Briskly yet calmly, Tina Williams Brewer threads her way around the fifth-grade classroom, table to table and student to student.
The veteran, nationally known fiber artist is leading eight Pittsburgh Linden PreK-5 students in making quilted pillows from their own designs, and on this March morning she’s busy correcting stitching techniques, praising design choices and showing kids how to use needle-threaders.
Brewer is among the most seasoned of about 40 artists employed this year by the Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media in its Arts in Education program, funded mostly by state tax dollars. The educators lead art projects at schools and senior centers, and for community groups and veterans organizations.
Brewer, 76, has been teaching at Linden through this program for 25 years. This spring she’s making weekly visits to supplement instruction by the school’s art teacher, Corbin Clemons. Emma Thornton is among the students who remembers Brewer when she taught her as a Linden third-grader.
“She’s a really nice person,” said Thornton. “She’s really patient with her class.”
All the students seem to enjoy the art-making.
“What I like about making pillows is because like if you make a pillow it will actually look decorative and it will be like your own thing,” Thornton said. “It’s not like store-bought or something. Like you actually made it. And it makes you feel more proud to have the pillow.”
But it looks like this school year might be Brewer’s last at the Point Breeze school.
Sweeping changes in how the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts (PCA) funds arts initiatives in the state include the end of the Arts in Education program. And critics say other new policies taking effect this year will harm small arts groups around the state.
‘An economic engine’
The PCA was created by the state legislature in 1966, around the same time as the National Endowment for the Arts and other state arts agencies. Its job was to encourage and develop arts throughout the commonwealth.
Though its operations were at first centralized in Harrisburg, the PCA began to partner with regional organizations statewide in the 1990s to make sure funds were distributed more widely and equitably.
Groups like the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council eventually became one of 14 regional partners to which the PCA provided funds to distribute in their areas. Groups with budgets as small as $10,000 could get funded, and so could groups who had fiscal sponsors because they lacked the status of legal nonprofits themselves.
All that changed decisively last year, when PCA announced it was rebranding as “Pennsylvania Creative Industries, powered by Pennsylvania Council for the Arts.” The idea was to embrace the entire creative sector beyond traditional fine arts and crafts, including film production, video game design and other for-profit industries, along with workforce development.
“It’s us recognizing that our creative sector is both a cultural asset and an economic engine,” said PCA executive director Karl Blischke in a recent video interview. “We’re looking at major opportunities for Pennsylvania’s students and artists … specifically relating to things like career pathways, and career awareness and apprenticeships and entrepreneurship.”
PCA leadership also decided funding could be distributed more efficiently. In some cases, Blischke said, more than half of the funds it distributed to one of its 14 regional partners went toward administrative costs rather than to artists or arts programming.
So starting with the 2026-27 fiscal year, PCA will re-centralize funding decisions in Harrisburg. It will also reduce funding opportunities for groups with budgets under $100,000, and eliminate it for those with fiscal sponsors.
Local arts advocates objected to these changes.
Kelley Gibson, board president of Creative Pennsylvania and president of the Cultural Alliance of York, called the regional-partnership program effective.
“It has really been a great way to ensure that there’s accessibility and equity in the grant-making that happens,” she said.
Regional partners bristled at the idea that either they or the organizations to which they distributed state funds were claiming needlessly large administrative fees.
“The vast majority of [the funding] goes out to those that we are supporting through that program,” said Patrick Fisher, executive director of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, which redistributed state funds for programs including the Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media initiative that employed educators like Brewer.
Brewer said as a retiree, she doesn’t rely on PCAM jobs for her living. But some local artists do.
“This program has been like a mainstay of my existence for 30 years off and on,” said metal artist Jan Loney, who this year did a project at Shadyside’s Kentucky Avenue School and East Liberty’s Vintage Center for Active Adults. (Like Brewer, she was first employed by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, a predecessor of the PCAM.)
Small groups affected
Gibson, whose Cultural Alliance was a PCA regional partner, said the loss of funding for groups with budgets under $100,000 was devastating.
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“In my part of Pennsylvania, York County, that’s 80 percent of organizations that I supported,” she said. “It sent the arts community into kind of a panic.”
Gibson said arts groups in places like Lancaster have already closed up shop because of the PCA changes.
In Pittsburgh, the PCAM appears to be the organization most affected by the changes: This year, it used grants totaling $175,000, plus some matching funds, to hire artists like Brewer and Loney. And unless those state dollars can somehow be replaced, there’s no way the 25-year-old program can go on, Houser said.
“It’s a big loss for us,” he said.
The PCA is also ending, after this fiscal year, its Heritage Arts Program, which promoted traditional craft practices. Rivers of Steel Arts chief curator Chris McGinnis said an annual PCA grant of $16,000 provided at least 15% of the funding for Rivers of Steel workshops in everything from blacksmithing to basket-weaving and calligraphy. Often, the workshops were held in new American immigrant communities.
Other Pittsburgh organizations that stand to lose PCA funding under the new rules include the Millvale Music Festival, Pittonkatonk and Art All Night.
The PCA is considering new programs for groups with budgets under $100,000. Its board, which tabled the proposal in March, is scheduled to vote on it at a special meeting Mon., May 18.
The PCA’s Blischke added that while the Arts in Education program will indeed be sunsetted, 92% of the groups the PCA expects to support with general operating funds do arts education of some kind.
‘Creative Industries’
The PCA’s shift from a more traditional arts funding model to a “creative industries” framework also concerns some observers.
The agency’s current homepage features the words “Pennsylvania Creative Industries” in large type, “Council on the Arts” in much smaller type, and an image of a rock band on stage in a packed concert hall as seen from behind the sound man’s console of computer monitors.
Critics say that by leaning heavily into the economic aspects of the arts, the new PCA policies downplay benefits not directly tied to economic development — creating beauty, opening minds, forging community.
“I don’t think anybody would ever argue that the sole purpose of the arts or the primary purpose of the arts is economic activity,” said GPAC’s Patrick Fisher.
Justifying public support of the arts — or indeed, any support of the arts — on economic grounds is a relatively new phenomenon. Over the past 15 years or so, even groups like GPAC have issued reports demonstrating how much tax revenue and how many jobs the arts generate. (For the record, the PCA says that the state’s “creative sector” — including things like film and TV production — “supports nearly 190,000 jobs and contributes approximately $30 billion annually.”)
Jake Goodman, executive director of Pittsburgh-based foundation the Opportunity Fund, has watched the economic argument gradually take over the conversation about the arts. The implications, he said, “go deeper” than simply noting that Downtown theatergoers also pay for parking and drinks after the show.
“It goes to a devaluing of artists, of artists’ lives, of what art can do,” he said. “And for those of us who have had profound experiences experiencing art and making art, … it’s not that arts are not an economic driver. …. But to view it as the only thing that is worth considering when describing its value is a poverty.”
Stagnant funding
New initiatives the PCA has rolled out include a statewide Multimedia Producer Apprenticeship to prepare young people for careers in fields like film and media, digital marketing and interactive design. The apprenticeship, a partnership with the state Department of Labor & Industry, was launched by PCA seed money that enabled Big Picture Alliance, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that works with marginalized youth, to develop the program.
According to its website, the PCA’s new Innovation and Impact Grant Program is meant to fund “bold, new, multi-year strategies that empower, connect, and amplify creatives and creative industries and their contributions to Pennsylvania’s communities, economy, and workforce.”
In April, Pennsylvania Creative Industries provided $87,000 in seed funding for Pittsburgh is Craft, a collaboration between the Pittsburgh Glass Center, Contemporary Craft and the Union Project to promote craft-centric tourism.
Gibson and other critics said they recognize the benefits of making the economic-development argument, and the need for services like workforce development.
The problem, Gibson said, is that the state budget line item for the arts has been stuck at about $10 million for more than 15 years. That means any money spent on so-called Creative Industries can’t support more traditional arts programs.
“They’re now starting to just rob Peter to pay Paul,” she said.
Many states have Creative Industries-type initiatives. But according to statistics compiled by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Pennsylvania ranks 34th among states in per capita arts funding. It spends 81 cents per resident, a fraction of what’s allocated by neighboring states like Ohio ($2.25 per capita), Maryland ($5.42) and New Jersey ($3.73).
Arts advocates believe their outcry, including pressure on state legislators, was a factor in getting the PCA board to consider beefing up funding opportunities for smaller arts groups.
State Sen. Jay Costa (D.-Forest Hills), who co-chairs the state legislature’s Arts and Culture Caucus, confirms this account. “[Legislators] had a number of meetings with organizations and the partners and other legislators and the like, who’ve expressed concern and spoke with the council at length on what needs to be done … to address some of the concerns.”
With state legislators now working on next year’s budget, Gibson encourages Pennsylvanians to ask their representatives to beef up arts spending. She said she’d like to see $5 million more for the arts.
“Give enough funding so we don’t have to make arts grants have to get cut in order to pay for great creative economy initiatives,” she said. “We should have both. And Pennsylvania really should fund both.”
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