The union of the arts: the Fine Arts Foundation, 1955

1955 - 1988

The founding: In 1955 Fort Wayne's arts organisations did the thing this section exists to record. The Fort Wayne Art School and Museum, the Fort Wayne Civic Theatre and the Fort Wayne Musical Society founded the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation, with Sam Rea of Rea Magnet Wire as its first board chairman. Arts United, as the foundation is now known, calls itself the third oldest united arts fund in the nation, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art's account of Margaret Ann Keegan, a key member of the early 1950s exploratory committee, puts it the same way: at the time, the foundation was only the third organisation of its kind in the country. The model was a single fund drive and a single voice for organisations that had competed for the same donors and the same audiences. Its first annual fund drive, chaired by Margaret Ann Keegan in 1958, raised $88,900 for five member organisations, and the same year a Regional Arts Council was established for the larger network. In 1964 Anita Cast, a board chair, led what the foundation's own history calls the Renaissance Campaign. The foundation took its present name, Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne, in 1988, on the Whatzup and PBS Fort Wayne account of the Arts United Center's history; the foundation's own annual-report timeline, read closely, ties the renaming to its expanded membership without fixing the year as cleanly, and the 1988 date is printed on the documentary's authority.

Why it is culture, not administration: The federation changed what Fort Wayne culture was for. Before 1955 the city's arts were a set of survivals, each company lasting as long as its volunteers and its hall. After 1955 they were a sector, with a fund, a plan, and, within six years, an architect. The two stated objectives Arts United's own officers give for the founding pair the whole era: downtown Fort Wayne was entering suburbanisation and decline and needed an answer, and the fledgling arts organisations needed a home. Culture was enlisted, deliberately, as the city's strategy for its own centre. Every later article in this section, the Kahn commission, the Embassy rescue's civic template, the public art program, the state district designation, runs on rails laid in 1955.

Sources:

1. Arts United of Greater Fort Wayne, 2017 Annual Report, Building on Six Decades of Visionary Leadership (the history timeline: the 1955 founding as the Fort Wayne Fine Arts Foundation; the three first member organisations; Sam Rea first board chairman; the 1958 first fund drive raising $88,900 for five organisations; the Regional Arts Council of 1958; the 1964 Renaissance Campaign under Ian Rolland in the 2018 report's timeline and under Anita Cast in the 2017 report's narrative of the renaming era).
2. Fort Wayne Museum of Art blog, Margaret Ann Keegan: Public Servant and Champion of the Arts (20 February 2019: the early 1950s exploratory committee; the foundation as only the third of its kind in the country).
3. Whatzup, Gem of city arts scene shines again (the Fine Arts Foundation founded in 1955, becoming Arts United in 1988, sourced to the PBS Fort Wayne documentary A Home for the Arts).
4. ETC Connect blog, Arts United Sets a High Bar for Accessibility (5 February 2026: Arts United's Miriam Morgan on the founding's two objectives, suburbanisation and a home for the fledgling organisations).