The New York City-based Shubert Foundation has announced grants totaling more than $18.2 million to 450 arts organizations around the country.

Ranging in size from $5,000 to $275,000, the unrestricted grants were awarded to a broad spectrum of organizations in urban and rural areas with programs that include experimental, contemporary, and classical works. Some $13 million of the total went to theater groups in forty-two states, while $2.5 million was awarded to dance companies and the remainder was distributed to other performing arts organizations, professional theater training programs, and human service agencies.

The Shubert Foundation increased its annual funding, from $17.6 million in 2009, for the thirty-first year in a row and committed to do the same next year. In light of substantial cutbacks in government and corporate support for the arts — over half the groups that received funding from the foundation scaled back their annual budgets in 2010 — the foundation made larger awards to a third of this year's grantees who also received grants last year.

"We are especially proud that we can provide increased support when our constituency is experiencing an unprecedented loss of contributed income," said Shubert Foundation chairman Philip J. Smith. "In the face of an alarming decline in arts funding, we feel more compelled than ever to deepen our commitment to arts organizations that enrich our society."