The Heinz Endowments, one of Pittsburgh’s largest foundations, is moving away from funding individual artists, shows and exhibits and toward strengthening the sector overall, the group announced Tuesday.
“We needed to evolve because the field here needs to evolve sooner than later,” said Jasmin DeForrest, the Endowments’ managing director of arts and culture. “And based on our history, based on our legacy, I felt that the Heinz Endowments was best equipped to be able to take this approach.”
Over the past decade, the Endowments said, it had granted some $186 million to more than 280 arts groups and programs of all sizes. This year, it expects to distribute $14 million in arts and culture grants. But the funds will be portioned under new criteria.
Courtesy of the Heinz Endowments
“Instead of thinking about a one-time program or really focusing on a one-time exhibit or an individual artist exhibit … we’re thinking wider, through a wider lens on how are these organizations or these individual artists partnering?” she said. “How are they collaborating with each other? How are they affecting and impacting and creating a sense of belonging on communities and residents in Pittsburgh in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region?”
As the foundation’s arts and culture web page now puts it, “We do not fund one-time projects; programming without systems, infrastructure, or community impact strategy; or requests that benefit a single organization without advancing the broader arts and culture ecosystem.”
‘A little bit of disruption’
In recent years, the wide roster of groups funded by the Endowments ranges from the Carnegie Museums, Heinz History Center and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh to the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Attack Theater, the Bach Choir and City Theatre. It is also a major funder of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, the region’s major arts advocate.
Programming cited on the Heinz website as fitting its new strategy includes: public programs at the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s work “commissioning and producing original theater, music, dance and multimedia works that represent the kaleidoscope of diversity of our region”; and Tech25, a Carrick-based nonprofit that provides tuition-free and low-cost education in entertainment technology. It also cited Pittsburgh Glass Center and collaborative programming at Silver Eye Center for Photography.
DeForrest said the Endowments’ strategy change was spurred in part by how groups continue to strain to find audiences in a post-pandemic era of social media and streaming content. Many nonprofit arts groups, DeForrest said, are struggling to survive. Add in an aging base in arts donors, and the fact that many communities feel the arts are inaccessible to them.
“This is a big shift for us and we understand that there’s going to be a little bit of disruption,” DeForrest said. “But we are also hoping that there’s going to be a lot of excitement because this is a focus on what the field needs and what we believe that the field needs in this moment.”
Arts community reactions
The day of the announcement, the arts community had a variety of reactions to the new strategy.
“I can understand some degree of concern” on the part of groups that produce or present arts, said Patrick Fisher, executive director of arts advocacy nonprofit the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council (GPAC).
GPAC itself has a long history of support by the Endowments, including a 2025 grant of $1.2 million over three years. Fisher said he believes GPAC’s research and advocacy work will continue to align with the foundation’s new priorities.
He acknowledged that groups or artists that focus on time-based, place-based projects (those “one-time projects”) might have trouble getting support in the future. But he said the Endowments’ new list of priorities “feels expansive enough that organizations still have a pathway through this.” He said they just might have to frame their work differently.
James McNeel, managing director of City Theatre, said that in a time when foundations’ support of the arts had become less certain, he was grateful to hear the Endowments planned to keep funding the sector. City Theatre was granted $95,000 in general support in each of the past two calendar years, and in 2022 received $1 million from the Endowments for its capitalization and recovery campaign. McNeel expressed cautious optimism about the new priorities.
“These are priority areas, these are funding principles that to me make a lot of sense,” he said. “I think that they speak to the changing realities of our field. How they play out in practice a year from now will tell us a lot more.”
Perhaps the biggest arts beneficiary of Endowments giving in the past year has been the Pittsburgh Symphony, which last July received two grants totaling $14 million — as much as the foundation has committed to spending on the arts this year.
“It’s terrific that they’re having this new focus. It’s aligned with a lot of the work that we do,” said PSO president and CEO Melia Tourangeau.
One of those two grants, for $4 million, was to engage new audiences with innovative programming at Heinz Hall. She cited the recent All Rise concert, with Wynton Marsalis, and the PSO’s programs in public schools, as ways the PSO was seeking to build new audiences. She added the PSO’s next BNY Classics season would incorporate audience-friendly elements from its unconventional Saturday Sessions (formerly Disrupt), including musicians talking to the audience from the stage, theatrical lighting and post-show talkbacks.
Too many arts groups?
In an interview, DeForrest repeatedly noted that Pittsburgh has about 500 arts and culture groups, and suggested the resources to support them all might no longer exist.
In the year that two venerable theater companies, Pittsburgh Public Theater and the Pittsburgh CLO, announced they would merge, DeForrest said the Endowments’ new “shared resources” rubric might include mergers.
“That definitely is something that we are interested in, whether if it’s mergers — and I think, quite honestly, there should be conversations happening around should some organizations actually, celebratory sunset [choose to close],” she said.
“I don’t believe in forced collaboration,” she added. “I don’t believe in things that are forced, but things that can come together naturally. … How can some of these services, these performances be streamlined in a way that works for the public who want to engage in what they’re offering?”
