Remembering Drue Heinz, Cultural Philanthropist and Director Emeritus of Heinz Endowments

Drue Heinz, a cultural philanthropist and publisher of The Paris Review, died on March 30 of this year, and reflecting on her life evokes a career in favor of culture and the arts.

She and her husband, Henry J. Jack Heinz II, dedicated much of their philanthropy to Pittsburgh, the home base of the Heinz family’s enterprises. There they were instrumental in the development of the city’s downtown cultural district in the 1970s, according to an obituary by the Independent.

In Pittsburgh, in 1973, she joined the board of directors of the Howard Heinz Endowment, which later became The Heinz Endowments, and eventually became director emeritus in 1994.

Acknowledging her "fierce devotion to literature, poetry, art, artists and beauty," Grant Oliphant, president of The Heinz Endowments, said:

At a time when the arts became slowly more embattled in our culture, she held fast to the firm conviction that art makes us supremely human. Human creativity could have had no more stalwart champion. We are grateful for her years of service on our board, and for the ideas she shared. They live with us still.

Among her achievements, Heinz was closely involved in the Endowments’ initiative to create Downtown’s Cultural District under the leadership of her late husband and in partnership with the city’s corporate, cultural, and political leaders, states The Heinz Endowments.

“We can visit museums like the Metropolitan in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in London and walk in the Drue Heinz galleries, but the support of literature is a less visible, subtler, indeed more selfless undertaking. Drue did it more consistently and with more thoughtfulness than anyone else," said Jonathan Galassi, president of book publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, remembering institutions she created or supported like The Drue Heinz Prize and The Paris Review in the US and the Hawthornden Prize in the UK, among them.

Read here the full article by The Heinz Endowments.

Image: Heinz Foundation website