Past
Grantees

Funding was awarded to DENISE IRIS for A Year of Minimentals, 52 short digital videos (one every week for a year), a web site to host them and a DVD featuring 20 of the pieces. The minimentals will be simple observations, or evocations of a mental state, rooted in everyday life and distilled to their purest forms in audiovisual terms.

The JAMAICA CENTER FOR ARTS & LEARNING, Jamaica, New York, received a two-year grant of $30,000 in support of the participation of emerging artists in its Visual Arts Program. The Center is dedicated to supporting the creation of work by artists, especially those who are working from cultural traditions and artistic disciplines under-represented in the artistic community as a whole. From a residency program for artists to workshops, seminars and teaching opportunities, the Center provides not only a venue for cutting-edge art but also the resources to help artists nurture their talents and promote their work. Its Visual Arts Program mounts exhibitions featuring the work of emerging artists from New York City, culturally-specific art treated in fresh ways, and work that explores new media. Jerome support is also directed toward the Workspace Artist Program, a year-long residency.

Jerome Foundation Directors approved a grant of $16,000 to JAZZ IS NOW!, Minneapolis, Minnesota, to initiate a composers' commissioning program. Jazz Is NOW! strives to build the culture and community of jazz through performance and education. The Jazz Is NOW! orchestra is a nine-piece ensemble, of which seven performers are composers. Jerome support will allow Jazz Is NOW! to initiate a composers' commissioning program, resulting in major works for the orchestra to perform in 2005. The composers will also receive subsidized rehearsal time.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for CATALYST, DANCES BY EMILY JOHNSON, received a two-year grant of $24,000 in support of the creation and development of new work. Catalyst is a seven-member contemporary dance company under the direction of Emily Johnson. Heat and Life, a new work, will use the sweeping scientific phenomena of global climate change to reveal the emotional and psychological connection between the ways people choose to live and the environments to which they adapt. It will investigate the coercion that comes from power and profit, which often has little regard for sustainability. In the second year, Johnson will develop four of the dancers' roles in Heat and Life into solo performance pieces. Funds from the Foundation will allow Johnson to work with dancer and choreographer Ossie Kairaiuak to learn the elements of Yup'ik dancing, which Johnson expects will enhance her movement-based storytelling and the ways in which her dances connect to culture, community and tradition.

VOLCANO LOVE, Brooklyn, New York, received a two-year concluding grant of $24,000 in support of the development and production of new work by choreographer Sarah East Johnson for her company LAVA, a troupe of strong women performing physical feats of power, strength, stamina and daring. Johnson's movement vocabulary encompasses dance, wrestling, circus acrobatics, aerials, contact improvisation and more. One new work under development is (w)H.O.L.E. (Whole History of Life), which draws inspiration from two distinct sources-natural phenomena/science and the female body/psyche. The structure of the piece will mirror scientific and mathematical processes that describe earths evolutionary cycles, iterations, compressions and loops, through movement, music, visuals, text and lighting. The piece will be configured in three one-hour cycles, that vary slightly with each repetition. The audience will enter the show already in progress and be allowed to come and go at any point within the cycle, mirroring the essential elements of evolution, geologic change and the behavior of living systems.

Support was awarded to JACQUIE JONES for Diagnosis: Babies, Breast Cancer and the Lives of Modern Women an impressionistic, hour-long autobiographical documentary about a pivotal year in one womans life following a diagnosis of breast cancer. The story focuses on the womans struggle against cancer and desire to preserve her fertility. The film will be a poetic meditation on the meaning of choices in life.

THE JUNGLE THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $23,500 in support of its Play Reading Series, literary management and developmental support for emerging playwrights. The Jungle Theater strives to maintain a high standard of artistic excellence, to present works that preserve and build on our theatrical heritage, to encourage and support artists in all areas of theater production, to broaden access to theater through education and outreach activities, and to contribute to the vitality of its neighborhood and community. Jerome support is directed toward activities that encourage the creation, development and production of new work by emerging playwrights. Funding will allow the Jungle to continue the annual Play Reading Series, hold readings of other new scripts throughout the year, mount workshops of new scripts in development, and support the work of the Theater's literary manager. In the Play Reading Series, six new plays by emerging playwrights are read by professional actors over the course of four days. The series informs the Theater's decisions about further development of the pieces and the commitment to producing select works on the mainstage.

PATRICK KELLEY, a web artist based in Northfield, will spend ten days at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. Kelley does research dealing with philosophies of imaging and notions of language and visualization, while at the same time undertaking a practical examination of digital imaging tools in light of photography's and image-making's history. He'll participate in a workshop titled Web Animation for Artists, taught by new media artists Joshua Davis and Mark Tribe, and focusing on the web as an artistic medium. He'll also spend some time making new images while in the east Snowmass wilderness area.

SHIN IL KIM was awarded funding for The Invisible Masterpiece, a video and drawing installation based on the ideas in the book of the same name by Hans Belting. The idea is to investigate the status and meaning of the masterpiece, with the goal of getting closer to the idea of nothingness, but also showing something with nothingness. Working from videotaped clips of people looking at art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kim will transfer the images to pressed line drawing animation on paper, eliminating the masterpieces. The drawings will be looped together and projected onto large walls.

Arts administrator and arts educator KAREN KRAUSE, New Richland, Minnesota, will spend three weeks in central Europe meeting with other arts administrators, taking classes designed to develop her own work, and creating a pilot international art exchange program for elementary children. This will likely take the form of two communities collaborating via artist teacher exchange and exhibitions of student work, sponsored by the Waseca Art Center.

Support was awarded to CHRIS LARSON, St. Paul, for Three Story Shack, a highly idiosyncratic film that presents the activities of a futuristic wooden capsule, a one-legged woman, and two farm hands operating a mechanical top-loaded vehicle inside a three story shack on a Midwestern landscape.

A grant of $10,000 was awarded to HARVESTWORKS, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for the LEAGUE OF ELECTRONIC MUSICAL URBAN ROBOTS (LEMUR), in support of the creation of new robotic musical instruments and compositions for those instruments by LEMUR core artists. LEMUR is a group of composers, musicians, artists and technologists dedicated to producing robotic musical instruments that offer new creative opportunities to composers and performers, and ultimately, new musical experiences for audiences. Founded in 2000, its members have a wide range of skills. Thus far, LEMUR has produced eight new instruments and conceived of numerous electro-mechanical sound production techniques for incorporation into instrument designs. With Jerome support, four new robotic musical instruments will be added to a growing chamber orchestra of instruments. The goal is to produce diverse robotic instruments that produce high quality sound, visually exciting design, and interfaces that are comfortable and intuitive for the composer and performer. Included among the new instruments will be Tromb Organ, HydroBot and Gam-e-tron.

The FOUNDATION FOR INDEPENDENT ARTISTS, New York City, as fiscal agent for NICHOLASLEICHTERDANCE, received $10,000 in support of the creation and production of two new works. nicholasleichterdance is committed to the development of innovative and exciting dance performance, breaking down the barriers between audience and performer, seeking to create a kinetic journey in which emotion itself is the story. The first work, Never End, deals with individuals who are messengers of hope, who continue to light the flame in order to pass the torch to the next disciple. It will feature seven dancers and will be set to original music. The second work, Skin Diving, explores how race influences the way people watch other people move. It examines whether differences and similarities be understood through; as well as the emotional and conceptual complexities of touch in interracial relationships. The centerpiece is two duets, framed by two solos.

JEANNE LIOTTA received funding for observando el cielo, a 16mm experimental color sound film, documenting and imagining the human relationship to the cosmos by collecting starlight in the night sky, a civilian act of scientific observation available to anyone.

THE LOFT LITERARY CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $48,000 in support of the Mentor Series, a vehicle for emerging Minnesota writers to work in small group settings with nationally recognized writers, and to be mentored by them in ways ranging from review of their work to providing inspiration and examples for the writing life. The Mentor program offers advanced criticism and professional development opportunities to 12 emerging Minnesota writers each year: four each in the genres of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Participants are competitively selected via an open call. Mentors are chosen through an involved process of community input, careful research and screening by The Loft. The Loft Literary Center is the nation's largest independent literary arts center, annually serving more than 600,000 writers and readers of all ages throughout the region. Jerome has been supporting the Mentor Series since 1979. Its key components have remained constant since 1980 and include an anonymous application process based on writing samples, four to five nationally recognized mentors in residence for several days, small group and private sessions with participants or "mentees", public readings featuring mentors and mentees, and master classes, workshops and public forums.

THE LOFT LITERARY CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $55,000 in support of the Mentor Series. The Loft's mission is to foster a writing community, the artistic development of individual writers, and an audience for literature. As a nonprofit literary center housed in the Open Book, it provides facilities for writers, access to contemporary literature in all of its forms, readings, and performances, residencies, workshops, audience expansion initiatives, and technical and professional assistance to writers. The Mentor Series is an intensive program that matches emerging developing writers with nationally recognized mentors in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, with the aim of creating strong and meaningful relationships. The program includes small group and private sessions, public readings, master classes, workshops, and public forums. Jerome Foundation has supported this program since 1979.

A grant of $20,000 was awarded to the LOWER MANHATTAN CULTURAL COUNCIL, New York City, in support of artists' stipends in the 2004-05 Artists Workspace Program. The Council supports programs in the visual, performing and new media arts; provides leadership in cultural planning; and is a primary source of support services for artists and arts groups. The Artists Workspace Program supports five to six-month studio residencies for artists working in various media including video, photography, painting, new media, sculpture, and installation. It provides studio spaces through partnerships with local real estate owners who donate unleased floors as temporary workspaces for artists. Artists have 24-hour a day, seven-day a week access to their studios. Various support services, partnerships and an Open Studios event enrich the residencies. Artists are competitively selected by a jury that reviews proposals submitted in response to an open call. Preference in selection is given to artists, with flexible and active practices, who are currently without studios.

The Jerome Foundation Board awarded a grant of $10,000 to MA-YI THEATER COMPANY, New York City, in support of the commissioning of three new works for the Performing Ethnicity conference and Performance Series. Ma-Yi produces new work and innovative plays about the Asian American experience. It is committed to the development of new Pan Asian-American texts that push the country's racial dialectics between the immediately obvious into a more nuanced examination of the human condition and the practical politics of ethnicity. Performing Ethnicity will commemorate the centennial anniversary of the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. The three commissioned emerging playwrights will explore how notions of display, parade, spectacle, exposition, and exhibition inform issues of representation in culturally-specific performances, contemporary media, and politics. The explorations are based upon the methods by which racial and ethic categories were represented and exploited in the 1904 World's Fair.

CYNTHIA MADANSKY received a grant for Presence, an experimental film that will explore two distinct forms of diary writing, namely an intimate diary of a teenage girl from Chinatown, New York and an online community based web log that addresses the suicide of Hong Kong based actor Leslie Cheung.

TRICIA McLAUGHLIN received funding to support See World, an installation of two animations back projected from inside a corner to make an aquarium. It will be an aquarium full of people where viewers can look at themselves behaving as themselves, revealing their adherence to structure, both natural and invented.