Anyone who still needs to be convinced about the current state of systemic racial inequities in our country need to look no further than the Pittsburgh arts scene for evidence. In 2018, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council reported that white-led organizations received 86% of the $318 million in private grantmaking awarded from 2003 to 2017. More recently, the Arts Council reported that just over 69% of Black artists and 50% of respondents from BIPOC-led arts organizations said that the area’s arts funding isn’t equitable.
Those numbers are seriously disappointing, but they’re not the end of the story. Good news arrived last month with the announcement of $3.2 million in capacity-building grants for 16 Black-led Pittsburgh arts organizations, courtesy of Phase II of the Pittsburgh’s Cultural Treasures Initiative, a joint $10 million partnership between the Heinz Endowments and the Ford Foundation’s America’s Cultural Treasures initiative. The latest announcement from the initiative follows 2021’s commitment to provide $5.4 million to 16 Black-led arts groups, including unrestricted grants ranging from $150,000 to $1 million. Phase II grantees were each awarded $10,000 in unrestricted grants and will also be provided with “learning opportunities, coaching and workshops, and shared experiences with peers.”
As my colleague Mike Scutari reported in 2020, Ford’s Cultural Treasures initiative is a one-time “moonshot” effort conceived during the first year of COVID-19 to help BIPOC-led arts groups survive the pandemic, and hopefully, to lay the groundwork for long-term sustainability. In Pittsburgh, Ford and Heinz are working in collaboration with the POISE Foundation, a small, Black-led funder launched in 1980 by Bernard H. Jones.
The national initiative targets BIPOC-led arts groups and BIPOC artists generally, while the Pittsburgh effort is currently focused entirely on Black-led cultural institutions. A Heinz Endowments spokesperson said that the local effort targets Black nonprofits because Black individuals make up the largest community of color in southwestern Pennsylvania, and to honor the importance of Black cultural history in the region. However, Heinz intends to expand the work to other arts and cultural groups led by people of color in the future.
In order to fund Black-led nonprofits, though, first, the initiative’s organizers had to find them. Shaunda McDill, who served as a program officer for arts and culture at Heinz from 2017 up until last month, coordinated the initiative for Heinz, and said that the funder didn’t originally have a long list of Black organizations to choose from, so the initiative’s first task was to work its existing network and open up online nominations to compile the eventual list of 160 Black-led groups that comprised the initial cohort of potential grantees. Even with those efforts, she said, “I still don’t think the list was exhaustive.” McDill became the managing director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater, a Heinz grantee outside of the Cultural Treasures program, last month.
The next step was to recruit a steering committee of community participants to advise the process, though Heinz reserved the right to make final choices about grant winners and amounts.
Beyond moving money to grantees, the initiative used additional money from Heinz to launch an ambitious marketing project on behalf of the nonprofits that included hiring a PR firm, a photographer, and writers to produce stories about them. Unfortunately, McDill said the PR effort didn’t garner the kind of response she was hoping for. “I think there were a lot of moving pieces and people became overwhelmed,” she said.
A history of supporting diverse arts organizations
The Cultural Treasures partnership may be a new program for Heinz, but this is far from the first time the funder has moved money to support diversity in the arts. In fact, Heinz supported a multicultural arts organization starting in 1988; in 2010, Heinz partnered with the Pittsburgh Foundation to fund the Advancing Black Art in Pittsburgh initiative. Heinz also provided representation and funding leading to the Pittsburgh Arts Council’s 2018 “Race Equity & Arts Funding In Greater Pittsburgh” report. Arts equity is part of Heinz’s overall focus on racial equity, which, according to the funder, is a natural outgrowth of the concept of a “Just Pittsburgh” which it first introduced in 2016.
Granted, the Pittsburgh Cultural Treasures Initiative’s $10 million isn’t going to tip the scales toward arts funding equity in the area by itself. At the same time, though, the fact remains that Pittsburgh’s arts leaders are at least doing the hard work of measuring, and publishing, the uphill battle that BIPOC artists face in trying to fund their work and organizations. Heinz’s several-decade commitment to supporting diversity is also a welcome sign. So while the question of whether or not Pittsburgh’s arts funders at large will embrace racial equity is an open one, there’s at least reason for cautious optimism that the answer will eventually be positive.
