What do you picture when someone says “the arts”? For many, it’s the curtain rising on an Oklahoma City Ballet performance; it’s the sound of the Philharmonic as it tunes up. It’s a festival crowd spilling through the downtown streets; it’s opening night at Lyric. It’s true: those touchstones are such an important part of what makes our city a vibrant place to live. But there are also dozens of smaller, less well-known organizations across many different disciplines, each helping to strengthen the fabric of our city.
Big or small, many of these arts organizations share one common denominator. For more than five decades, Allied Arts has provided key infrastructure: a centralized fundraising and grantmaking engine that supports nearly every corner of the region’s arts ecosystem. Founded in 1971 by Chamber of Commerce business leaders, the organization was built on a key tenet — that investment in arts and culture is essential to a city’s growth.
This article is sponsored by the Potts Family Foundation
Fifty-five years later, Oklahoma City is now the 20th largest city in the country, a fact Allied Arts President and CEO Sunny Cearley points to as evidence that early investment paid off. What was once a forward-looking gambit is now nothing less than a mandate.
“It’s incumbent on the community leaders of today to continue to look forward and say, ‘What does vibrant arts and culture look like for the 20th largest city in America?’” Cearley said.
At its core, Allied Arts does one thing exceptionally well: it raises money and distributes it strategically. In the past year alone, the organization granted $3.1 million to 48 arts and cultural nonprofits across central Oklahoma. This year, its goal is even more impressive: the annual campaign aims to raise $3.85 million, funding that will reach more than one million Oklahomans and provide critical resources to arts and cultural organizations benefiting the underserved.
That reach matters, particularly in a landscape where individual donors may only be familiar with a handful of major institutions. Allied Arts acts as both curator and connector, directing funding not only to flagship organizations but also to smaller, less visible groups that might otherwise struggle for support.
But even within those flagship institutions, Cearley says the public often misses the full picture.
“What I didn’t get until I began working for Allied Arts was just how much outreach the flagships do,” she said.
She points to programs like Dance for Parkinson’s, an Oklahoma City Ballet program presented in partnership with the Oklahoma Parkinson’s Alliance, which provides a fun and social setting for those living with Parkinson’s disease to work on their motor functions through movement.
Similarly, Arts Council Oklahoma City, best known for its annual Festival of the Arts, operates year-round programming that often flies under the radar. For example, its Creative Aging program connects professional teaching artists with senior living facilities to provide programming that reaches those with dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other physical and cognitive challenges.
These arts organizations are not just producing performances but also delivering health, wellness, and community-building services. Such programs reflect a broader shift in how Allied Arts—and the community it serves—defines impact. The arts are not simply a cultural amenity; they are a tool for connection, education, and even healing.
That understanding extends beyond audiences to the workforce itself. Cearley, who previously worked at the Chamber, said her time at Allied Arts reshaped how she thinks about the role of creativity in everyday professional life.
“What I’ve learned is how important it is for our broader workforce to have creative outlets to excel in their careers,” she said.
In conversation, those examples surface quickly: a mayoral staff member singing in a chorus, a federal court employee performing in a choir, a development director balancing fundraising with tap dance classes and performances. These are not side hobbies so much as parallel systems of support—creative practices that sustain the people behind the city’s civic and economic engines.
“For people to be their best at work every day, they’ve got to have the outlet to go and do those creative things,” Cearley said. Access, then, becomes more than a theoretical goal. It is a logistical challenge—one Allied Arts approaches through funding programs that meet people where they are.
In rural communities, that can mean bringing live theater directly into schools. Through Lyric Theatre’s outreach programming, small touring productions travel to districts where students may never otherwise see a live performance. “I get letters from really rural teachers and students,” Cearley said. In one, a teacher wrote that because of “the rural nature and extreme poverty” of their community, the visit was “the only live play most of these kids will ever see.”
But access gaps exist closer to home, too. In larger suburban districts, logistical barriers—like transportation and limited bus capacity—can prevent students from attending off-site performances. Bringing the arts into schools eliminates that friction, allowing entire student bodies to participate rather than just a select few.
“Because you brought it to us, everybody could go,” Cearley recalled from another teacher’s note.
That spectrum—from rural scarcity to urban constraint—underscores the breadth of Allied Arts’ mission. The organization is not simply funding programming; it is funding access points.
Even its most visible fundraiser, the annual ARTini art auction, reflects that philosophy in ways many attendees may not realize. While the event is widely known as a lively, art-forward party, it also functions as a platform for working artists.
More than 400 submissions are juried—blindly—down to more than 200 pieces, ensuring equal opportunity regardless of name recognition. Artists can then choose whether to donate their proceeds or split sales with Allied Arts, a structure that directly compensates creators while supporting the broader mission. “We pay artists to show their work,” Cearley said. It’s a small but meaningful inversion of expectations—one that reinforces one of the organization’s underlying beliefs: that art has value, and so do the people who make it.
On May 2, ARTini returns to the Oklahoma City Convention Center. The art auction and martini tasting event, now in its 23rd year, is one of the largest—and, arguably, most fun—cultural events of the year. It raises critical funding while showcasing local artists; the evening is rounded out by entertainment and light bites from twelve top local restaurants.
Another important initiative is the OKCityCard, a unique way to both fund Allied Arts and make the arts more accessible to cardholders. For a $60 minimum donation, donors receive a card that can be used for savings at nearly 100 locations across central Oklahoma. The card unlocks everything from discounted art classes and workshops to 2-for-1 admission at many arts organizations and performances, and discounts at some of the best local shops and restaurants. Valid for a full year from the time of donation, the card is like a secret handshake to the best the 405 has to offer.
As Oklahoma City continues to grow, the broader art scene remains both a reflection of that growth and a driver of it. The work done by Allied Arts is not in the spotlight; it creates the conditions for the spotlight to exist in the first place.
Or, as Cearley and her team might frame it, the job is straightforward—even if the impact is anything but: raise the money, invest it wisely, and trust that the ripple effects will reach farther than any single stage.
This article appears in 100 Years of Route 66.