Federal pandemic relief for the national arts and culture sector was “unprecedented” in scale — and Allegheny County pulled in its share of the aid.
That’s according to a new report by SMU DataArts, the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University. The county-by-county tally, “Distribution of Federal COVD-19 Relief Funds for the Arts and Culture Sector,” found that more than $17 billion went to arts and culture groups around the country.
The relief awarded to nonprofit arts and culture groups was $16 billion of that — double the total of National Endowment for the Arts and Institute for Museum and Library Services funds awarded in the first 24 years of this millennium, according to the report.
To use another measure, in 2022, federal funding accounted for 18% of the average arts nonprofit’s budget. In 2019, that figure was 3%. (Compared to other developed countries, the U.S. is notable for its meager government support of the arts — though its pandemic aid packages were more in line with international norms.)
Most of the aid came via either the Paycheck Protection Program (which provided forgivable loans to let businesses to retain workers) or the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. Funds from the American Rescue Plan and CARES acts were included if they were awarded within the study period.
Groups in Allegheny County received $107 million of those funds, making it one of only 35 counties to receive more than $100 million, said SMU DataArts director Zannie Voss.
SMU DataArts created an interactive map showing where the funds landed across the country. Nearly every county in the U.S. benefited, researchers found.
The report actually looked at multiple definitions of what constitutes an “arts and culture” group. By the broadest measure, which used standards employed by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal government awarded the arts a much larger total: $53 billion.
But BEA/NEA figures includes mostly for-profit business sectors that few would think of as “arts and culture,” including ad agencies, architectural and interior design services, and display advertising. Those companies tend to be much larger than most traditional arts groups.
However, SMU DataArts’ final figures don't account for all federal pandemic relief to Pittsburgh-area groups. For instance, a week after the report was issued, Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development announced it had awarded about $13 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds to art groups in the commonwealth. That included $3.1 million for nearly 70 groups in Allegheny County, in amounts of up to $95,000 each for the likes of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.
For many local groups, the impact of programs like the PPP and SVOG is difficult to overstate.
“It saved us. It literally saved us,” said Melia Tourangeau, CEO of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. “We wouldn’t be around. There’s no question. I mean we were shut down for a year-and-a-half with no concerts.”
The PSO has a budget of $34 million. Tourangeau said over a few years, the PSO received $6.53 million in PPP loans and $6.34 million from the Shuttered Venue Operators program (not to mention $2.8 million in Employee Retention Tax Credits, a program not tallied by SMU DataArts).
She said while the PSO furloughed some employees during the shutdown, and musicians and staffers took a temporary 30% pay cut, the aid allowed the PSO to avoid permanent layoffs and steep draws on endowment and line of credit.
Likewise Pittsburgh Opera, which received $1.3 million in PPP loans and $341,300 through the SVOG. Managing director Robert Rak said the Opera normally tallies $1 million in tickets a season; that earned income suddenly dropped to almost nothing.
But once pandemic restrictions loosened enough to allow people to gather in larger numbers, the aid let the Opera stage shows for limited audiences, in addition to its online programming. “We were able to continue to reach our patrons, reach our community with our art, and keep that engagement going,” he said.
Voss said that compared to a cohort of 11 similarly arts-intensive cities — including Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Columbus, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. — funding patterns in Allegheny County stood out in a few small ways.
For instance, she said, in those 11 other cities, an average of 21% of arts groups received federal funds, whereas in Pittsburgh the figure was just 15%. That suggests, she said, that either a smaller proportion of groups here applied for help, or that more that applied were rejected. However, Voss said, Pittsburgh’s figure “was not horribly below average.”
SMU DataArts’ report concludes by cautioning that the flood of federal pandemic aid has now basically ended, and that groups that relied on it are again on their own — even as many continue struggling to regain audiences and donors they lost during the pandemic.
The much-vaunted “new normal” will test the groups’ resourcefulness, she said.
“We’d all like to think that all of the change that happened will just reverse coming out of it. It’s not that it’s better or worse, it’s just different,” she said. “It’s just adapting to a different reality now, and that’s not something that happens overnight.”
