Pew Center for Arts and Heritage

Get our monthly newsletter in your inbox for the latest on cultural events, ideas, conversations, and grantmaking news in Philadelphia and beyond.

Main page contents

Center Publications

The Center produces in-depth web-based and print publications derived from our experience as cultural grantmakers. Discover diverse perspectives on evolving cultural practice in publications on topics such as exhibition making, cross-disciplinary approaches, restaging of performance works, and more.

Photography related to this content
Site Read: Seven Curators on Their Landmark Exhibitions

Site Read is an anthology of essays from exhibition makers who illuminate the site-based innovations in now-iconic exhibitions they organized.

Cries and Whispers, directed by Ivo van Hove. Pictured is Chris Nietveld. De Singel, Antwerp, March 16, 2009. Photograph © Jan Versweyveld.
The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory

The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory gathers the work of artists and cultural practitioners in dance, architecture, science, and the visual arts with essays that cross boundaries within and between disciplines, and illustrate how the body serves as a repository for knowledge.

Jérôme Bel, Le dernier spectacle (The last performance), 1998. Photo by Herman Sorgeloos.
In Terms of Performance, a Keywords Anthology

As practitioners and curators increasingly cross artistic boundaries and borrow among disciplines, the web-based publication In Terms of Performance—produced by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the University of California, Berkeley—provokes dialogue, debate, and discovery in an anthology of keywords designed to generate shared literacies.

Lucinda Childs. Photo by Cameron Wittig, courtesy of Pomegranate Arts.
danceworkbook: A Steady Pulse: Restaging Lucinda Childs, 1963–78

Danceworkbook, a series produced by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, documents the creative practice of living and working with dance.

Ann Carlson's The Symphonic Body: Stanford at the Performance Studies International 19 conference, June 2013. Photo by Toni Gauthier.
An Experiment in Five Acts

In 2013, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage launched An Experiment in Five Acts (Five Acts), conceived of in collaboration with Obie Award-winning playwright and former Center Visiting Artist Ain Gordon. Five Acts was aimed at artists and cultural producers working in the Philadelphia region who are negotiating mid-career challenges—be they purely aesthetic or more practical.