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Paula Marincola, Executive Director, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Photo by Julia Lehman.

Dear friends of the Center, 

At The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, our commitment to making Philadelphia a vibrant, widely recognized hub for dynamic cultural experiences is embodied in our multidisciplinary grant making and our knowledge-sharing activities.

In 2022, the Center awarded more than $9.5 million to support the region’s artists and cultural organizations through 12 Pew Fellowships and 30 Project grants. Following our pivot last year to recovery funding for organizations, we return this year to project-based support for public programs and events, while our Fellowships for Philadelphia artists continue into their 31st year.

In addition to our grant-making work, the Center is a hub for ongoing dialogue on issues relevant to contemporary practice and interpretation. Through our Questions of Practice research series, we engage with leading cultural practitioners and artists from around the world, publishing a wide range of interviews and commissioned essays, delving into topics such as evolving approaches to audience engagement, curating now, and social and community-based practices. In 2021, we held lively discussions on the work being done to restore Black cultural presence, expand content, and reimagine access through the Archiving Black Culture series, led by our Visiting Scholar Linda Earle.

Additionally, our in-depth publications include Site Read: Seven Curators on Their Landmark Exhibitions (2020), The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory (2018) and In Terms of Performance (2016).

Beginning with our first funding program established more than three decades ago, the Center has been privileged to support work by an extraordinary and diverse constituency of practitioners—from major civic institutions and community-based organizations to independent artists.

I encourage you to further explore our website to experience all that the Center and our cultural community have to offer, follow along on social media @PewCenterArts, and sign up for our newsletter.

Paula Marincola 
Executive Director