Arts Funding

This has traditionally been a difficult area, and the funding from the National Endowment of the Arts was always a blessing, but it has been in a swan dive for awhile and the impact of that, and arts funding in general, has been substantial in Pennsylvania, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

An excerpt.

“When Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, breezed through town early this month ("to learn," as an endowment press official put it), he heard a great deal about "siloing."

“The arts can't "be siloed," said Jane Golden, head of the city's Mural Arts Program. It's important "to eliminate all the silos" that constrain thinking about arts funding, said Jeremy Nowak, head of the Reinvestment Fund, the nonprofit development organization that was one of Landesman's hosts.

“There was not, however, much talk about art making, or those who make it. Art for art's sake? Not at the moment - a time when public funding for individual artists has virtually vanished from Pennsylvania, for the first time in nearly half a century.

“For much of one afternoon, the booted, bearded Landesman toured the Crane Arts building on North American Street - home to dozens of artists and arts organizations - and listened attentively to talk of the arts as an economic engine, the arts as a tool of neighborhood revitalization, the arts as a key to tourism, the arts as linchpin of economic development.

“But none of the city or tourism or development officials at that day's roundtable discussion mentioned the absence of direct federal support for artists. No one brought up the dissolution of Pennsylvania's individual artist fellowships, victims of the fiscal meltdown of 2008.

“Rachel Zimmerman, founder of InLiquid, a visual-artist collective headquartered in the Crane Arts building, did not attend the roundtable but said after Landesman's visit that she finds the absence of fellowships and discussion of them unsettling.

"It seems that culture and art are important as long as they redevelop neighborhoods or have some quantifiable measure," Zimmerman said. "We're continually losing sight of the value of what's created, not just as a means of social or economic change, but as art. It becomes a Band-Aid to fix the ills of society and is not about the art or the artists anymore."

“This has compounded a chronic problem for artists, she said. "We're really struggling."