The Henry Luce Foundation is pleased to announce more than $5,700,000 in grants to 21 organizations. Through these grants, the Foundation seeks to enrich public discourse by supporting the creation and dissemination of knowledge, the establishment of collaborative networks across disciplines and geographies, and the amplification of diverse narratives and experiences.
The grants awarded by the Foundation’s programs are described below, with links to the full list of grantees.
View the full list of new grants
The American Art Program (AAP) awarded ten grants for innovative museum projects, including a major grant to the Baltimore Museum of Art for its new accessibility-focused Prints, Drawings and Photographs Center. Two grants will support the reimagining of permanent collection presentations. The inaugural installation at the new Shaker Museum will center around the Shaker values of equality and inclusion, and the Peabody Essex Museum will place its American and Native American collections in dialogue with one another. The AAP continues its work in collection-based exhibitions with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's retrospective of Venezuelan-American Pop Art sculptor Marisol and the Cheekwood Museum’s survey of African-American folk sculptor William Edmondson.
With a growing focus on projects that explore, celebrate, and increase access to art by people of color, two of the American Art Program’s newest grants demonstrate its commitment to advancing greater representation and equity across all facets of museum work. Building on their recent Luce-funded achievements in which they set new standards for equitable museum practices, the Mississippi Museum of Art and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are the first two grantees in the AAP's new Museum Partners for Social Justice Project, a strategic effort that will bring museums into dialogue to explore, develop, and disseminate representation- and equity-based project models for use by the wider museum community.
Finally, Western Kentucky University Museum, Denver Art Museum, and Tougaloo College received follow-up grants for projects that were only partially supported in 2020 due to the Foundation’s reallocation of funds for emergency grants.
View the new American Art grants
The five grants awarded by the Asia Program align with its aims to increase awareness and understanding of Asia in American public discourse and to create opportunities for constructive dialogue and scholarly engagement across nations, disciplines and sectors.
Grants to China Dialogue Trust and Claremont McKenna College will develop resources on the intersection of Asia and the environment. Collaboration and connection among individuals and institutions are at the center of two grants with a focus on Southeast Asia. The New York Southeast Asia Network at Columbia University—a vibrant community of scholars, artists, journalists, and activists—will receive renewed funding to support network partnerships and activities, and the Asian Cultural Council will launch a new fellowship program offering cultural exchange opportunities to artists and arts organizations.
Finally, the Genron NPO will encourage dialogue among scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders from Japan, Korea, China and the United States as they work to promote peace and security in Northeast Asia.
The Initiative on Native American Intellectual Leadership awarded a single grant to First Nations Development Institute to provide supplemental support to the first cohort of Indigenous Knowledge Fellows who were forced to adapt their fellowship experiences due to challenging and restrictive circumstances caused by the pandemic.
View the new Native American Leadership grants
The Public Policy Program made a grant to the Public Leadership Education Network (PLEN) that will provide renewed support for the Women in Global Policy Program, a series of seminars that empower college women with knowledge, skills, and networks to help them succeed in global policy careers.
View the new Public Policy grants
A grant from the Religion and Theology program to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) will support a new initiative that seeks to advance public knowledge of religion in the service of healing and strengthening American democracy. The initiative will support collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship through a new fellows program, supporting research and the development of public-facing work across four areas: religious pluralism, racial justice, immigration, and LGBTQ rights.
View the new Religion and Theology grants
Since its launch in 2005, the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs (HRLI) has supported research, reporting, and collaborative exchange to enhance public understanding of the role of religion in global affairs.
The first of HRLI’s three new grants will fund a project at the University of California, Berkeley, to examine the fault lines of citizenship, religion, and belonging in South Asia, in collaboration with Stanford University and civil society collectives in India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A grant to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will support a study on how religious, social, economic, and political forces are likely to be reconfigured in the post-pandemic Middle East. And a project at Lancaster University will examine the contestation of sectarian identities and the emergence of protest movements in the Middle East, with a focus on Bahrain, Iraq and Lebanon.
View the new Religion in International Affairs grants
