The Barnes Foundation will be the new home for The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, a major funder of local arts programming, after the closure of the University of the Arts in June 2024 left the center without an organizational home.
The Pew Charitable Trusts will continue to fund the center, as it has for the past 20 years.
The center distributes an average of $8-$10 million a year to arts organizations and artists in the area. Last year, it funded a wide range of arts-related projects, including institutional changes at Opera Philadelphia and The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University; $85,000 grants for 12 Philly-area artists through the Pew Fellowship in the Arts; a new play by actress and scholar Anna Deavere Smith, and a “hip-hop-inflected ballet retelling” of Lord of the Flies commissioned by BalletX.
Over the last 20 years, the center has funded the commission for 500 new artworks.
“In terms of the day-to-day, the center will operate in the same way that it has,” said Donna Frisby-Greenwood, senior vice president for Philadelphia and scientific advancement at the Pew Charitable Trusts. The shift is more of a back-office one: The Barnes will now handle human resources and finances.
The new arrangement will begin in August.
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, founded in 2005, requires a fiscal sponsor because it is not a 501c3. For years, that operational partner was the University of the Arts. When the school abruptly shuttered last year, Pew Charitable Trusts became an interim sponsor and there was no disruption to grantees.
But both Pew and the center wanted to find a home organization that was more aligned with the arts.
“What we were looking for was a partnership,” Frisby-Greenwood said. “Someone to do strategic thinking with, vs. just someone to cut checks.”
The Barnes turned out to be that partner.
“The Barnes and the center are natural collaborators,” said Thom Collins, the executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation, in a statement.
The Barnes Foundation has received Pew funding in the past, including last year for work on the forthcoming Calder Gardens on the Parkway. Though it will not be involved in grantmaking, as part of the new partnership, the Barnes will no longer be eligible to receive Pew grants.
As part of the announcement, Paula Marincola, the long-serving executive director of the center, said she would be leaving her role in October, making way for a new executive director to oversee the new partnership. The Barnes will lead the search for that person.
“I feel enormously gratified by the work that we’ve been able to do over the time I’ve led the center, and it seemed like just a natural point of transition,” Marincola said.
The center has remained a vital source of funding for local arts, particularly in the wake of DOGE cuts that slashed grants worth millions of dollars for the Woodmere Art Museum, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the Penn Museum, and others local groups. Organizations surveyed this spring by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance said the federal funding cuts would likely disrupt payroll and halt educational programming for children, as well as planned exhibits and performances. (Many of the cuts are currently being challenged in court.)
In the face of those cuts, Pew funding has stayed steady. Both organizations hope the new partnership with the Barnes will keep it that way.
“It’s very bittersweet to leave,” Marincola said, “but it’s also just a moment full of positive potential.”
