Since 1989, the Center has awarded over $153 million to artists and arts organizations in the Southeastern Pennsylvania region, which includes Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties.
[8] The Pew Fellowships provide artists with an economic freedom that presents the opportunity to focus on their individual practices over a considerable period of time—to explore, to experiment, and to develop their work.
To engage in an international arts dialogue, the Center develops and hosts a range of activities, which concern artistic production, interpretation, and presentation.
[3] A multidisciplinary group of cultural practitioners, scholars, and consultants from around the world have contributed to the Center's ongoing knowledge-sharing activities, including Jérôme Bel,[13] Romeo Castellucci,[14] Tacita Dean,[15] Anna Deavere Smith,[16] Thelma Golden,[17] Anna Halprin,[18] Barkley L. Hendricks,[18] Bill T. Jones,[19] Miranda July,[20] Tony Kushner,[21] Claudia La Rocco,[22] Ralph Lemon,[23] Paul Schimmel,[24] David Lang (composer),[25] Boris Charmatz,[26] Ann Hamilton (artist),[27] and many more.
Center publications include Pigeons on the Grass Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field,[31] The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory,[32] and What Makes a Great Exhibition?, an essay anthology that examines various components of exhibition-making, edited by Paula Marincola.
The anthology explores subfields such as oral history and digital humanities to interrogate the changing nature of expertise in the museum field, and considers co-curation as a method for encouraging public engagement.
The online keywords anthology features essays and interviews from more than 50 prominent artists, curators, presenters, and scholars who reflect on common yet contested terms in interdisciplinary cultural practice.