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Patrick Fisher, CEO at Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. Photo by Malcolm Jackson.
In this conversation Patrick talks about:
Patrick Fisher has a deep commitment to his work at the intersection of the arts and community building. He started as Community and Collaborations manager at the Cultural Council of Greater Jacksonville, Florida, in 2016, and has since worked his way into the role of CEO at the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council as of 2023.
Rather than a buttoned-up, suit wearing CEO, you’ll meet an ambitious community builder whose passion for using the arts as a tool for social transformation is contagious.
Patrick’s dedication to dismantling barriers to access and participation in the arts, particularly in under-resourced communities, was shaped by unconventional life experiences, including traveling across North America in a van with his three-legged dog, living in a dry cabin in Alaska, spending his formidable years in DIY music scenes and couch surfing while traveling abroad.
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“ I think that any time you are in a non-major market, it’s assumed that the talent is not as great because if it was, it would be in a major market.”
Most recently recruited from Erie, PA, Patrick Fisher has called Pittsburgh home since June 2023. While new to the area, his dedication for championing the arts and empowering artists every day runs deep.
“What I specifically like about Pittsburgh’s arts ecosystem is that it represents the entire spectrum: We have legacy cultural institutions with global notoriety from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to the Carnegie Museum systems. But we also have really small, avant garde, independent organizations that add to the fabric of our community. So whether you are trying to engage with European-centric fine arts, more contemporary and conceptual work, or globally informed work that exists outside of traditional tracks in academia – we have the full spectrum here.
What excites me about that is that it yields a democracy of choice for everyone who wants to engage with the arts in a meaningful way.
Almost every night of the week, there’s an opportunity to explore Pittsburgh’s arts scene regardless of your interest levels, what neighborhood you live in, what your socioeconomic level is – it truly is a democracy of choice.”
Mountain Goats at Thunderbird Cafe & Music Hall. Photo by Patrick Fisher.
Redefining the role of an Arts Council
Owed to its role during the industrial revolution and subsequent investments into the arts during the Gilded Age, Pittsburgh has a long history of an active cultural sector and arts community. The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, however, only emerged in the early two thousands – formed after the merger of two arts service organizations.
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“Every Arts Council should shape themselves based off of the context of the ecosystem in which they exist and operate.”
Patrick compares the Pittsburgh Arts Council to his previous role, “ In my previous community, we had to operate really wide. There were not a lot of presenting and producing arts organizations, nor a whole lot of art service organizations. So, by default, we were very wide and somewhat shallow.
In Pittsburgh, that’s not the case. Here, you have a tremendous amount of producing and presenting organizations and – I would also say – a relatively hefty amount of art service organizations. When I joined the Pittsburgh Arts Council, we asked ourselves what seat the Arts Council should be sitting in such an active arts ecosystem.
We spent a lot of time with people where they weren’t: We went into artists’ studio spaces and did site visits with organizations. I wanted to sit down with them and ask them about the nuances of their work and its context. In that process, I had the opportunity to ask probing questions about their aspirations, their challenges, their opportunities, their obstacles – all these conversations allowed us to follow up based on what they had communicated to us.”
Flotsam River Circus, hosted by Riverlife, performed in Downtown Pittsburgh. Photo by Patrick Fisher.
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“As a convener, how do you not position yourself in a way in the ecosystem that it feels like you’re competing for resources against the very organizations and individuals you’re trying to serve?“
Financial sustainability in the arts is a tough nut to crack. When taking the reins, Patrick knew he wanted to move the Council away from grant dependency toward a diversified model with appropriate earned and contributed revenue.
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“I was hired with an expectation that we were going to be in a growth model, but truthfully, it’s been a shrinking model.“
Patrick elaborates, “ Typically, grant funding is geared towards supporting new initiatives; it rarely wants to sustain existing initiatives. Consequently, you’re always chasing a new angle, initiative or program. But that’s exhausting and not serving the ecosystem in a sustainable way. We took a critical look at the Arts Council’s offerings and asked ourselves what programs we could sunset and dissolve. We identified programs that others were already doing so we didn’t have to. Pittsburgh doesn’t have an offering problem, it has an awareness problem. There are countless things to do in the arts, but oftentimes people aren’t fully aware of what, when, or how to engage.”
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“It wasn’t a matter of the quantity of offerings, it was a matter of making them visible and accessible.“
From program provider to superconnector
Under Patrick’s leadership, the Arts Council let go of administering programs and shifted into the role of superconnector and amplifier. Today, the Arts Council views its role as disseminating relevant information, amplifying stories that uplift the local ecosystem and advocating around critical issues. Patrick explains, “We should know our ecosystem well enough – locally, regionally, and nationally – that when any artist or arts organizations asks for guidance, we can direct them to the resources or opportunities that are most relevant to them in that present moment.”
A dragon performance at Moon Fest, presented by the Organization of Chinese Americans-Pittsburgh and JADED artist collective. Photo by Patrick Fisher.
Supercharging the ecosystem through technology
As Patrick met with organizations and artists, he heard the same needs over and over again; needs that he knew already had a solution in the community. People just didn’t know about them. He realized his work would be more about raising the profile of what resources, opportunities, assets, services, and amenities already existed, and connecting people to them.
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“When I came to Pittsburgh, I recognized the abundance of possibility but also the lack of visibility. I knew we had all the ingredients for baking a phenomenal dish. The recipe just needed a little tweaking.“
His team started keeping lists of the assets the community already has access to in three categories:
At the beginning of each month, the Arts Council team scours websites, newsletters and the media for opportunities for their artists and arts organization – a process that takes a lot of staff time that could be better used elsewhere.
In collaboration with EcoMap, they are automating this process through data mining to find relevant resources and opportunities in Greater Pittsburgh. The same process will help populate an comprehensive calendar of events – a one-stop shop for all the happenings in the area further democratizing the access to the wide spectrum of activity in the ecosystem.
Superconnecting at a systems level
I’m a firm believer that Pittsburgh can be one of the best tier two cities for an artist to live and work in.
Tier one cities like New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta and DC are becoming more and more expensive to live and to maintain an artistic practice in. Communities like Pittsburgh have the ability to be really attractive.
My goal is to disseminate information in a way that makes other artists think about Pittsburgh as a place to live and work, because they realize there are resources, support models, art service organizations and a proactive Arts Council that are all here to help them thrive in their artistic practice.
With his deep commitment to supporting artists and arts organizations, Patrick is spearheading transformative changes in Pittsburgh that could serve as a model for other cities. Already, he convenes a peer-group of other Arts Councils to share good practices and insights from other parts of the country.
I would love to see a national model where what we’re doing in Pittsburgh can shape what they’re doing in Jacksonville or New Orleans or Nashville or Denver because if an artist moves out of a community and into another community, it would be great if they knew how to navigate the ecosystem of that community based off of how they navigated their last ecosystem.
Grief Cake, an exhibition by Pittsburgh-based artist Laurie Trok, at Bunker Projects. Photo by Patrick Fisher.
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