CMU School of Drama


Thursday, December 01, 2016

$308,000 awarded to 18 artists and arts groups for Advancing Black Arts

NEXTpittsburgh: Good news for 18 local artists and arts organizations: they’ve been selected as recipients of the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh awards, a partnership between The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments, totaling $308,000.

Since 2010, about $4 million has been granted to local artists through the program, which is designed to help end racial disparities within the arts community.

1 comment:

Cassidy Pearsall said...

I'm glad the city of Pittsburgh is trying to support black art through a real, concrete effort. I feel like a lot of cities often talk about cultural diversity and being a magnet for culture, but rarely do their policies and actions reflect that. The 300k that is going to black artists will help get their names out there and have more freedom to grow.

The exciting thing about this is that it is happening in Pittsburgh, which has a very strange relationship with the arts. It holds CMU, which is an amazing arts program, and it has legacy with artists such as Andy Warhol and August Wilson, yet at the same time these art forms can all become very elitist. It is easy to ignore the little people when you have such prominent artists already. By allowing them to grow and flourish, I think Pittsburgh will become even more of an arts haven than it is.