September 13, 2021

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (the Center) announced 42 grants in September 2021 totaling more than $10.2 million to support the Philadelphia region’s artists and cultural organizations. $900,000 goes to Pew Fellowships, awarded to 12 individual artists working in music, visual art, dance, theater, film, and poetry. $9.3 million goes to 30 recovery grants, including $1.5 million provided as unrestricted general operating support, awarded to organizations as they move forward from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Art & Art History adjunct faculty member and visual artist Rami George is a recipient of a 2021 Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Pew Fellowships provide unrestricted awards of $75,000 to individual artists from all disciplines. In addition to monetary awards, Pew Fellows are offered focused professional advancement resources such as financial counseling and career-development workshops.

George’s practice turns an autobiographical lens on their Lebanese heritage, queer experience, and family history in a New Age spiritual community. Their mixed-media installations and video works draw from archives and family ephemera and use common materials such as plywood, plastic sheeting, and house paint.

George has exhibited and screened work internationally, and currently has work included in Among Us: Four Decades of Art & AIDS in Philadelphia, an online exhibition hosted by the William Way LGBT Center. They will open a solo exhibition, titled Virtues Vol. 1 at Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia later this year.

About The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and it engages in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders. For more information, visit pewcenterarts.org.