Chicago Cultural Leader Talks Philanthropy, Funding and the Current Fight for the Arts

Marc Vitali | May 16, 2025, 5:00 pm

Members of the Chicago arts community gather at a Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation event on May 13, 2025. (Marc Vitali / WTTW News)

Leaders from more than 100 Chicago arts groups met this week to discuss the state of the arts, new collaborations and how to fight back when creativity is under attack.

They came from small theaters, galleries, dance companies and music venues — all of the many places we encounter culture in Chicago.

The gathering was hosted by the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, which currently funds more than 160 small arts organizations in the region through multi-year operating grants.

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Keynote speaker Erin Harkey, CEO of Americans for the Arts and former commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, spoke of the necessity of community in a time of uncertainty when there’s a loss of federal funds, grants being terminated and open hostility toward DEI initiatives.

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget calls for the National Endowment for the Arts to be eliminated. The agency provides hundreds of millions of dollars annually to cultural institutions around the country. At the same time, many grants have already been rescinded.

“Don’t let a good crisis go to waste,” Harkey said, seeing the moment as an opportunity to strengthen the infrastructure of arts support.

Afterward, WTTW News spoke with the program director of Chicago Art & Collections for the Donnelley Foundation, Ellen Placey Wadey.

Wadey works with local arts leaders year-round, and she gets them; she was once executive director of the Guild Complex, a longstanding literary arts and performance space, and worked with Marwen on their young artists program.

WTTW News: Many creative people and arts groups are still climbing out of the hole that COVID put them in, now this. What are you hearing from them?

Ellen Placey Wadey: I’m not going to sugarcoat it, the arts are devastated. Not in terms of the work. The work is still incredible but the money. Unfortunately, the arts had to learn how to operate without a ton of money for years. One thing the pandemic did that was positive is that the government relief funds came and finally helped some of them get back to even.

The arts are a passion, they’re a calling. For some it’s a career, but I think for most it’s just the way you walk through the world. One of the things that’s also happening with this money being pulled is folks are feeling isolated. It’s wave after wave of bad news.

But in terms of where we go from here, the arts have always survived. It’s part of the human spirit. It is the human spirit. Like you said, we just got our sea legs under us after the pandemic and this happens, but folks are already talking about how to collaborate. How do we build partnerships? If we don’t have as much money, how do we help each other to make what we have work?

So you brought them all together for a kind of brain-storming conference.

Wadey: We had the theme ‘Stronger Together,” and we wanted to connect people — particularly small arts organization. Most are community-based. They’re in neighborhoods. They’re not on Michigan Avenue or Dearborn or Halsted. And they are very inventive. They’re entrepreneurial. They know how to do pretty much everything.

And what is your role — advocate, cheerleader, a kind of lobbyist?

Wadey: Foundations are not allowed to lobby. 100% we cannot lobby, but we can talk about why we do the work we do and why we think it’s important. And especially for small arts organizations, they’re just trying to get the shows up. That’s one of the things philanthropy can do. We can talk about why we support the things we support and why we think it’s important and, particularly now, that’s become a bigger responsibility of my job.

We know what it’s like to be out there and how hard it is to do this work. That’s something I brought to my role from the time I came to the foundation, because there can be a certain distance that exists between philanthropy and nonprofits. There’s a power dynamic — one organization has the money, the others need the money — so conversations are critical. It’s where we learn everything from the arts leaders, we build trust with them, and they understand that we are their partner.

Do you think the administration in Washington has a misguided understanding of what the arts mean to people?

Wadey: I don’t know what the administration thinks in terms of the arts, but I think we’re so imbued in the arts that people don’t think about not having it. You couldn’t turn on the radio, you couldn’t stream anything, you wouldn’t have any clothes to wear. It’s everywhere.

Sometimes folks only think about it as being pretty and inspiring — and it is that. The thing I don’t agree with is that somehow it’s frivolous or not essential.

Art can also be dangerous because it’s about free speech and it’s about making room for all voices, and it’s about asking hard questions and not necessarily knowing the answers. Art is about exploration, digging into things and seeing what’s there. Artists always lead in terms of the things that we’re thinking about.

And the DEI backlash cuts deep because so many artists are all about diversity, equity and inclusion.

Wadey: You know, Chicago is one of the most diverse cities in the country. It’s also one of the most segregated cities. That’s an intersection that artists look at, and that’s another reason why it’s so important they’re community-based – not only because they’re helping to represent these various communities but they are also trying to bridge them. What makes Chicago so great is the richness of all that we have, all of the experiences and voices that have made the city great, and that’s something we want to celebrate, not be afraid of.

By defunding and putting restrictions on the arts it’s kind of saying “this is not something important,” and we just wanted to be sure the message is “You are not just important – you’re essential.”

Do you believe we’ll get to the other side of this?

Wadey: I absolutely do. This is its own particular moment, but we’ve been through moments before. COVID did quite a bit in terms of changing art consumption patterns. People are more prone to stream something than to go see a live performance, which is unfortunate because there’s nothing like live performance. So we’ll get through to the other side of this. It’s not going to be easy and there’s going to be some losses along the way. But art endures.