The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
About the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative
The Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI) was established in 1997 to foster artistic development and excellence in the region’s visual arts community by supporting public visual arts exhibitions and accompanying publications of high artistic caliber and cultural significance. PEI awards grants of up to $250,000 for exhibitions implementation, and up to $25,000 for exhibitions planning, to independent curators and organizations meeting the program’s eligibility requirements. These grants are awarded annually on a competitive basis and are selected by a panel of internationally recognized visual arts professionals. Between 1997 and 2009, PEI panels awarded grants totaling $9.6 million, bringing outstanding visual arts exhibitions to the region’s audiences, as well as to the field.
PEI also provides professional development opportunities through curatorial roundtables and symposia that address important issues in the field, travel grants for curatorial research and development, and access to its growing research library of 2000 volumes. PEI commissions and publishes critical writing on curatorial practice including proceedings from the symposium Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility and an anthology entitled Questions of Practice: What Makes a Great Exhibition? A new anthology exploring innovations in exhibition-making is forthcoming.