Showing posts with label Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. Show all posts

Monday, May 9, 2011

Day of Giving to Arts Organizations

Midnight to midnight May 11th is the "Pittsburgh is Art Day of Giving" when individual donations to arts and culture organizations in six counties will be matched up to $475,000 by six local foundations.

The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council is coordinating the campaign. CEO Mitch Swain says interested donors should log on to pittsburghgives.org to donate online to 148 organizations in Allegheny, Butler, Fayette, Indiana, Washington and Westmoreland counties. Each organization will use donated funds as it sees fit.

$50 to the Pittsburgh Glass Center supports a glass-blowing demonstration; $100 buys sheet music for the Pittsburgh Concert Chorale; and $324 pays for replacing all the color in the lights in the Kelly Strayhorn Theater.

In addition to a dropdown menu listing all organizations alphabetically, a donation can be designated to individual artists for professional development opportunities through the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Advice for Arts Groups in Tough Times

The so-called “Turnaround King” addressed about 200 arts managers at a meeting of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council today at the August Wilson Center. Michael Kaiser, President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, says he turned around the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Kansas City Ballet, the American Ballet Theater, and the Royal Opera House in London.

Kaiser says mid-sized groups tend to have the most difficult time in a recession because they have more infrastructure to pay for than a small group but not as big a base of support as a large group.

Some keys to success at any size, says Kaiser, are interesting programming, effective marketing, and attracting support from diverse groups in the community--not just the same people all the time. He says the internet is a wonderful and inexpensive tool to this end.

Pittsburgh is the 51st stop on Kaiser’s “Arts in Crisis” tour of 69 American cities.