Past
Grantees

PATRICKS CABARET, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer CHRIS SCHLICHTING, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $8,000 to support the creation and production of a new work, Matching Drapes. Matching Drapes aims to spark dialogue between elements of attraction and repulsion. The movement generated carries layers of information and complex questions and messages that may not delineate a clear narrative logic but do evoke strong ideas. Gender, identity, and vulnerability of the human experience are some of the topics in the dialogue. Funding will allow Schlichting to work with a dynamic group of performers in a rigorous generative process to develop this new work.

The James Sewell Ballet, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $31,000 in support of the Ballet Works Project. The Ballets mission is to create and perform works that connect artists with audiences and to advance contemporary ballet. The Ballet Works Project supports the companys desire to inspire and assist in the creation of innovative choreographic works from emerging and established choreographers by providing resources for exploration and discovery. In each of the years covered by this grant, the James Sewell Ballet will commission and present at least three new works by emerging choreographers based in Minnesota and/or New York City.

"KAREN SHERMAN, choreographer, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Deer Isle, Maine, to participate in a mixed media craft workshop to research ideas and acquire skills in support of her current dance project, One with Others. Sherman is experimenting with wearable wood and hardware appendages as body enhancers or inhibitors in a work that draws upon ideas of biography, self-determination, communication, and desire. She will attend the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts to study with mixed media artist Mark Hartung, whose workshop will focus on imaginative representation of experience through the repurposing of simple objects, and with writer Elisabeth Tova Bailey."

DEB SHOVAL received a grant in support of a feature-length narrative called AWOL. Joey, 19, is a recent high school graduate who is working her way slowly toward nothing in rural Northeast Pennsylvania. Physically strong and honest, she lives up to the low expectations of others until she meets Rayna, 28, a sexy, married mother of two who is vivacious, bold, and lonely. Despite the realities of her Appalachian poverty, Rayna exudes a joie de vivre that is addictive. Rayna seduces Joey, and Joey is smitten. But when Joeys Catholic mother announces that its time for Joey to move out, and Rayna makes it clear that their trysts will never become anything more, Joey must make some choices about her future in a post-industrial area with little to offer. With Raynas encouragement and without any other viable options for housing or employment, Joey joins the Army. As summer becomes fall and fall becomes winter, Joey and Rayna exchange letters and fuel their passion once again. Preoccupied by her infatuation with Rayna, Joey concocts big plans to run away to Canada from her home, her family, and the Army with Rayna and Raynas kids. Moments before crossing the Canadian border, Joey finds Rayna with her husband, and realizes shes traveled hundreds of miles northward under a lie. As the reality of Raynas deception becomes clear, Joey decides to continue the journey alone, crossing the border into her new future and new self.

SMACK MELLON, New York City, received $10,000 in support of the Artist Studio Program.  The mission of Smack Mellon is to nurture and support emerging, under-recognized mid-career and women artists in the creation and exhibition of new work, by providing exhibition opportunities, studio workspace, and access to equipment and technical assistance for the realization of ambitious projects.  The Artist Studio Program provides six emerging artists with access to private studio space, shared workspace, and a $5,000 fellowship for 11 months.  From a competitive pool of applications, the six artists chosen are given the opportunity to create new work, develop existing work, establish relationships with arts professionals, and connect with peers in the arts community.  Studio artists work in a wide range of disciplines including photography, video, film, performance, painting, collage, public art, sculpture, printmaking, and mixed media installation.

THE SOAP FACTORY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $22,000 in support of the participation of emerging Minnesota artists in the 2012 Exhibition and Residency Programs. The Soap Factory is a laboratory for artistic experimentation and innovation, dedicated to supporting artists and engaging audiences through the production and presentation of contemporary art in a unique and historic environment. The Soap Factory provides a supportive environment for emerging artists, and remains unabashedly artist-centered. It offers artists a vibrant, active place for creative experiment and innovation.

SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK, Long Island City, New York, received a two-year grant of $46,000 in support of the Emerging Artist Fellowship Program. Socrates is an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. The Parks existence is based on they believe that reclamation, revitalization, and creative expression are essential to the survival, humanity, and improvement of the urban environment. The Emerging Artist Fellowship Program gives emerging artists a chance to work outside the confines of a traditional studio environment in a community that is supportive and encouraging. Artists experiment and take risks with their work, realize innovative and ambitious projects, and exhibit in an open, professional forum. For many artists, Socrates offers a first opportunity to create work on a large scale in a public, outdoor space.

SOHO REPERTORY THEATRE, New York City, received a two-year grant of $30,000 in support of the creation, development, and production of new works by emerging playwrights or performance ensembles based in New York City.  Soho Rep, a hub for innovative contemporary theater, is dedicated to artistic excellence by supporting distinctive, diverse, and pioneering theater.  Jerome dollars support new play development programming, which includes a Writer/Director Lab that fosters ongoing relationships between early career writers and directors in the creation of new plays.  The Studio is a commissioning and development program that is project specific, and strengthens theatrical works in development, constituting the engine behind the mainstage.  Soho Rep produces annual seasons that include works by emerging playwrights.

STEFANIE SPARKS was awarded a grant for Cathy Coppola, a neo-realistic, comedic, character-driven narrative feature. The film will present a satirical look at class, ambition and the female experience as seen from the fringes of the contemporary American independent film world. Cathy Coppola will focus on primary character Cathy Klinkmans struggle to get her feature film made while suffering from a loss of confidence. After winning a film competition at North Seattle Community College, Cathy quickly makes her way to Los Angeles. She lands a job on a successful LA television show. She gets caught up in the fast-paced lifestyle of LA and gets fired from her job after just a few months, so she heads to New York and Film School. Five years later she receives her Masters degree from Columbia and is again on her way to the top. She eventually lands an interview with a renowned film producer. The interview goes well, but Cathy is surprised to discover that her job will be taking the producers dogs on the weekends, not assisting on a film as she had hoped. And so begins a long series of mishaps, until Cathy resorts to anything to get ahead, including posing as the illegitimate daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. Suddenly her world is occupied by industry people who cant get enough of her. But where will all this lead? Will Cathy make it in the world of independent film, or will her deception be her final undoing?

MICHÉLE STEINWALD, arts administrator, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, to participate in the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance to deepen her understanding of contemporary performance (focus on dance), create a peer network of emerging leaders in the presenting field, and develop a strong curatorial voice in her role as Assistant Curator for the Performing Arts at the Walker Art Center. Her study goals are to further develop language for communicating artistic and curatorial intent, improve her leadership skills, create strategies for impactful connection between contemporary dance artists and new audeinces, and broaden her capacity to serve furture projects.

MICHÉLE STEPHENSON received support for American Promise, a documentary twelve years in the making that chronicles the school experiences of two African American boys and their families, offering an unprecedented look at the complexities of race, parenting, privilege, and education at the dawn of the 21st century. Stephenson and her husband Joe Brewster turned the camera on themselves and began filming the experiences of their five year-old son Idris and his best friend Seun, as they started kindergarten in 1999. The boys enrolled at the prestigious Dalton School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, just as the private institution boldly strengthened its commitment to cultivating a diverse student body. Over the 12 years of this film, we see the boys and their families navigate learning differences that later become diagnoses, struggle with stereotypes and identity, and ultimately take increasingly divergent paths on their road to graduation. We also see a rare and vivid portrait of middle-class African American families as the filmmaker parents wrestle with doubt and angst over their sons educational journey. Both sets of parents grapple with how best to support their sons and interact with teachers and administrators. All of this is set against the backdrop of a persistent educational achievement gap that dramatically affects African American boys at all socioeconomic levels across the country. The film puts a face to the unique social and emotional needs of these boys and poignantly calls into question commonly held assumptions about access, resources, and what really influences academic performance.

STREB, Brooklyn, New York, received $21,000 in support of the Emerging Artists Commissioning Program.  STREB is dedicated to supporting and presenting the work of choreographer Elizabeth Streb at home and on tour throughout the world.  It brings audience and community into the artistic process by breaking down barriers to participation and access with new approaches to creation, education, and presentation.  Built on the organizing principle of Extreme Action, as developed by choreographer and action architect Elizabeth Streb, the company’s mission is to create opportunities for artistic discovery and connection.  In the Emerging Artists Commissioning Program, emerging choreographers and movement artists are selected to develop new work at SLAM, Streb’s Lab for Action Mechanics.  The artists, each with his/her own artistic language expressed through distinct media, work individually, in collaboration with each other, or in partnership with Streb and her company.  The new works remain fluid throughout the process, changing over time and in response to artist and audience feedback. 

The TEXTILE CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $31,000 in support of the Fiber Artist Project Grants Program for emerging artists, and the Center’s program of support and services for emerging artists.  The Textile Center, a national center for fiber art, honors textile traditions and promotes excellence and innovation in fiber art.  It supports artists working in all textile forms including weaving, quilting, knitting, sewing, dyeing, felting, needlework, lacemaking, basketry, and beading.  The Fiber Artist Project Grants Program is designed to advance the professional development of emerging fiber artists in Minnesota and foster vitality and excellence in the field of fiber art.  Project grants are awarded to four emerging artists, enabling them to undertake projects ranging from studies with esteemed artists to purchasing specialized equipment and exploring new techniques.  The program culminates in an exhibition.

TICKLE THE SLEEPING GIANT, New York City, received $9,000 in support of the development and presentation of Used, Abused and Hung Out to Dry, by Artistic Director Trajal Harrell. The mission of Tickle the Sleeping Giant is to advance interest in and understanding of postmodern and contemporary dance and their application to everyday life. It carries out this mission by creating original dance works, performances, interdisciplinary collaborations, and publishing initiatives. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a work for three dancers divided into two parts: Mon Hiroshima and Mon Amour. Taking its title from the 1959 film by Alain Resnais about two lovers, a Japanese man and a French woman involved in a conversation about memory and forgetfulness. Harrells new work is a conversation with culture and aesthetic style where remembering and forgetting play together to develop something neither Butoh nor non-Butoh but wholly art. Harrells work has, since 2001, been based on a theoretical conversation between the parallel aesthetic histories of the voguing dance tradition and the early postmodern dance tradition.

TOFTE LAKE CENTER, Ely, Minnesota, received $25,450 to support three weeks of residencies for emerging creative artists based in Minnesota and New York City.  Founded in 2007, the Center is a retreat for artists, scholars, and leaders wishing to expand and deepen their creative potential.  There are daily opportunities for interaction, stimulation, and reflection in the Center’s facilities, which include both individual and community work spaces.  The Center positions itself as an incubator for innovation and inspiration and a cradle for creativity and community.  Week-long residencies are open to creative individuals who seek individual growth through workshops or master classes, artists who crave dedicated time to work on their projects, organizations that want to focus on goals and missions, and leaders who want to exchange ideas with colleagues in their field.  Jerome dollars are directed toward the participation of emerging individual artists and ensembles to further the creation of new works.  

The TOFTE LAKE CENTER, Ely, Minnesota, received $18,800 to support residencies for emerging artists based in New York City and Minnesota. Located on the shores of Tofte Lake, a beautifully secluded lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota, the Center is a creative retreat for artists, scholars, and thinkers of all disciplines. From June through September, the Center offers creative residencies for individuals, arts groups, and organizations seeking to create work while in residence in a natural setting with arts facilities and comfortable cabins. Its a destination for artists who crave dedicated time to work on their projects.

NICOLE TRESKA, writer, New York City, will drive across the country to San Francisco, Archer City, Taos, Denver, Graceland, Nashville, New York City, Baltimore, and Mississippi, visiting independent bookstores, artists, editors, and writers to investigate and explore ideas of literary landscape in America.  Through interveiws, visits, observations, and experiences, Treska will begin a series of essays about the people and places that reside within and create the places defined by their representations in the great works of American Literature; for example, Poe’s Baltimore, Faulkner’s Mississippi, McMurtry’s Texas, Anderson’s Ohio, and Steinbeck’s California. While on this journey, she also plans to talk to staff at independent bookstores thriving in the face of corporate competition and e-publishing.

Homegoings is a feature documentary exploring the African American way of death. Filmed at Owens Funeral Home in Harlem and rural South Carolina, the film takes an up-close and unusual look into the rarely seen world of undertaking, one of the few occupations Black Americans could enter freely after slavery. Combining cinema verit? with intimate interviews and personal photographs, Homegoings tells the stories of several families who have lost loves ones, while painting a vivid portrait of the passionate man behind their funerals.

LARISSA VELEZ-JACKSON, choreographer, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Vienna, Austria, to participate in study, observation, artist mentorship, critical dialogue, and networking in the field of Contemporary Dance and Performance at the danceWEB Scholarship Programme at ImPulsTanz-Vienna International Dance Festival. Velez-Jackson will engage in a one-on-one mentorship with Benoît Lachambre, a choreographer, performer, and improviser concerned with the dynamics of communication and perception.  The intense course of study and peer dialogue will provide inspiration for new work and deepen her creative process as well as her connection with choreographic peers.

VOCALESSENCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $24,839 in support of the 2013 Essentially Choral program.  The mission of VocalEssence is to champion choral music of all genres, celebrating the vocal experience through innovative concerts, commissions, and community engagement programs.  The focus is on commissioned and first performances of music as well as important, but rarely heard works of the past.  Essentially Choral focuses on the creation, development, and production of new works by emerging artists.  It nurtures emerging composers in the field of writing for chorus, and is undertaken in partnership with the American Composers Forum.  Emerging composers from Minnesota and New York City spend an intensive period in the Twin Cities working on the development of new pieces.