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Fort Wayne's arts world has an umbrella, and it was raised in a department-store tea room: in 1955 a circle of civic leaders meeting at Wolf and Dessauer formed the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation, today Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne, with Samuel A. Rea as founder and first president. The foundation's great project was a campus: when the Redevelopment Commission cleared a worn downtown tract as its first project, the foundation set out to fill it with a cultural district modeled on Lincoln Center, and the Arts United Center that rose there is now, fifty years on, being remade under the Soaring Vision campaign launched in 2023. The companies under the umbrella have older roots, the Civic Theatre from a 1927 guild that played in a high school and a church, and this section carries the foundation, the campus and the companies as one continuous civic undertaking.
The umbrella: Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne
Founded 1955 as the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation
Founding: In 1955 a circle of civic leaders — Arts United's own retelling, through its president Susan Mendenhall, places the talks in the tea room of the Wolf and Dessauer department store — formed the Fort Wayne Fine Arts…
An arts campus downtown: the Kahn plan and what grew from it
1959–1973, and after
The idea: The Fort Wayne Redevelopment Commission, founded in 1959, made the clearance of a worn downtown tract — between Clinton and Lafayette streets, Main Street and the railroad — its first project, and the Fine Arts…
A Soaring Vision: the Arts United Center remade
2023–2025
The campaign: In October 2023 Arts United publicly launched A Soaring Vision, a capital campaign to expand and modernize the fifty-year-old Arts United Center, with a goal of $40 million. Private donors and public funding had…
Before the companies: Fort Wayne's first stages
1853–1920s
Colerick's Hall: Fort Wayne's first theatre, by the Fort Wayne News's 1907 account of city firsts, was Colerick's Hall, erected by E. F. Colerick in 1853 on the north side of Columbia Street between Clinton and Barr. It opened on…
Fort Wayne Civic Theatre: the wandering company
1927–1973
Founding: The company's own historic overview begins in 1927, when the Fort Wayne Community Theatre Guild was formed and produced two shows — one in a local high school, one in a neighborhood church (the shows were Seven Keys to…
Fort Wayne Civic Theatre: the Kahn years and the Colglazier era
1973–today
Growth: From a budget of $77,500 in 1966, the company grew to $807,670 by 2006. In 1988 Civic presented the world premiere of a musical Fahrenheit 451 — book by Ray Bradbury himself, lyrics by Georgia Bogardus Holof, music by…
Fort Wayne Youtheatre
Founded 1934
Founding: In 1934 Dr. Clive McAllister, president of the Old Fort Players, appointed a committee to create a children's theatre branch; the company's own education guides tell it that way, while the mission statement carried by…
Arena Dinner Theatre
Born 1974, from the Fort Wayne Theatre Workshop of 1962
Roots: Arena's own history corrects the date often given for it. The company began not in 1964 but in 1962, as the Fort Wayne Theatre Workshop, part of the Fort Wayne Parks Department and the only theatre in the city then…
First Presbyterian Theater
The 1960s; theatre in McKay Hall from 1967
A theatre instead of a gym: First Presbyterian Church (the congregation itself is carried in Churches & Religion) built its mid-century ministry around the arts. When the congregation expanded its downtown building, it chose to…
Three Rivers Music Theatre
Founded 2016
Founding: Three Rivers Music Theatre was founded in 2016 by Andy Planck, a Fort Wayne native (Northrop High School, then Ball State's musical theatre program) who had worked in New York and on national tours, come home in 2009…
All for One productions
Formed 1992; incorporated 1993
Founding: all for One began in 1992 with a "what if" conversation among five friends who wanted a faith-based theatre company that would perform outside any church, "in the heart of the arts community." Artistic director Lauren…
The Embassy as a stage: vaudeville, the rescue, and the Broadway tours
Opened 1928 as the Emboyd
The palace years: The Embassy opened on May 14, 1928, as the Emboyd Theatre — a movie palace and vaudeville house built by theatre operator W. Clyde Quimby at a cost of $1.5 million, attached to the 250-room Indiana Hotel, with…
Fort Wayne Ballet
Incorporated 1956
Founding: In the mid-1950s, with the city thriving as an industrial hub, a group of residents decided a proper metropolis needed a ballet academy, organized and raised the money, and in 1956 filed articles of incorporation — the…
Fort Wayne Dance Collective
Founded 1978
Founding: In the summer of 1978 five women — Cathy Craighead, Ranny Levy, Liz Monnier, Krista Schloss and Lisa Tsetse — met at a modern dance workshop sponsored by the Fort Wayne Women's Bureau, most accounts placing it at the…
The Fort Wayne Artists Guild and the crafts guilds
Organized December 18, 1959
The guild: The Fort Wayne Artists Guild — the documented guild line for the city's visual artists (no Fort Wayne "Art League" appears in the record reached) — was begun through the impetus of Jim McBride and eighteen alumni of…
Artlink
Opened 1978
Founding: Artlink's own history begins in 1976, when Bruce Linker founded Linker's Gallery in his apartment at 1117½ Broadway to showcase emerging artists — inspired, by his later account, by the cohort of Fort Wayne Art School…
Cinema Center: film as art
Founded 1976
Founding: When the Spectator Theater, Fort Wayne's last art and specialty movie house, on The Landing, lost its lease, a group of film enthusiasts organized to fill the void. Fort Wayne Cinema Center was founded in 1976 with…
Public art: the general, the steel, and the alley walls
1918–today
The monument era: Fort Wayne's first great piece of public art was a monument. Griswold's 1917 history tells the commission: the work was first awarded to Chicago sculptor Charles E. Mulligan, whose sudden death revised the…
Literature in brief: a poet laureate and the written record
In brief
The record: Fort Wayne's literary institutions are thin beside its stages — no durable local poetry society or literary organization surfaced in the record reached — and the city's written life is carried mostly as biography, in…
The arts today
The sector in 2026
The shape of it: The structure built in 1955 still organizes the field. Arts United's annual fund supports a roster of funded member organizations across heritage, music, theatre, dance and visual art — the companies in this…
