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Erie Arts & Culture and its Cultural Service Partners invite the public to participate in the 2021 United Arts Fund, which started on September 1 and will continue through December 31, 2021.

Panel: Restorative Justice and the Arts Amongst Juvenile Populations

Join us on September 16 at 6 PM at the Erie Art Museum or Facebook Live!

On September 16 at 6:00 PM, join Erie Arts & Culture at the Erie Art Museum for a live panel discussion focused on restorative justice through the arts amongst juvenile populations. The conversation will be moderated by Ken Nickson, the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Erie's Public Schools. Contributing to this important conversation are:

Tony Rodrigues - Erie Arts & Culture's visiting artist for the month of September. For more than 20 years, Tony has taught painting to youth at a Duval County pre-trial detention center.

Antonio Howard - A rostered teaching artist with Erie Arts & Culture and a community muralist. Antonio is a former juvenile lifer.

Maria Goellner - Maria is a former Federal Public Defender and now serves as the Pennsylvania State Policy Director at FAMM, a nonpartisan criminal justice reform organization that amplifies the voices of families impacted by incarceration.

The panel will be followed by an audience Q&A.

Through a partnership with Community Access Media (CAM), this discussion will be streamed through Erie Arts & Culture and CAM's digital platforms, including Facebook Live and YouTube.

The Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC) recently announced it is now accepting applications statewide for $1.2 million in pandemic recovery grants for organizations with a humanities-based mission and organizations conducting humanities programming. Called PA SHARP (Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan), the initiative provides up to $20,000 in flexible funding to strengthen and grow the humanities in Pennsylvania.

The full press release is included in this blog post.

Erie Arts & Culture welcomes Jacksonville-based visual artist Tony Rodrigues as the agency’s next visiting artist in residence. Tony’s residency will extend the month of September. Tony is already collaborating with Egress Press and Research, the edition publishing arm of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania’s print department, to plan his fine art edition that will be created during his residency. Tony’s edition, along with all other editions that have been created through this program in 2020 and 2021 will be on exhibition and sale at Art Basel Miami in November.

This visiting artist residency program is made possible through the generous support of a privately funded grant from The Erie Community Foundation. 

Amy and Eric are one of Erie Arts & Culture’s 2021 Creating with Community Artist teams. The team is creating a small mural series which will be located on 19th street. Collaborating partners include McKinley Elementary School, Edinboro College of Education, Iroquois Elementary. Earlier this summer, Amy and Eric sought community feedback from the visitors who visited the Blasco Library during their Pride Month Art show. Amy and Eric also gathered the opinions of the children as to what makes a neighborhood safe for them. Using art and ideas from their engagements, they sketched a small series of personified houses with the intent to paste them all around the 19th street corridor in a scavenger hunt-like fashion.

We invite you to read and share our 2021 Q2 Impact Report!  Download the pdf to learn about our most recent programs, services, and impact on the community.

We ask that you please keep Erie Gives in mind as you read our Q2 Impact Report.

Sculptures are an outcome of EAC's Creating with Community initiative.

Kaleidoscope Grove is a collaborative project between Buffalo-based sculpturor Shasti O’Leary Soudant and Erie-based pinata artist Esther Ortiz. The duo were paired together in 2020 through Erie Arts & Culture’s Creating with Community program, which was funded by Erie Insurance and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development through the Neighborhood Assistance Program. The artist team led community listening sessions to help inform both the design and functionality of their public art, as well as receive suggestions for installation sites. The fabrication of the sculptures is being supported by a Shaping Tomorrow grant from the Erie Community Foundation, which Erie Arts & Culture was awarded in 2019. 

The proposed locations for the set of sculptures includes Gridley Park and Nate Levy Park. Erie Arts & Culture has worked closely with Our West Bayfront and the Bayside East Side Task Force to engage neighborhood stakeholders.

We invite you to read and learn more in our latest blog post.

August 10 is Erie Gives Day. Do you plan on giving to Erie Arts & Culture? Help us out by sharing your reasons why!

Erie Arts & Culture weaves culture and creativity into the fabric of everyday life in our region. Our investments translate into every resident having opportunities to participate in, and benefit from, the arts and humanities - whether socially, educationally, or economically. We are passionate about our work because the arts and humanities help us as people become more creative, self aware, empathetic, and socially responsible. 

Please read this blog to learn more about our accomplishments and goals as you consider making a donation to the agency this year for Erie Gives.

Learn about who we are, what we have accomplished, and the goals we aim to meet this year for Erie Gives 2021.

The City of Erie is slated to receive another large scale mural. The site for this new piece of public art are the basketball courts at Bayview Park. The initiative led by Erie Arts & Culture is a collaboration with the agency’s CHROMA Guild and is funded with support from Brian and Linda Graff, Erie Insurance and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development through the Neighborhood Assistance Program (NAP), and a special grant from the Erie Community Foundation. 

Brian and Linda (Hoehn) Graff made their first contribution to Erie Arts & Culture in 2019 as part of Erie Gives. That donation funded the mural “Rudy,” located on Methodist Towers and painted by international artist Evoca1. The Graffs made another contribution to Erie Arts & Culture on Erie Gives 2020 and that gift is supporting this mural project. 

Each month, Erie Arts & Culture highlights one or more of our Teaching Artists. The goal of these monthly posts is to share the wonderful work our TA’s accomplish and their impact on our community! This month's feature is Annie Schmitt.

Interested in an Artist Fellowship? Learn more about becoming an artist fellow in our latest blog post. 

Erie Arts & Culture committed to making a greater investment in the artists living and working in Erie County by establishing the annual Artist Fellowship program. This program provides cash awards to three artists from Erie County. The Fellowship, which includes cash awards ranging between $2,000-$5,500, helps individual artists sustain or enhance their creative process and advance their career in the arts. 

The deadline is now extended to July 30 for Fellowship Applications.