2021 Grant Announcement: Scrolling Hero Carousel

Re:imagining Recovery

Introducing our 2021 Grantees

2021 Grant Announcement: Intro

How is the Philadelphia region’s arts and culture sector envisioning a more sustainable future following the challenges of COVID-19? Our newest grants fund the forward-thinking work of imagining recovery and realizing transformation in artistic and organizational practices.

Totaling more than $10.2 million, our 2021 grants support artists through Pew Fellowships, while Re:imagining Recovery grants help cultural organizations undertake critical adaptations as they emerge from the effects of the pandemic—bringing new perspectives on how the arts can be revitalized and play a key role in the resurgence of the region’s civic and economic vitality.

The Center is delighted to continue our support for the cultural community as it provides the public with essential platforms for artistic experiences and meaningful connection.

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2021 Grant Announcement: Stats Bar

By the Numbers

$10,274,610

Awarded through 42 grants

Re:imagining Recovery grants

Pew Fellowships in the Arts

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“Pandemic-related closures forced us to reconsider our delivery methods in order to sustain the educational programming that is central to the Barnes’ mission. With this grant support, we now have a unique opportunity to take a bold and intentional move toward expanding our mission-related service, creating a new earned revenue model, and transforming approaches to online arts education.”

—THOM COLLINS, NEUBAUER FAMILY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND PRESIDENT, THE BARNES FOUNDATION

2021 Grant Announcement: Recovery Grant 1

See the Arts Community’s Plans for a Sustainable Future

Re:imagining Recovery grants are designed to help organizations undertake critical adaptations needed to stabilize operations, reshape business and revenue models, and develop new approaches to programming and public engagement practices. These new grants are awarded in amounts up to $400,000 for a single organization, plus an additional 20% in unrestricted general operating support, bringing the maximum for a grant to $480,000.

Technology Broadens Possibilities for Programming & Audience Relationships

African American Museum in Philadelphia
In service of its mission to foster greater appreciation of the Black experience through art, culture, and historical witness, AAMP will expand its digital strategies to make its live programming and exhibitions, as well as newly created content, more fully available online. Two new staff positions will support these efforts, which aim to meet and exceed the museum’s pre-pandemic audience reach and generate new opportunities for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) scholars and artists.

Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture
A newly renovated multimedia room in Al-Bustan's West Philadelphia offices will function as a community resource, enhance the organization’s media production and online programming capacity, and create new revenue opportunities. Live-streaming, video production and editing, and sound mixing capabilities will provide the tools for Al-Bustan to develop its own arts and culture news programming, serving larger audiences and building its reputation as an Arab American cultural center.

The Barnes Foundation
The Barnes plans to expand its online learning platform to produce and distribute arts education programs for pre-K–grade-12 students and adults. Virtual programs developed during the pandemic drew large and diverse audiences from the Philadelphia region and around the world. Now, research and analysis of current online education offerings and learners’ needs will inform a next-generation digital platform that will increase access to educational content and create a new earned revenue model.

BlackStar Projects
The creation of a customized online platform will enable BlackStar to present its film screenings, live conversations, and other programs to a global community of BIPOC filmmakers, artists, critics, and film audiences. Building on the substantial regional and international reach of the organization’s online-only film festival during the pandemic, the platform will prioritize a high-quality and inclusive user experience that encompasses language translation and interpretation, American Sign Language, captioning, and audio descriptions.

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A drive-in film screening during the 2020 BlackStar Film Festival, West Fairmount Park. Photo by Daniel Jackson.

The College of Physicians/Mütter Museum
The development of a user-friendly online catalogue will widen access to the Mütter Museum’s medical history collection for museum audiences, artists, and researchers in Philadelphia and around the world. The digital database will help address the museum’s limited physical capacity by offering images of and information on 15,000 specimens, greatly increasing what can be displayed beyond the gallery spaces. This new collection management software will help staff develop timely programs that explore current health events through a historical and social lens.

Philadelphia Folklore Project
Reorganized staff structures, along with new technological capacity, will strengthen Philadelphia Folklore Project’s mission to sustain the vitality of folklife and living cultural heritage through collaborative community archives and multimedia storytelling projects. Upgraded digital tools and a newly envisioned folk art and social change fellowship will focus on digital humanities and asset management to reinforce the organization’s role as a secure and accessible archive for local history and culture.

Philadelphia Museum of Art
A fresh approach to digital storytelling practices will involve community members as content co-creators in ways that deepen connections to the PMA’s collections and the stories they hold. Focus groups and co-creation sessions will help establish ongoing structures for audience-driven collaborations and diverse representation of local artists and makers. A newly created content director position, along with improved video production capabilities, will support inclusive methods for developing video and text-based narratives as part of the museum’s nascent “division of digital resources and content strategy.”

Please Touch Museum
In response to young learners’ increased technology use during the pandemic, PTM will translate its “learning through play” education model into digital experiences. The children’s museum will establish a new digital engagement director position, purchase media production equipment, and gather input from technology and business consultants, educators, and families. This work will help form an infrastructure to launch an online educational platform that will sustain relationships with audiences beyond the museum’s walls.

PRISM Quartet
Evaluators will study PRISM’s online educational program—an offering the contemporary saxophone ensemble piloted during the pandemic—to assess its effectiveness, impact, and potential to serve a wider audience. This research will determine a strategy for making a digital curriculum a source of sustainable revenue for the organization and for expanding learning and mentorship opportunities in new and experimental music, arts administration, and concert and record production.

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“Our organizational resilience relies on our ability to continually listen and respond to the needs and ideas of our Fairhill-Hartranft neighbors. Our new gallery will serve as a hub for interchange between the Village and our neighborhood. It is an equitable, long-term investment in combating the erasure of Black neighborhoods, communities, and artists.”

—AVIVA KAPUST, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE VILLAGE OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES

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Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, & Inclusion Initiatives Transform Organizational Practices

Institute of Contemporary Art
ICA will engage its staff, board, community, and consultants in a strategic visioning process, centered on diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) themes, that will guide its internal processes and future curatorial, public engagement, and fundraising efforts. A revised mission statement and organizational plan will consider how this venue for contemporary art and culture can become more welcoming, relevant, and responsive to the local and global communities it serves.

Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia
Through a restructuring of its approach to its cultural festivals, such as the popular annual Cherry Blossom Festival, JASGP will evaluate and reaffirm its commitment to “mutual curiosity, understanding, and collaboration.” With a focus on DEAI values, the organization intends to make its programming a more inclusive conduit of transcultural understanding to deepen relationships with and connections between Asian American and Black communities.

Mural Arts Philadelphia
Mural Arts will cultivate strategies for recruiting and sustaining long-term relationships with BIPOC artists. The country’s largest public art program will work with consultants, staff, artists, curators, and community members to advance diversity and antiracist frameworks in participatory public works. It will also hire a new full-time artist relations director to ensure implementation of new policies and practices and focus on developing opportunities for artists.

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Russell Craig and Jesse Krimes, Portraits of Justice, 2018, Municipal Services Building, Philadelphia, PA. Photo by Steve Weinik, courtesy of Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Opera Philadelphia
Opera Philadelphia will refine its artistic and organizational operations and center the company around an equity and inclusion lens as it moves to engage diverse audiences and artists in advancing opera as an art form. To inform this work, the company will employ consultants on antiracist and restorative practices, create new staff roles to elevate equity-focused work at the senior level, invest in professional development for staff and board members, and convene community advisory councils on artistry, access, and the intersectionality of race and culture.

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Input from audiences, community members, and musicians will inform the Orchestra’s efforts to create a more inclusive organization as it advances internal cultural transformation. Additionally, the Orchestra will seek to broaden its relevance and reach and enhance the audience experience of both digital and concert hall programs by upgrading the performance lighting system and enabling the integration of video content in performances at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall.

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Opera Philadelphia, Cycles of My Being, 2021. Pictured: violinist Randall Mitsuo Goosby. Photo by Dominic M. Mercier.

Pig Iron Theatre Company
Pig Iron will hire its first director of a new digital, film, and interactive initiative to lead the experimental theater company’s extension into digital content creation, bridging live performance and media-based artmaking while also generating alternative revenue sources. This initiative—in conjunction with an advisory group focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion—will establish channels of leadership and interdisciplinary collaboration for BIPOC artists as the company works to realize forward thinking and equitable artistic and business practices.

Theatre Horizon
The formation of a community advisory board will support Theatre Horizon in bolstering relationships with its Norristown neighbors, increasing the diversity of its audiences, and deepening its commitment to being an antiracist theater company. Additionally, the company will design a more visible, welcoming, and accessible theater entrance and building exterior and develop strategies for virtual events that complement the experience of live theater.

The Village of Arts and Humanities
With involvement from its surrounding North Philadelphia neighbors, the Village will modify its main cultural building to include a new hybrid indoor-outdoor gallery that will expand space for exhibitions and arts-based community development programs. To support this programming, the organization will increase community participation in the curation of exhibitions that preserve and amplify Black histories and expression and will design a training program that places Black young adults in jobs as art handlers and installers.

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“Our vision is to be a vibrant arts hub that provides equal and excellent services and accessibility to all who enter our building. Our recovery project will creatively reimagine the design and use of our space to serve and grow our constituencies and reinvigorate our business model.”

—NICK STUCCIO, PRESIDENT & PRODUCING DIRECTOR, FRINGEARTS

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Facility Upgrades Enhance Health, Safety, & Visitor Services

The Clay Studio
The Clay Studio will modify a roof deck and street-level community pavilion at its new 32,500-square-foot Kensington facility to create more year-round usable space. With increased use of these outdoor areas, along with a new staff position to coordinate events and community activities, the organization will boost earned revenue and safely expand attendance capacity for both paid and free classes, workshops, and events that serve international and regional professional artists, children, adult learners, and neighborhood residents.

FringeArts
FringeArts will redesign its performance space to improve accessibility and comfort for patrons, maximize operational efficiency, and increase earned revenue. Planned renovations include a reconfigured theater entrance and gender-neutral restrooms. Working with design and architecture consultants, the organization will analyze the use of space and patron flow in its facility, which serves as a central contemporary arts hub on the Delaware River waterfront.

Mann Center for the Performing Arts
Upgrades to the Mann Center’s 45-year-old heating, ventilation, and air filtration systems—in its underground backstage area and on the main pavilion stage—will allow the Fairmount Park amphitheater to safely expand the scope of its artistic programming. As part of a new master plan for capital improvements, these updates to air quality systems will provide a healthier and more comfortable environment for artists and audiences to experience performances in an intimate new presenting space contained within the pavilion’s proscenium stage.

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BalletX onstage at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, 2021. Photo courtesy of the Mann Center for the Performing Arts.

National Constitution Center
Significant audio-visual enhancements in the Constitution Center’s three largest public spaces will augment delivery of the museum’s programs on timely constitutional issues for both on-site and online audiences, which encompass students, teachers, and adult learners from throughout the US. These new technological capabilities are projected to make the venue more appealing to rental clients and press outlets, supporting new revenue streams and strengthening the institution's role as a prominent location for regional and national media events.

People’s Light
People’s Light will remodel public and backstage areas of its mainstage theater to more safely and comfortably accommodate performers and audiences, laying the groundwork to meet long-term inclusion and accessibility goals. Renovations will include new covered outdoor space for guests, reconfigured seats and lighting to create wider and better lit theater aisles, and improvements to ventilation, dressing rooms, and restrooms. An accompanying feasibility study conducted in collaboration with architects and community members will inform future changes to the company’s seven-acre suburban campus.

Philadelphia Chamber Music Society
Acoustical enhancements and the creation of a livestreaming production room will support in-person and online performances at the American Philosophical Society’s Benjamin Franklin Hall. In partnership with the Philosophical Society, PCMS will also build a portable stage extension to increase flexibility for ensemble sizes and presentations, redesign stage lighting, renovate backstage space, and install an ADA–compliant front entrance.

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David Lutken, Nyssa Duchow, and Christine Lyons backstage of the Blue Ridge Nightingale outdoor workshop at People's Light. Photo by Ryan Collerd.

Philadelphia Theatre Company
PTC will convert a presently unfinished 2,800-square-foot space on the second floor of its building into a multifunctional studio, supporting the company’s development of new theater work and serving as a complement to its proscenium mainstage. A new heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system will create a healthy and safe environment for artists, staff, community partners, and rental clients to hold rehearsals, in-progress play readings, and other activities.

The Woodlands Trust for Historic Preservation
The Woodlands will add a variety of site amenities to accommodate an influx of new visitors who sought an outdoor gathering place during the pandemic and discovered the historic site’s 54 acres of green space in West Philadelphia. A mobile visitor services station will serve as a box office, welcome center, and gift shop that the Woodlands can deploy anywhere on its grounds, while the installation of lighting, wayfinding signs, and outdoor audio-visual equipment will expand the organization’s capacity for event hosting, generating new revenue.

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“The pandemic exposed myriad challenges and also offered us an opportunity to double down on our values, to create an equitable and sustainable path forward for Asian Arts Initiative in service of our community. The grant from the Center will help us improve our physical space and augment our ability to serve artists and organizational partners.”

—ANNE ISHII, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ASIAN ARTS INITIATIVE

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New Business Models Diversify Revenue & Strengthen Operations

COLLABORATIVE PROJECT
Cliveden of the National Trust, Historic Germantown, & Stenton
A collaboration between three organizations will consider how an 18-member consortium of historic sites in Northwest Philadelphia can leverage shared resources to strengthen community relationships. The cooperative effort will develop strategies for in-person and virtual programs, upgrade members’ technological capabilities, and produce a new website to showcase offerings from Historic Germantown sites. Additionally, two new community engagement managers based at Cliveden and Stenton will support collective learning and sharing of ideas between neighborhood residents and staff. This work will inform long-term planning that reinforces connections among the consortium’s historic houses, museums, and other sites related to the Underground Railroad, Revolutionary War battles, and more.

Asian Arts Initiative
Asian Arts Initiative will work with a team of consultants to develop a building master plan for its multi-tenant arts facility, which serves as a community anchor in Chinatown North. Balancing a mission-aligned, equitable real estate model with opportunities for sustainable revenue generation, the plan will fortify AAI’s building operations to provide an accessible space to gather, teach, and make art that speaks to the diverse experiences of Asian Americans.

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Visitors listen to Eastern State Penitentiary’s audio tour. Photo courtesy of Eastern State Penitentiary.

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site
As a result of audience and market research, Eastern State will reimagine its business model to develop and promote programming aligned with its mission to interpret the United States’ legacy of criminal justice reform. This data-driven approach will identify opportunities to grow the historic prison site’s audience, increase regional awareness of its social justice education programming, and diversify revenue potential.

The Fabric Workshop and Museum
An initiative supported by consultants with expertise in retail, e-commerce, and web design strategies, as well as a new staff position that will coordinate commercial studio endeavors, will aim to bolster the earning potential of both FWM and artists. The extended capacity for studio collaborations with artists will allow the organization to create and sell limited-edition artworks and other merchandise related to its exhibitions, artist residencies, and permanent collection.

Scribe Video Center
New staff positions and media production equipment will enable Scribe to revamp its workshop curriculum, offer more virtual programming, and advance its role as a resource for artists and community makers in telling their stories through film and video. With guidance from curriculum and marketing consultants, Scribe will seek to strengthen its organizational infrastructure while examining and refining its business model, audience outreach practices, and processes for program delivery, teaching, and media production support.

2021 Grant Announcement: Fellows Header

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“The Pew Fellowship will give me the space and time to work without restriction. As an artist, time, space, and peace of mind are essential to make major breakthroughs and take risks.”

—MARK THOMAS GIBSON, VISUAL ARTIST

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Emily Bate, Composer and vocalist
“I’m interested in reuniting people with their rightful inheritance as sound-makers and bringing us back together in communal music-making.”

Bate’s compositions and performances focus on group singing and blend elements of theater, performance art, and choral and experimental music. She founded and conducts Trust Your Moves, a 65-member queer community chorus centered on gender liberation and co-creation that performs and commissions work by queer and transgender composers.

Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Poet
“Though writing feels most often like a solitary act, when it is born into the world, it becomes a small part of our collective…My writing becomes a small part of the queer collective, of the trans experience, of the rural experience.”

Candrilli’s poetry balances transgender rights and environmental justice, informed by their experience as a trans person from rural America. Their work both interrogates “an inhospitable American landscape” for queer people and identifies and celebrates the joys of trans experience.

angel shanel edwards, Performance artist
“My work is what happens when there’s infinite space for uncompromised play, rest, rage, joy, and tenderness.”

Edwards creates work that ritualizes the mundane, embodying the textures of Black queer and transgender existence. Their movement, film, and writing practices reveal intimacy, rest, and community in domestic settings (a bedroom, a front porch), outdoors, and in performance spaces, paying close attention to overlooked joys and obligations of daily life in marginalized communities.

Rami George, Visual artist
“I’m interested in moments shared between the individual and the collective, when a body is marked by society, and inversely, when a body leaves a mark back.”

George’s practice turns an autobiographical lens on their Lebanese heritage, queer experience, and family history in a New Age spiritual community. Their mixed-media installations and video works draw from archives and family ephemera and use common materials such as plywood, plastic sheeting, and house paint.

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Pew Fellow Didier William, Ti Pisin, 2020; acrylic, oil, wood carving on panel; 50" x 62".

Mark Thomas Gibson, Visual artist
“Like an overextended peninsula at the edge of the world, my work acts as the soil between two bodies of water: Historical Truth and Personal Truth.”

Gibson chronicles race, class, and contemporary American culture with a historian’s eye on the past. His paintings, collages, prints, caricatures, graphic novels, and other visual works explore the potential of narrative art to provoke examinations of power structures and racism and to foster empathy.

Naomieh Jovin, Photographer
“I began my work as an artist in order to re-imagine and understand the body as a form outside of shame.”

Jovin’s work includes original photography as well as reappropriated images from family collections to contemplate her Haitian American identity, family history, spirituality, and the African diaspora. Her striking portraits converse with found photos of relatives, creating an expressive depiction of vulnerability and healing.

Rich Medina, DJ and interdisciplinary artist
“Like my familial forebears, I am a man of the pulpit myself, wholly committed to edifying the space through unmistakably Black musical and artistic expression.”

Medina approaches his DJ practice as an archivist, storyteller, educator, and “ambassador for Black excellence.” His live and online performances and programs—such as the “African American Culture and Music” lecture series for The Barnes Foundation—combine entertainment and education, amplifying Black diasporic ingenuity and musical traditions.

Brett Ashley Robinson, Theater artist
“I push beyond cultural comfort to a place of transformation, rejecting the catharsis of theater and instead inviting questions, confusion, and greater self-reflection.”

Robinson’s work blends physical ensemble performance, drag burlesque culture, documentary theater, and clowning. In participatory experiences designed for the theater as well as site-specific, community-based events, she invites audiences to reckon with history, examine their beliefs and perspectives, and engage with imaginative Black theater.

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“With the Pew Fellowship, I can facilitate collaborations with other Black theater makers to build radical theater centered around our own pleasure and curiosity. I will also deepen my connection to Philadelphia while expanding my network of collaborators nationally and internationally.”

—BRETT ASHLEY ROBINSON, THEATER ARTIST

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Kambel Smith, Sculptor
“I hope offering minute details in the sculptures will provide a level of engagement for people experiencing my work—to have people marvel and keep looking.”

Smith builds large-scale, highly detailed sculptural recreations of iconic architecture such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York's Chrysler Building, as well as more quotidian locations and structures of his own invention. He is interested in changing the perception of autism by “rebuilding the world with cardboard” and identifies as an “Autisarian,” a person with “superhuman abilities due to...autism.”

Didier William, Visual artist
“My surfaces—where the body is formed through cuts, stains, and the residue of historical narratives—become sites of convergence and collision, marking both the fragility and the persistence of Black humanity.”

William’s interweaving of painting and printmaking hovers between abstraction and figurative representation. Drawing from his Afro-Caribbean lineage, personal narrative, and mythology, his ethereal images of bodies obscure race and gender through intricate patterns and ornamentation.

Eva Wǒ, Visual artist
“My art is a spell, a manifestation of my dreams. I create multiplicitous and lawless landscapes where gravity is optional and nothing is as expected.”

Wǒ creates lush scenes of bold, fantastical joy in new media works that fuse photography, digital collage, GIF animation, and lenticular prints. Their vivid dreamscapes grapple with identity, representation, and belonging, portraying queer and trans people of color as protagonists in a utopian, futuristic vision.

Rashid Zakat, Filmmaker and artist
“Black social aliveness is the political imperative of my work, whereby I seek to create openings for audiences to be loud, to be enlivened, and to revel in the glory of communal excitement and civic joy.”

Zakat intermingles film, music, photography, and creative space-making in work that engages with Black social and spiritual life. His short films, documentaries, and music videos feature original content and archival material, including images of migration, worship, uprising, dance, and popular culture.

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Pew Fellow Kambel Smith at the Outsider Art Fair, New York, NY, 2019. Photo by Darian DiCianno, courtesy of the Elaine de Kooning House.

2021 Grant Announcement: Photo captions

Scrolling carousel: DIGSAU Architects digital rendering of The Roof Deck at The Clay Studio's new building, opening in November 2021; Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia's annual summer Obon lantern ceremony at Shofuso Japanese House and Garden, photo by Ryan Collerd; Karyn Olivier, Karyn Olivier: Everything That's Alive Moves, 2020, exhibition opening event, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, photo by Kait Privitera; Rashid Zakat, 2021 Pew Fellow, photo by Ryan Collerd; Ever Ensemble performs on the terrace of the Mansion at The Woodlands, photo by Ryan Collerd.

Hybrid class demonstration at The Barnes Foundation, Room 2. Photo by Ryan Collerd.

Sculpture: Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, On the Day They Come Home, 2021, part of Staying Power exhibition, The Village of Arts and Humanities, Fairhill-Hartranft neighborhood, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mural: Lily Yeh, Obatala, 2018. Photo courtesy of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

The exterior courtyard of FringeArts, Philadelphia, PA. Photo by Johanna Austin.

Asian Arts Initiative, Unity Within the Initiative capsule exhibition, 2021, Pearl Street view. Photo by Zsa Zsa Dali.

Mark Thomas Gibson, 2021 Pew Fellow. Photo by Ryan Collerd.

Brett Ashley Robinson, 2021 Pew Fellow. Photo by Ryan Collerd.