Arts council seeks equity in awarding of grants
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Each year, 218 arts groups in the region compete for grants. A new report released Tuesday by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council shows some stark, historic inequity in the awarding of that money.
The report was released as 200 arts and civic leaders and artists gathered for a one-day discussion of its findings at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
“This report was a one-time effort to code arts organizations by race. Our hope is that these kinds of data can be collected on all funders’ applications in the future so that trends in inequity can be tracked over time,” said David Pankratz, the arts council’s research and policy director.
Funding inequity among arts groups results partly from the criteria used to distribute grants, Mr. Pankratz said, adding that another cause is that funders do not consult with
racial minorities before awarding grants.
Over the past 15 years, arts organizations that are predominantly white received $273,418,179 in grants from private foundations such as the Heinz Endowments, the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Richard King Mellon Foundation. The $273 million represents 86 percent of the total amount of grants — $317,928,116 — made over that time period.
Arts organizations that include African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics and other racial minorities received $44.5 million in grants from private foundations or 14 percent of $317,928,116 over the past 15 years.
Funding is becoming more equitable in the number of grants, but there is continuing disparity in the amount of overall dollars awarded to arts groups made up of racial minorities. Not all funders collect racial data about arts groups and if they do, the terms they use are not consistent, according to the report.
Mr. Pankratz said it would be helpful if public and private grantmaking organizations standardized their grant applications to collect racial data. If applications were standardized, he added, information could be gathered and compared over time.
The Allegheny County Regional Asset District, which awarded $99 million in grants last year to civic, cultural and recreational entities, libraries, parks and sports facilities after collecting a half of a 1 percent retail sales tax, collects information about the racial breakdown of employees and board members at arts organizations.
In related arts news, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto announced that his annual public art award would go to Andrea Polli, who used wind energy from 16 vertical turbines to power LED lights that lit up the Rachel Carson Bridge over the Allegheny River. The name of Ms. Polli’s art installation was “Energy Flow” and it lit up the bridge from November 2016 to this past April. Ms. Polli is a a professor of art and ecology at the University of New Mexico.
Ronald Gdovic, founder of the Pittsburgh manufacturing company WindStax, which makes the vertical turbines used in Ms. Polli’s installation, accepted the award.
“It is a great honor to receive this recognition from Mayor Peduto and Pittsburgh, in my view one of the most forward-thinking cities that I have had the honor to work in, and a city that leads the country in looking to the future of culture, technology and sustainability. Creating a work like ‘Energy Flow,’ powered by state of the art Windstax turbines and integrated into the historic Rachel Carson Bridge, is unique to Pittsburgh and could not be duplicated anywhere else in the world,” Ms. Polli said.
Marylynne Pitz: mpitz @post-gazette.com, 412-2631648. Twitter: @mpitppg