The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage announced its 2025 grants, with $8.6 million being awarded to 44 Philadelphia-area cultural organizations and artists. Among them are two local grantees — José Ortiz-Pagán, a Mt. Airy-based multidisciplinary artist, and Yolanda Wisher, a Germantown-based curator of the nonprofit Monument Lab.

The Local spoke to these Northwest-based artists about their work and how it felt to receive a Pew Center grant.

José Ortiz-Pagán

Ortiz-Pagán is originally from Puerto Rico, but moved to Philadelphia at the age of 25 to pursue his master’s degree at Temple University. He faced a difficult decision to stay in the U.S. after graduating, despite most of his family remaining in Puerto Rico. Ortiz-Pagán said this experience was formative for his art.

“A lot of my work still deals with that departure, deals with displacement, deals with that limbo,” Ortiz-Pagán said. “You have to manage and learn how to be the master of two very different worlds.”

Ortiz-Pagán works in many different forms, including sculpture, painting, and drawing, but said printmaking was the medium that first caught his eye. He started making street art in Puerto Rico, dealing with topics such as the Iraq War, gentrification, and urban decay. He moved to Philadelphia with plans to continue this type of work.

“I came with this preconceived idea of what I wanted to do, being from a colonial territory. There’s a very chaotic relationship with the United States and politically it’s always very intense and very volatile, so I came to Philadelphia thinking that I was going to export all of these conversations and issues,” Ortiz-Pagán said. “But I think when I came to Philadelphia, especially North Philadelphia, I realized that Philadelphia has in itself a very different set of challenges through which I had to learn how to see them and adapt them to my work.”

Ortiz-Pagán focuses a lot of his work on being community-centered, engaging with topics such as healing and spiritual traditions. One project he is especially proud of took place during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Along with other artists, Ortiz-Pagán helped organize a livestreamed Día de los Muertos procession with four ofrendas, or altars, located around the city. Ortiz-Pagán wore a ceremonial suit he designed to honor the dead with dignity.

Ortiz-Pagán said he had been anonymously nominated for a Pew Center grant twice before, so his expectations were low this third time. However, randomly checking his email one day led to “an explosion of joy.”

“It happened in the most beautiful way possible,” Ortiz-Pagán said. “My parents were here to visit from Puerto Rico because my daughter’s birthday was happening that week. We were in a big box store getting supplies. Things were challenging, so we were being careful with our budget. Suddenly, something told me, ‘Check your email,’ and I did. My wife, my parents, and I just started jumping and hugging.”

The Pew Center grant of $85,000 is unrestricted, not only enabling Ortiz-Pagán to explore more avenues of creativity in his art, but also leading to more exposure and allowing him to work at a more “sustainable” yet “robust” pace. According to Ortiz-Pagán, the award was very affirming.

“I became an individual artist when my wife was pregnant with our daughter… It was a huge risk that most people said was a little bit insane, but it has played out in a beautiful way,” Ortiz-Pagán said. “Your confidence is definitely strengthened. Not because you doubt your work, but because sometimes things in your work get lost in translation…Understanding that other people saw through that complexity doesn’t feel bad.”

Yolanda Wisher

Wisher, a Germantown resident, is the senior curator for Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art, history, and design studio. The organization is receiving a Pew Center grant of $360,000 to work on [birdsong], a “living monument to Philadelphia’s birds.”

“[birdsong] invites deep listening and reflection on interspecies relationships through three new environmental soundworks that are going to be installed across the city,” Wisher explained. “We’re going to commission three artists to develop these sound monuments in partnership with local environmental organizations.”

The vocalists and sound artists involved in [birdsong] include Mendi and Keith Obadike, a husband and wife duo from Ithaca, NY; Raúl Romero, a Philadelphia-based sound artist; and Hanna Tuulikki, a British-Finnish composer. Ornithologists and wildlife biologists will also work alongside the artists to explore the intersections of environmental stewardship and ecology through sound.

Wisher said [birdsong] embodies Monument Lab’s goals in expanding the definition and understanding of monuments.

“Working in the environmental ecology space is a new foray for us, so we’re eager to learn as much about that space as possible,” Wisher said. “There’s not anything else like bird songs to give you a sense of place and time wherever you are, and to make you feel human…You have to think about what it would be like to wake up one day and not hear it and how much we do take it for granted, the presence of this environment that we get to live in. We want everybody to be able to have a moment to reflect, enjoy, and celebrate these connections, this human-animal species connection that we have.”

[birdsong] is set to run from May to August 2027, coinciding with the migration season of birds in the area.

This grant is Wisher’s third time receiving a Pew Center award — in 2015 she got one as an artist and in 2024 she received a grant as a curator of a project. However, the feeling of finding out she won remains “incredible.”

“It’s great when a really esteemed panel of folks from outside the city recognizes the caliber of your idea and the artists that you’re working with,” Wisher said.

Maggie Dougherty can be reached at Margaret@chestnuthilllocal.com.