With a scant few exceptions, Minnesota isn't known for cranking out Oscar-winning directors. But Jerome Hill took an Academy Award back in 1957 for his documentary on Albert Schweitzer. He also took the enormous wealth he inherited from his grandfather, St. Paul railroad magnate James J. Hill, and funneled it into a foundation to help young artists willing to take a few risks.

Now, to mark the centennial of his birth, the Walker Art Center this week presents an exhibition celebrating his film work and his support of emerging artists.

Hill took up painting, music and photography and organized performing arts festivals before focusing his attention on cinema. His film on the Nobel Prize-winning medical missionary Schweitzer won a best documentary feature, and his cinematic diary "Film Portrait" received its world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in October 1972, a month before his death.

Through his legacy, the Jerome Foundation, Hill continued his longtime support of creative artists in Minnesota and New York City, with a special emphasis on cutting-edge media work.

Over the past 40 years, Hill's foundation has donated $63.5 million to up-and-coming artists including Spike Lee and Todd Haynes, the Oregon-based director of the environmental thriller "Safe," the rock drama "Velvet Goldmine" and "Far From Heaven," 2002's Oscar-nominated study of racial and sexual bigotry in 1950s America.

Haynes will be at the Walker on Saturday night to discuss his work and the Jerome Foundation's role in launching his career. He will take questions between the 7 p.m. screening of "Far From Heaven" and before the 10 p.m. showing of his first feature, "Poison," an AIDS-themed avant-garde horror-comedy, made in part with a Jerome Foundation grant.

"I'm not sure what would have happened to my career without that assistance," Haynes recalled in a phone conversation. "That experience really changed my mind about the kinds of films people really could deal with and were interested in dealing with. I found that there were different audiences for different kinds of work, and that's really what's propelled my career."

As a rising moviemaker, he relied on artists' grants to finance his first large-scale film, he said. His 1987 debut, "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" dramatized the late singer's life with Barbie and Ken dolls, achieving enormous notoriety but negligible commercial returns.

In the early 1990s, Haynes said, there were more venues for alternative films and more grants available. It was a struggle to find the resources, he said, "but when you did it came with a kind of freedom because you were not making the film with money that came from the film industry," which is always looking for a profit on its investment, he said. "That was really liberating for me."

But funding from the National Endowment for the Arts grew politicized as some artists used their money to create work that offended many viewers, and voters. "Poison" won the grand prize at the Sundance Film festival, but its NEA funding became a point of contention; when the movie's gay themes aroused controversy, Haynes found himself in TV debates with Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed and Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas.

"It was never my intention to make a crossover mainstream film," he said, "but when people came to see whether it was pornography, I found that audiences could deal very easily with the structure of the film, three seemingly unconnected stories intercutting, which I thought was far more challenging than the content. More than anything, that's what made me feel like I could continue making features."

The NEA took a 40 percent budget cut in the mid-1990s, and Capitol Hill conservatives are pressing to eliminate the agency. At the same time, many wealthy patrons have reexamined their priorities and are less inclined to fund the arts. It's regrettable, Haynes said.

"Our culture does not prioritize the arts as much as it should in any avenue, be it education or public funding. Great societies are remembered by the art and personal expression they leave behind. When you look at the amazing film cultures in Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe, where they're highly subsidized by the government, they're responsible for amazing careers, and largely mainstream voices in film: Jane Campion, David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan. They don't wind up being elitist bastions of leftist art, but part of the spectrum of expression in an open society where we value free expression."

Forty years on, it seems, the Jerome Foundation is more valuable than ever.