience (2023).
• A $150,000 grant to support the Art of Urban Ag: Growing an Art of Urban Ag Academy, a novel initiative focused on improving the quality of life in the Park Heights community by growing a model for healthy communities through humanities- and arts-based approaches to land, food and sustainability (2023).
• A $530,000 grant to launch “Breaking the M.O.L.D.,” a collaborative initiative to address a lack of diverse leadership in higher education — including underrepresentation of women and Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaskan Native arts and humanities faculty in college and university leadership (2021).
• A $110,000 grant for emergency student support to bridge the financial crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and to assist Morgan’s efforts to stabilize enrollments for the academic year (2020).
• A $375,000 grant to fund the development of a new degree minor in African American and African Diaspora Studies, which examines the full embodiment of the African and Black diaspora and launch the Africana Film Festival at Morgan (2017).$1 million in grants, two individual awards of $500,000, to support the establishment and continued operation of the Benjamin A. Quarles Humanities and Social Sciences Institute within Morgan’s College of Liberal Arts (2018, 2015).

About Morgan
Morgan State University, founded in 1867, is a Carnegie-classified high research (R2) institution offering more than 150 academic degree and certificate programs leading to degrees from the baccalaureate to the doctorate. As Maryland’s Preeminent Public Urban Research University, and the only university to have its entire campus designated as a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Morgan serves a multiethnic and multiracial student body and seeks to ensure that the doors of higher education are opened as wide as possible to as many as possible. For more information about Morgan State University, visit www.morgan.edu.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.

# # #

Media Contacts:
Larry Jones or Dell Jackson, for Morgan State University PR
443-885-3022