MELLON FOUNDATION HEAD ELIZABETH ALEXANDER ON THE TRAYVON GENERATION AND THE POWER OF MONUMENTS
POETRY IS RARELY A PAYING GIG. NEVER HAS been. John Donne was a priest. Langston Hughes was a newspaper columnist and a lecturer. William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician. But it’s possible that Elizabeth Alexander has taken the day job to a whole new level: she’s currently the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the biggest U.S. nonprofit dedicated to the arts and humanities. Its endowment sits at about $9 billion.
Having a poetry insider at the head of a big grantmaking institute does not mean, however, that poets have moved to the front of the line for funding. Alexander has a much more ambitious vision for the role that the arts and culture play in the formation of society. And during the It’s a series of meditations on cultural and artistic artifacts that illuminate “the color line,” which she identifies as “a fundamental, formative, and constitutive problem” in the U.S., and on the role the arts and humanities play in both drawing and erasing that line. Alexander is like a cultural archaeologist, dusting off and examining relics and shedding new light on the society that produced them. Except in this case, the relics are still in use.
