Mellon Foundation Awards Walker Art Center $1 Million For Interdisciplinary Arts Initiative

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced that it has awarded the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with a $1 million grant that will go toward underwriting the center’s forty-two-month interdisciplinary initiative, which will focus on the intersection between performing arts, performance, and visual art.

Nine new events will be commissioned by the center from artists working across a wide range of media, such as Laure Prouvost, Maria Hassabi, and Jason Moran. The money will also be used to help identify new ways of collecting, conserving, documenting, and archiving cross-disciplinary works, as well as broaden the scholarship surrounding this kind of artmaking. A presentation of this research will take place at the Walker sometime in 2019.

The initiative will be led by Fionn Meade, the Walker’s artistic director, and Philip Bither, the William and Nadine McGuire director and senior curator of performing arts. Two new fellowship posts will be created for the initiative, and Adrienne Edwards, visual arts curator at large, will support the curatorial team.