‘The arts have never been more urgent’: Philly arts leaders make case for their role in civic life

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Alba Martinez, Philadelphia’s director of commerce, sat on a stage at Drexel University on Tuesday looking out at an auditorium filled with hundreds of the region’s arts leaders.

The former investment executive at The Vanguard Group and onetime salsa songwriter said artists are entrepreneurs that the city needs to nurture with free business training and access to resources.

“Information is power and time is money,” she said. “I saw Vanguard as fundamentally a giant process machine. It’s all in the process. One of the opportunity areas for Philadelphia is to improve the process of how we do business.”

Martinez was invited to speak at the Cultural Dynamics Summit, a conference organized by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and PA Humanities, as part of their ongoing effort to position the arts sector as an essential civic function, which local government needs to embrace.

Alliance President and CEO Patricia Wilson Aden has been shifting the narrative around cultural support toward the notion that the city needs arts engagement.

“The role of arts, culture and the humanities have never been more urgent,” she said. “The arts have always been a powerful tool for healing, bridging divides and helping communities thrive.”

While this summit has been planned for several months, the head of the William Penn Foundation, Shawn McCaney, tied its urgency to the results of the recent presidential election and the perceived possibility that a Trump administration may be a threat to the country’s humanities.

“It’s hard to ignore the fact that so many of our fellow citizens have recently voted for a national vision fueled by rhetoric of hate, fear and darkness,” he said. “People continue to ask, ‘How could so many thinking people do the unthinkable?’”

Surveys by both the Pew Research Center and the Partnership for Public Service show the rate at which Americans do not trust other Americans to make decisions on behalf of the country is accelerating to record levels.

McCaney said the arts are uniquely capable of restoring some level of civility to an increasingly divided country.

“What are the arts, if not our most important form of self-expression, of connecting across differences to communicate our shared humanity, our common history is our same stories to each other?” he said. “What are the arts, if not one of our most powerful reasons to gather, share space, celebrate and take part in common experience?”

The William Penn Foundation just announced it is giving $8 million to the Philadelphia Cultural Fund to support unrestricted arts grants.

The summit featured Val Gay, Philadelphia’s chief cultural officer, who presented a plan to hold 12 town hall-style community meetings across the city next year, including one in every City Council district. What she learns from those meetings will inform a comprehensive arts plan for the city, which Gay plans to present in the spring of 2026.

Gay said she and Mayor Parker, who was invited to speak at the summit but was unable to attend, are aligned in leveraging the arts sector toward addressing entrenched civic issues such as crime, the economy, education, health care and equity.

“Hard times are always encroaching on our doors, and we know when those hard times come the first thing that gets cut is the appendage,” she said. “We are moving ourselves back to the place where we belong: in the core. In the center of civic life.”

Another invited speaker at the summit, Tayyib Smith, a longtime cultural entrepreneur and co-founder of The Growth Collective, advised Gay to approach her town hall meetings with an open ear and a thick layer of skin, particularly when she goes to neighborhoods in which the city has historically underinvested.

“As someone who’s been hired by some of the institutions in this room to do community work, you have to make space for the discontent and justified outrage that you’re going to receive,” said Smith. “Prayers up. You’re going to hear a lot from people who have a justified outrage. You can’t grow without discomfort.”

Some of that outrage was present at the summit itself. One of the panel discussions included Dave Kyu, interim director of the Asian Arts Initiative who has been active in the effort to block the proposed 76ers basketball area in Chinatown.

He said Mayor Parker is ignoring protests from the Chinatown community.

“Chinatown is the canary in a coal mine,” Kyu said. “Chinatown organizers have asked for four meetings, and instead of being invited into the room to negotiate, to talk, to hear us out, we’re seeing this administration put the full force of its authority against the door.”

“This is the precedent that we’re going to be seeing for the rest of this administration,” he said.

Councilman Isaiah Thomas, who had to leave the summit early to attend a session of public testimony regarding the Chinatown arena proposal, was more focused on maximizing the cultural and economic opportunities of the year 2026, when Philadelphia will be hosting several major events including the World Cup and a national Semiquincentennial celebration.

Thomas, who has supported Philadelphia arts by co-creating City Council’s Illuminate the Arts fund, said arts and culture will play a central role in the success of 2026, which will ultimately serve the arts and culture sector ongoing.

“I’m laser-sharp focused on 2026,” he said, reiterating comments he made the day before. “If we can get 2026 done in an equitable way where we’re not just touching Center City and some of the historical parts of the city, but we’re actually able to touch neighborhoods and impact everyday people, I think some of the things that we’ve had to advocate for in the past will go without saying, moving a forward.”

The keynote speech of the summit was delivered by the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Maria Rosario Jackson, who described the NEA’s mission to use the arts to heal and connect people, fostering joy, inspiration, curiosity and connection.

She said President Biden signed an executive order in 2022 to integrate the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Library and Museum Services into other federal departments as they make policy decisions.

“Some of the things that I have found to be transcendent across different levels of work is that calling out of the arts as valuable, full stop, is really important,” Jackson said. “Arts integration work relies on having something to integrate.”