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1955 — the united arts fund
Founding: Arts United was established in 1955 as the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation. Its first member organizations were the Fort Wayne Art School and Museum, the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre, and the Fort Wayne Musical Society — an exact map of the city's established arts in that year. Sam Rea of Rea Magnet Wire (whose fortune and philanthropy are in the Wealth section) was the first chairman of the board. A first Fine Arts Festival followed in 1958, held annually until 1975, and a first annual fund drive raised 88,900 dollars for five organizations.
The building: The foundation's great work was a home: Louis I. Kahn was hired in the early 1960s to design a fine arts center for Fort Wayne, and the Arts United Center opened in 1973, Kahn in attendance at the opening months before his death — the only theatre Kahn ever built, and the anchor of the downtown cultural district the foundation had imagined. Freimann Square, its companion, was dedicated in 1972. The foundation took the name Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne (the renaming falls about 1981 in its own timeline) and describes itself as the nation's third-oldest united arts fund and the region's only local arts agency. Member organizations' own histories — Civic Theatre, the Museum of Art, the Philharmonic — belong to their own sections; Arts United is the funder and landlord that holds them together.
Sources:
- Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne, 2017 Annual Report timeline — 1955 founding as the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation, the three first members, Sam Rea first chairman, the 1958 festival, the 88,900-dollar first drive, the renaming.
- Arts United / Kahn literature — the Kahn commission, the 1973 Arts United Center opening, Freimann Square 1972.