Past
Grantees

ANN KLEFSTAD, an artist from Duluth, will spend three weeks in wetland areas in Northern Minnesota, the Mentor Ranch in the Northern Tall Grass Prairie Restoration Program, Thief Lake Wildlife Refuge and the Floating Muskeg Bog area along the Southwest Shore Lake of the Woods. This trip is designed to enrich her work , which is focused on swamps and wetlands.

ANN KOHLS, Education and Studio Program Director at the Northern Clay Center, was awarded a grant to travel to Helena, Sheboygan, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. She will visit ceramic arts organizations, meet with their staffs and investigate education, artist studio and residence programs. This study will enrich her vision for and direction of the Education and Studio Program at the Clay Center.

LARISSA PAIGE KOKERNOT, actor and director, received funding to spend a month in Saratoga Springs, New York, during which time she will be immersed in the theatrical philosophy and practices of Ann Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki, founders of the Saratoga International Theater Institute. She will apply this experience to her work on stage and in the classroom.

JOHN KOLOMVAKIS AND JAMES DOWELL were awarded support for The Worlds of Charles Henri Ford, which will present the life and work of this poet, novelist, photographer, filmmaker and collagist. The work will present Ford as a catalyst and keen observer of the art and literary worlds of New York and Paris for a period of more than 68 years, as well as an important force in creating an honest gay identity.

THE KITCHEN, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer JENNIFER MONSON, received a grant of $8,000 to support the development and production of a new work entitled Sender. Monson will create, in collaboration with composer Zeena Parkins, a 60-minute work for six dancers and four musicians, scheduled to premiere in February of 1997. The piece, constructed in three sections, explores ideas of confinement and resistance, force and enforcement; and reflects upon the rise of imprisonment as a means of social control in contemporary culture. Experimenting with the line between speed and danger, Monsons full bodied dancing encompasses trust and delicacy.

Tap dancer and instructor GWEN LAVINE of Baxter, received a grant to attend the Florida Dance Festival in Tampa, Florida. She will undertake intensive tap study and classes in other dance styles at the Festival.

ALISA LEBOW AND CYNTHIA MADANSKY received support for Treyf, an unorthodox documentary exploring what it means to be Jewish and lesbian on the eve of the 21st Century. Treyf synthesizes the lessons learned by Jews throughout history in order to develop a perspective that revels in the diversity of Jewish communities.

THE LOFT, Minneapolis, received two awards from the Jerome Foundation, the first a grant of $15,000 in support of the Creative Nonfiction Program. The Loft is a nationally recognized, community-based literary center with a large membership. Its mission is to foster a writing community, the artistic development of individual writers, and an audience for literature. Each year, a nationally acclaimed writer of creative nonfiction is brought to the Twin Cities to work with six emerging writers in a month-long mentoring program, which includes eight evening workshops, an individual manuscript critique and a public reading. The Minnesota Writers Career Initiative received a two-year commitment of $114,000. This program was developed in 1993 to serve Minnesota writers who had achieved significant artistic recognition for their work on a regional basis and who had the potential to expand significantly that recognition and audience on a national level. The purpose is to use individually designed leverage to bring writers to new levels of career development.

THE LOFT, Minneapolis, received two awards from the Jerome Foundation, the first a grant of $15,000 in support of the Creative Nonfiction Program. The Loft is a nationally recognized, community-based literary center with a large membership. Its mission is to foster a writing community, the artistic development of individual writers, and an audience for literature. Each year, a nationally acclaimed writer of creative nonfiction is brought to the Twin Cities to work with six emerging writers in a month-long mentoring program, which includes eight evening workshops, an individual manuscript critique and a public reading. The Minnesota Writers Career Initiative received a two-year commitment of $114,000. This program was developed in 1993 to serve Minnesota writers who had achieved significant artistic recognition for their work on a regional basis and who had the potential to expand significantly that recognition and audience on a national level. The purpose is to use individually designed leverage to bring writers to new levels of career development.

THE LOFT, the MINNESOTA CENTER FOR BOOK ARTS and MILKWEED EDITIONS, all Minneapolis-based literary arts organizations, received a $5,000 planning grant to investigate the possibility of a shared facility and literary arts center. These three are engaged in joint planning in order to enhance their programs and make them more effective. There are a number of potential collaborative organizational models which might emerge from this process, ranging from one in which the three organizations may simply lease adjoining spaces with selective sharing of rooms and resources, to the most elaborate in which they might develop a literary arts center which would house a number of related and support organizations and businesses to create an institutional presence for the literary arts.

Artist and Art History Professor, ANA LOIS-BORZI was awarded funding to spend two weeks in New York City at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Hispanic Society of America. She will study rare manuscripts, prints, drawings and paintings produced in Spains American colonies. She will investigate specific images of the body and its use as metaphor for representing self and other in relation to power and identity struggles among Colonial and European subjects. This investigation will inform her own work as a producing artist.

Funding was awarded to JULIE LOKTEV to produce Moment of Impact, a feature-length experimental documentary about the filmmaker's father who was hit by a car and in one instant became a different person, a different being, stuck between life and death. This film will be an intimate expressionistic portrait of her father-then and now. It is also a portrait of her mother, who left her job to care for her husband at home.

DANSPACE PROJECT, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer SONDRA LORING, received a grant of $8,000 to support the development of a new work. The Bridge will be presented at Danspace Project in the fall of 1997, bringing together two choreographers, one composer and six professional performers, three from New York and three from Mexico. The Bridge signals a new direction in Lorings choreography toward work that is cross-cultural, cross-generational, and produced on a large scale.

MABOU MINES, New York City, received $40,000 over two years in support of the Suite Resident Artists Program in 1997 and 1998. Mabou Mines is a collective of artists who believe that life is performance, and that the study and practice of one is the study and practice of the other. The collective builds a bridge between performance practice and performance theory, with a distinguished production history. Mabou Mines asserts that if young artists are to make it through the early stages of development, maintain their uniqueness and not become mere imitators, they require the support and patience of more established artists. Over the years, Mabou Mines has developed a number of initiatives to help young artists make the transition to professional lives. In the beginning of the 1990s, it organized this work in the form of Suite, emphasizing intensive development and experimentation of new works by resident emerging artists working in tandem with Mabou Mines company members. The program serves approximately ten artists each year, with residencies lasting from six to eight months. Artists receive studio hours to work alone and with chosen collaborators. Each artist is provided a stipend, and has access to several opportunities for development. Jerome Foundation has provided support to the Suite program since 1993.

The Jerome Foundation provided a grant of $7,500 to the MAD ALEX Arts Foundation, New York City, in support of its unique reading and presentation program for emerging writers. MAD ALEX presents the work of emerging poets and writers, and honors those who provide role models to younger generations by virtue of sustained commitment. Readings by emerging writers takes place on Thursday evenings from September through May. Artists are encouraged to shape their allotted time in order to contextualize their work, and present it in a performance format.

Two years of subsidy, $7,000 in each year, were awarded to the MINNESOTA DANCE ALLIANCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal agent for choreographer PAULA MANN, to create and present her 1997 season. Mann will celebrate the 10th anniversary of her dance-making in the Twin Cities by presenting highlights of work to date, along with a new piece. Maze is an exploration of the human desire to find freedoma way out of surroundings that entrap. Set on seven dancers, the piece is inspired by Serbian actor/narrator Srdjan Pesics Flight From Croatia.

The MARGOLIS BROWN COMPANY (aka Adaptors), Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant commitment of $16,000 to continue the creation and presentation of new works. Margolis Brown relocated from New York City to Minneapolis in 1993. The mission of the company is to create original multimedia, physical theater productions that are provocative and socially relevant; to continue to push the boundaries of experimental physical theater; to make the work accessible to a broad and more diverse audience; and to foster the development of young artists through a professional training program and artistic opportunities. The Margolis Brown Company creates a theater of spectacle and celebration that searches for the visual metaphor and the probing commentary that will grab an audience emotionally and live in the spectators imagination. Jerome subsidy was initiated in 1994 and continues, with this grant, through the 1997-98 season. Funds will feed the creation and presentation of new work, including a full-evening repertory production, two Open House events and a site-specific production.

A grant was awarded to BIENVENIDA MATAS, filmmaker, to travel to the Philippines for four weeks in order to research media representation of Filipinos during and after the Spanish American War. She will trace its influences on the present media representation of people of color in the US.

A two-year terminal grant of $20,000 was authorized for the MIDWEST MEDIA ARTISTS ACCESS CENTER, St. Paul, in support of programs serving emerging media artists. The Center serves filmmakers, videomakers, photographers and sound artists by providing access to equipment and facilities, networking, education and grant support to accomplish their goals. The Centers membership is over 450; and it operates, in part, as a result of 7,000 hours of volunteer time per year. Its primary purpose is to provide low cost access to media arts equipment and studio facilities. It also offers an education program, access grants, exhibitions and screenings, media arts events and programs and a newsletter.

MEET THE COMPOSER, New York City, received a two-year grant of $46,000 in support of the New York City Emerging Composers Program and Meet the Composer/Midwest. Meet the Composer fosters the creation, performance and recording of music by American composers and develops new audiences for their work. Based on the premise that a composers presence at an event or concert can make a direct and vital link between music and audiences, a New York City and Midwest fund renders the creative process more tangible by linking composers to audiences. Grants subsidize their active and direct participation in workshops, interviews, rehearsal coaching and performances.