This year the gallery at the Ford Foundation – which Walker shepherded as president until handing the office over to Gerken in November – hosted group show THIS IS NOT A RETREAT! It was an exhibition of residents from NXTHVN, the Connecticut arts space, but the title could be taken as a new rallying call by the grant-making organisation. Utilising a 1936 endowment from Henry and Edsel Ford, but now against a backdrop in which – former Yale Law School dean Gerken wrote in her introductory letter – ‘the winds of polarization have reached gale force’, the foundation continues with equality as its ‘touchstone’. Walker, and now Gerken it seems, possess the political appetite and, with a $609m annual funding budget, the means to offer a resistance against the so-called war on woke. The themes championed by their grantees are wide-ranging, from disability rights to democratic governance; arts organisations enjoy a considerable chunk of the generosity: from the $1m the foundation gave Mississippi Museum of Art in July, to the $100,000 it awarded New York’s Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in February.

*Darren Walker was 37 on the 2024 Power 100 list.