On November 20, 2020, at the presentation ceremony of the Mécénat Awards 2020 held by the Association for Corporate Support of the Arts at the Hamamatsucho Convention Hall (Minato-ku, Tokyo), the Kajima Foundation for the Arts received the Mécénat Grand Award for sponsoring the Kajima Foundation for the Arts Awards.
Established in 1991, the Mécénat Awards honors companies and corporate foundations for outstanding activities in social creativity that are based on promotion of the arts and culture. This public commendation program aims to further enhance these activities by presenting awards.

Since 1994, the Kajima Foundation for the Arts has annually offered Kajima Foundation for the Arts Awards to research projects that produced extraordinary results with the grants given by the foundation every year. The foundation also holds workshops. These awards are currently seen as a major presence in the Japanese art community, and have helped many laureates obtain positions at universities and research institutions, or secure proposals to write books and deliver lectures. In this way, the awards bring a large leap to giving young researchers great leaps.

The awards are highly esteemed for having supported research in the arts for many years, for its contributions in nurturing young researchers, for bringing the spotlight to many talented people who support the art community, for improving the quality of research, and for contributing to the development of art culture as a whole.

* The Kajima Foundation for the Arts was established in 1982 and provides chiefly young and mid-level art researchers across Japan with grants for research in the arts, related publications, international exchange, and projects to deliver art lectures, aiming to nurture the arts and enrich Japanese culture. It has provided some 2,600 grants (2.06 billion yen in total) for 40 years since its establishment.