The New Museum announced that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded it $500,000 in support of scholarship in contemporary art. The grant, which is among three new scholarship initiatives at the museum, will be awarded over three years and will support a research fellow position along with seminars on developing issues in contemporary art. Awardees will work under artistic director Massimiliano Gioni and curator of education and public engagement Johanna Burton.

The Mellon grant will also go to support the relaunch of the museum’s Critical Anthology Series, for which it will partner with MIT Press. The series, which debuted in 1984 and ran through 2004, included titles that helped shape the the critical discourse at the time such as Art after Modernism and Blasted Allegories. The new books will be produced together with the new research and scholarship emerging from the scholar residencies, the seminar series, and the public conferences. Burton will be the series editor and the first volume, co-edited by Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, will be Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century.

The grant we’re the most excited about, however, is the MX Curatorial Travel Fund. Honoring Gioni, the museum’s jet-setting artistic director whose direction of the Venice Biennale last year was met with widespread praise, a group of trustees have pooled together over $300,000 for this fund, which will support the museum’s curators in their global research and to expand their network.

International artists are already essential to the museum’s programming. In the last five years, according to the museum’s release, the museum has shown 540 international artists from over 76 countries. International research has also helped curators organize shows like the current “Here and Elsewhere,” a survey of contemporary art from the Arab world. Lead gifts for the fund were made by Shelley Fox Aarons and Phil Aarons, Toby Devan Lewis, Lonti Ebers and Bruce Flatt, Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg, Susan and Leonard Feinstein, Charlotte Ford, Lietta and Dakis Joannou, Joan and Charles Lazarus, and Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis.