PHILADELPHIA — Across the country, cultural organizations have been hard hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic, but the impact has been felt particularly hard here where the city has eliminated its funding for two institutions, reduced it for others and completely shuttered its Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy. The cutbacks have been felt at some of the city’s largest cultural organizations, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose city funding was trimmed back by $510,000 to $2 million, deepening a shortfall that has led the museum to reduce its staff by about 100 people. The Greater Philadelphia Film Office, an economic development agency that promotes the film industry, lost all of its $131,000 in city funding, and Historic Philadelphia, a nonprofit, also lost its public money, as the City Council approved a budget last week that reduced citywide arts funding to $5.84 million, a cut of 40 percent. Still the council-approved figure was $1 million more for the arts than first proposed by Mayor Jim Kenney as his administration worked to close an estimated $750 million gap in Philadelphia’s $4.8 billion budget.

Source: New York Times June 30, 2020 23:03 UTC