Art funding in Pittsburgh is still racially unequal

When Pittsburgh-based artist, educator and arts administrator Amber Epps began applying for jobs, she saved her rejection emails.

“This will become art at some point,” she recalls thinking. “If you apply for 150 jobs and get four interviews, then this is a kind of crazy art.”

As an artist looking for funding for projects, she is familiar with rejections.

“For me personally, I have only received one grant,” says Epps. “There is one other grant I received in collaboration with someone else, but for me as an artist, there has only been one grant. Ever.”

Epps’ experience does not exist in a vacuum. A new report released Monday, July 29, by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council reveals that arts funding in southwestern Pennsylvania has been racially inequitable for nearly two decades.

Epps served on the Arts Advisory Board’s Learning and Leadership Committee for both the 2018 report “Racial Equity & Arts Funding in Greater Pittsburgh,” which summarized data on arts funding for racial minority groups from 2003 to 2016, and the new report, “A Second Look,” which collected and compared data for the five years after that.

This year’s Learning and Leadership Committee did not have the same membership as in the original study, but it was comprised exclusively of arts leaders, artists, cultural workers and creative entrepreneurs from the “global majority,” a term used in the report to refer to people or organizations of Indigenous, African, Asian or Latino descent.

According to U.S. Census data cited in the report, Allegheny County’s population is about 23% global majority people, but of the funds disbursed between 2018 and 2023, only 16% went to global majority organizations – just 2% more than the 2018 report found.

“The results are not surprising, but it’s nice to have the actual numbers,” says Epps.

Nevertheless, the data showed an outlier.

In 2021, the share of total grants awarded to Global Majority organizations reached 26.2%—three percentage points more than the population of Allegheny County and about 8.5% more than the amount awarded to similar organizations in 2020.

However, after 2021, these dollars began to disappear again. In 2022, Global Majority organizations received 19.8% of total donated dollars, and in 2023, this share fell again to 18%.

For the Learning and Leadership Committee, the increase was due to one event: the murder of George Floyd.

“Everyone wanted to prove they weren’t racist,” Epps says. “So there were all these initiatives to support people of color, whether it was artists or ‘diversity hires.’ All these companies wanted to hire Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officers – what does that mean? You need a black person, that’s what you’re saying.”

“It shouldn’t take tragic events like this to happen for people to say, ‘Oh no, not me, I’m not racist. Look at me, I like black and brown people. I’m going to support them and give them jobs and money because I’m not racist.'”

Although the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council confirmed in an email to NEXTpittsburgh that the recent report has sparked interest from Western Pennsylvania funders, Epps doesn’t expect it to spark a similarly large boost.

“I think it’s just about showing people what’s going on here,” Epps says. “We just wanted to show people, ‘This is what we found out. What are you going to do about it?’ And if you decide not to do anything, that’s totally up to you, but here are the numbers. That’s a good start.”

Morgan Kasprowicz, director of research and cultural policy for the Arts Council, wrote to NEXTpittsburgh that while the 2024 report shows an increase in funding between 2018 and 2019—from 8.7% to 16.1% of total funding—it coincided with the police shooting of Pittsburgh resident Antwon Rose Jr.

Kasprowicz concluded that there were too many factors at play to determine whether the report itself caused the upswing.

NEXTpittsburgh contacted six of the 17 funding organizations that provided data for the report, asking for responses and information about their grant selection processes. Only one organization, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, responded.

Norah Johnson, a representative of the state arts agency, wrote in an email to NEXTpittsburgh that the council is confident that all funders will continue to learn from relevant studies and work to distribute funds equitably to all Pennsylvania residents.

“For the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in particular, our strategic goals are already guided by our overarching values ​​(adopted in 2019) of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as our commitment to providing equitable access for all Pennsylvanians to fully participate in a creative life and the diverse forms of arts and culture in the Commonwealth,” Johnson writes. “This is implemented through our funding opportunities, program policies, program administration, and program measurement. The PCA remains committed to offering funding opportunities that are responsive to the needs of Pennsylvania’s creative sector to ensure we can deliver on our mission of strengthening communities through the arts.”

One sentiment expressed in the report—and shared by Epps—is that grant-making foundations should take the initiative to demystify the relationship-building that is critical to the application process. Epps compares engaging with foundation representatives to a first date, especially with smaller organizations that may be less professionally cohesive.

“In my experience, all the program officers I’ve contacted have been very open to meeting. However, many smaller organizations may not know this or simply don’t have time to do it because they’re too busy getting their work done,” Epps says.

Beyond outreach, rotating grant review panels result in inconsistent feedback and results.

“If you don’t get any grants, you can ask for feedback on your grant application,” Epps says. “But even if you submit the same application for the same grant next year, it will be reviewed by a different panel. So if you hear the feedback from the first panel and make those changes, it may not mean anything.”

More specifically, the 2024 report found that Greater Pittsburgh funders who met or exceeded a 23% funding rate for global majority organizations were more likely to:

• Ensure strong representation of the global majority in leadership, staff and board positions
• Provide racial equity training
• Use Global Majority’s review panels to guide initial funding recommendations

According to Epps, these findings could mean that companies that employ a “diverse” group of people are more likely to make decisions that benefit a “diverse” population.

She hesitated or emphasized “diverse” every time she said it.

“I really hate that word,” she says, because it implicitly categorizes people.

Beyond the diversity of an organization’s workforce, some groups may simply have a stronger internal culture that allows them to recognize historical deficits.

In any case, Epps believes that thinking about why the new data is the way it is is a crucial step for any company.

“I’ve been teaching in college for over 22 years. If I give my students a test and most of them fail, I’m not going to say, ‘Well, you just didn’t study,'” Epps says. “I’m going to ask, ‘What could I have done better? What role did I play in the failure of this system?'”

“Do some internal research, analyze or evaluate and find out why this is happening and what they think they can do to change it. Because it doesn’t help anyone to just say, ‘We’re going to give grants to black people because we want to make things better.’ Really work on the process and the decision-making. How do you decide what art is worth supporting?”