The Kelly Strayhorn Theater opened in 2001 in East Liberty’s former Regent Theater. It’s been there ever since, a nonprofit focused on artists of color and LGBTQ artists and one of Pittsburgh’s go-to venues for dance.

But it won’t be there too many years longer.

The theater’s lease expires in late 2029, and co-executive director Joseph Hall said there’s no option to extend or to buy. So the Kelly Strayhorn will be on the move. The questions are where and how. And those are also the issues to be addressed in Owning Our Future: A Symposium on BIPOC Institutional Ownership the theater is presenting this week.

The four-day symposium gathers experts and artists from Pittsburgh and around the country for talks, panel discussions, performances, a film screening and even a guided neighborhood tour. The idea is to explore how BIPOC-led cultural groups can improve their communities by controlling their spaces.

“We know that not only BIPOC-led arts organizations, but arts organizations in general struggle with keeping space,” Hall said. “We have learned that this is not only a U.S. issue, but across the world.”

Yet BIPOC-led groups are especially vulnerable to dislocation, in part because of circumstances like the Kelly Strayhorn’s. During its 24-year run, East Liberty rapidly gentrified, gaining a Whole Foods, a Target, new restaurants and expensive new apartment buildings. Many long-time residents, especially Black folks, have been driven out by rising rents and new construction.

“We have seen neighborhoods in Pittsburgh both demolished and then redeveloped. And in that process, we have seen culture be lost,” said Patrick Fisher, executive director of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, an advocacy group. “We have seen culture not preserved. And the only way to really take a stance against that is through investment and ownership, to have some agency in the moment.”

“There’s a challenge there, but there’s also a great opportunity,” Hall said. “Right now we are really looking for, in the East End, the new opportunity to build the theater for the future, the 21^st-century theater for the people is really what our vision is.”

Building on history

This week’s symposium was sparked in part by Kelly Strayhorn’s working with Lisa Yancey, a nationally known, New York-based consultant who helped the group develop a strategic plan.

Yancey, citing examples such as the historic Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, says there is a long history of people of color taking ownership of their communities.

“We are continuing that history, continuing to build from, respond to and elevate our agency and ownership and the importance for a really complete and fulfilling society that benefits all to maintain and preserve spaces that uplift the environments where people can hold and be and identify and find joy, innovation, and belonging,” said Yancey, one of the symposium’s keynote speakers.

There are many ways for nonprofit arts groups to pursue a path toward independence and sustainability.

The panel discussions have titles like Transformative Operational Practices, Radical Financial Innovation and Envisioning the Future. Moderators include local arts-and-culture experts like poet and artist Veronica Corpuz, Jasiri X of 1Hood Media, Khamil Bailey of the Greenwood Plan, and Kilolo Luckett of ALMA | Lewis.

Yancey said around the country, groups have taken approaches from land trusts to building cooperatives and entrepreneurship.

Panelist Darren Isom, of San Francisco’s Bridgespan Group, said even endowments are not just for big-budget institutions like universities.

“I think that endowments are extremely important to smaller groups as well,” Isom. “They empower nonprofits to take longer-term perspectives so to look past moments and think about success in a longer way. And they also attract other potential funders.”

One role model in the realm of BIPOC-led arts groups taking ownership is the National Black Theater of Harlem. The late Barbara Ann Teer founded the troupe in the late 1960s with a plan to make the group’s real estate subsidize its art.

“She understood that if I own the land, and I utilize the land as a mechanism of economics, then I actually create more freedom for me to take creative risks that allow for me to center community first, versus this engine called capitalism,” said the group’s artistic director, Jonathan McCrory, another symposium panelist.

The NBT eventually owned a whole block in Harlem. In stark contrast to most nonprofit arts groups, who rely heavily on donations, NBT earned most of its revenue from below-market rents paid by artists and nonprofit tenants. The troupe and its partners have just built a 23-story residential-and-mixed-use building that should expand its earned income even further, McCrory said. The building will also include the NBT’s new performance space.

For-profit models will also be discussed. Keynote speakers also include Andy Shallal, the Washington, D.C.-area restaurateur who founded Busboys and Poets, a chain of eight restaurants that double as bookstores and performances spaces.

“My message is that we as a society tend to undervalue art, and we need to make sure that we continue to put our money where our interests are, where our mind is,” Shallal said.

Taking ownership

Some grassroots, BIPOC-led groups in Pittsburgh have already taken ownership of their spaces in various ways. A number of them are in the Hill District, including the Hill Dance Academy Theater, which owns a campus formerly occupied by St. Benedict the Moor School and runs it as dance studios, offices, and rental space for artists.

Another is Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Co. The group was founded in 2003 by Mark Clayton Southers, an actor, playwright and Hill native who funded its productions largely out of his salary as a heavy-equipment operator for U.S. Steel.

Playwrights was known for its productions of August Wilson plays, thought it also staged works by Southers and other local playwrights. For years, it staged shows in rented spaces around town. In 2022, it was temporarily homeless while its Pittsburgh Cultural Trust-owned space underwent renovations.

Southers learned of an opportunity to purchase Madison Elementary School, a massive complex in the Hill that he’d attended as a kid, but which had been closed for more than a decade. “I thought about it and I was like, ‘Oh, we could make that work,’” he said.

Southers, who’d by then left U.S. Steel, sank most of his pension into the project. But he bought the building outright, and now Playwrights is the anchor tenant.

“Ever since we got the keys and got in that building and saw what the potential is, and that we can dream, we don’t have to worry about nobody kicking us out or raising our rent, or losing costumes to water damage and things like that, all these type of things went out the window,” he said. “And it was ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ it was like going from black-and-white to color.”

Southers already gets some rental income from the property, and hopes to earn more as improvements are made.

Similarly, Joseph Hall imagines a future where Kelly Strayhorn Theater — wherever it might reside — is not just a nighttime arts venue but a kind of all-day community center.

“What could it be to have a restaurant that was open and during the mornings we could have activities for seniors. After-school activities for students coming from Obama High School who could meet us in a big opulent lobby space where we have a restaurant but other activities as well. A retail space!”

It’s a dream that goes beyond nurturing artists to enriching the whole community.

“We know that our communities deserve so much more, and that’s what we’re really trying to go for,” he said. “That’s what we’re envisioning in the future”

The Owning Our Future symposium includes performances Fri., May 16, by local groups including Balafon West African Dance Ensemble with Oronde Sharif, Alisha Wormsley & Jasmine Hearn, Adil Mansoor and slowdanger; on Sat., May 17, by local and nationally based performers including Jesse Factor, Sidra Bell Dance New York, PearlArts Movement & Sounds, and A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham.

In addition, there’s a Thu., May 15 screening and discussion of “East of Liberty,” Chris Ivey’s film about East Liberty’s fraught history of urban renewal and gentrification; a Sat., May 17, neighborhood tour led by local historian Terri Baltimore; the Kelly Strayhorn gallery’s ongoing exhibit “Lifting Liberty,” featuring Njaimeh Njie’s collage-based show about the neighborhood; and Adrian Jones’ “Looking Glass,” an innovative app-based archive of Black life in Pittsburgh.

More information about the symposium is here.