$1 million in grants awarded to Philly-based artists of color and BIPOC-led arts organizations

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Philly-based artists of color and arts organizations will receive $1 million to fund new performances, exhibitions and films and create long-term organizational success.

Thirty-nine grants from Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures program will fund work for local artists of color, as well as provide arts organizations aid for staff expansions and technology upgrades. The grants were distributed to organizations with annual operating budgets below $300,000 and artists over 18 years of age who have lived and worked in Philadelphia for at least the past five years.

Aside from organizational expansions, the grants address archival work and documentation, collaborations and artistic expression and experimentation.

Barbara Wong, the director of the Creative Communities team at the William Penn Foundation, discussed the importance of the grants being distributed throughout Philadelphia with WHYY News.

“This was really meant to address sort of like the broader spectrum of the BIPOC [Black, Indigenous or other people of color] creative communities and all of the areas that they could be doing their work,” Wong said. “A lot of these artists and organizations are so embedded within their neighborhoods and communities, so their impact on our communities is just so rich.”

Wong said providing grants like these can help open the door for more philanthropic groups to provide aid to local artists.

“The amazing impact of this work is that there’s now recognition that our BIPOC artists and organizations haven’t had access to the kinds of resources that philanthropy can really benefit and afford,” Wong said.

The grants are awarded as part of America’s Cultural Treasures, a national initiative created by the Ford Foundation. Along with the William Penn Foundation, The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Barra Foundation, Neubauer Family Foundation and Wyncote Foundation contributed to the grants.

In 2022, Philadelphia’s Cultural Treasures awarded over $6 million to 16 cultural organizations, followed by more than $1 million for 12 individual artists. Another round of grants will be distributed later this year.