Past
Grantees

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for composer JOE HORTON, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $12,000 in support of the development and production of A Hill in Natchez, a multi-disciplinary postmodern, surrealist re-telling of an American slave narrative through music, movement, and performance. Horton’s impetus for this work was a family visit in which his father shared with him a bill of sale listing livestock, farm equipment, and new slaves, including his newborn great, great grandmother. Horton is best known for his work with experimental hip-hop band No Bird Sing. He is a professor of Songwriting and Composition at McNally Smith College of Music. Springboard for the Arts is an economic and community development organization for artists and by artists. Its work is about building stronger communities, neighborhoods, and economies.

INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $140,000 in support of the 2016 and 2017 Beyond the Pure Fellowships for Writers and VERVE Grants for Spoken Word Poets. The mission of Intermedia Arts is to be a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art. Beyond the Pure Fellowships make it possible for emerging writers to study with master teachers, work with mentors, travel for professional opportunities, bring work to publication, and keep writing. VERVE grants enable emerging spoken word poets to create new work, make CDs, tour their work, expand the range of performance opportunities, and work with established spoken word mentors.

HANNAH JAYANTI received support for an 85-minute documentary entitled Truth or Consequences. In 1950, the residents of a southern New Mexico town, then called Hot Springs, voted to rename themselves after the most popular radio show of the time—Truth or Consequences. In return, the show’s charismatic host would visit once a year, bringing his celebrity friends to the newly burgeoning resort town. Fame and prosperity would inevitably follow, or so they hoped. For a short while the boom seemed imminent, but soon everything returned to how it was before—a small economically depressed desert town. Sixty years later, the same optimism and frustration is playing out as the world’s first commercial Spaceport is being built 20 miles outside of town. Just as the town’s residents are attracted to the remoteness of the desert, so is Spaceport America. Run by the government of New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the country, and funded with tax payer dollars, the spaceport’s landing strip is rented out to private Space Tourism companies such as Virgin Galactic and Space X. Through an intimate combination of observational and impressionistic filmmaking, this documentary will paint a portrait of a small town in flux by focusing on the daily lives of its residents. Intertwined with traditional documentary footage will be experimental photogrammetric animations of the landscape and the spaceport. Referencing sci-fi tropes of an impenetrable force affecting the status quo (think Solaris, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Contact), the animations will dramatize the desert landscape and represent the perceptions that the residents have of the spaceport, both fears of unknown progress and the hope that an outside influence could save the town.

THE JAZZ GALLERY, New York City, received $25,000 in support of the 2015-16 Jazz Gallery Residency Commissions, which support emerging jazz composers. During the 2015-16 year of the program, The Jazz Gallery plans to celebrate guitarists, with each of the selected artists approaching the guitar in a radically different way, challenging traditional notions of jazz, crafting their own methods of musical notation, engaging in creative methods of improvisation, and blurring lines of genre and culture in their music. The Jazz Gallery nurtures a young generation of professional jazz musicians, giving them a performance venue with audiences. The Gallery also encourages established musicians to present new projects and collaborate with emerging artists.

JAMES N. KIENITZ WILKINS received support for Mediums, a 45-minute narrative short centered around the jury selection process known as “voir dire.” This process is when a pool of prospective jurors are questioned about their backgrounds and biases before being chosen. In ideal form, it could be described as a trial before the trial to select those who best represent society. The setting of Mediums is the exterior of an upstate New York courthouse, where participants smoke and drink coffee before, during, and after a day of jury selection. While on break, they naturally form groups and alliances and learn from each other. This trade of information and the small dramas of a single day is the focus of the film. As an experimental narrative, Mediums takes literally the definition of voir dire (“to say what is true”), by collaging original dialogue with texts collected from the internet and found in the world, including jury selection pamphlets, automotive manuals, union constitutions, fast food franchise contracts, health insurance primers, blog posts and more. Bits and pieces from these sources are woven into the fictional dialogue as informal quotations (to be acknowledged in the end credits). As such, each juror-character is a sort of “medium” of specific, real-world knowledge. They each possess a unique expertise as well as a problem to be solved. As the day progresses, they trade tips and insight, finding common ground in a show of civic participation extending well beyond—and literally external to—the legal requirement of jury duty.

KIMBALL, SELENA, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Gambier, Ohio, to attend a Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop for Literary Nonfiction to help her prepare for a publication/written component to an upcoming solo booth with Wolfstaedter Gallery at the Volta Art Fair in March 2016. Kimball is interested in expanding her visual art practice to include different forms of writing, working with printed visual histories that she researches and takes apart and puts back together in large-scale format collages and installations.  The research aspect of her projects has deepened and expanded and she wants to capture through writing this research, breaking down the division between visual and textual in her work.

JOSH KOURY and MYLES KANE received support for Voyeur, a 90-minute documentary that is an exclusive look at a writer's life, legacy, and process as he develops a new book revolving around a mysterious man who spent 30 years secretly spying on people during their most private moments. The documentary examines both the subject's and writer's motivations as the two intertwine: the man is seeking public validation for his actions while the writer works tirelessly to articulate the man's life story. The documentary follows the writer as he culls through decades of research materials, including diaries with detailed descriptions of the events the man witnessed during his years of observation. The film will follow the story through publication and document the public's reaction, finally bringing to light events kept underground for over 40 years.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for theater artist Aaron Landsman, Brooklyn, New York, received $25,000 in support of the development and production of two new multi-media theater works by Landsman, PAKO and Anna. Founded by artists for artists, The Field provides strategic services to thousands of performing artists and companies in New York City and beyond. It fosters creative exploration, stewards innovative management strategies, and helps artists reach their fullest potential. Aaron Landsman constructs performances using people, language, space, and time. Some projects combine formal experimentation and long-term community engagement. Some are staged in commonplace settings, such as homes, offices, and meeting rooms. PAKO is about nostalgia, analog technology in the age of digital production, and the impossibility of reconstructing the past. The work is in early-stage development and will include a gallery installation and live performance. Landsman envisions Anna as both a stage work and a film. Using Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and a 1960 recording of a complete episode of the game show Queen For A Day, Landsman will engage three performers in ongoing conversations on the depiction of gender norms.

THE LAUNDROMAT PROJECT, New York City, received a grant of $17,250 in support of the Create Change Artist Residencies and Commissions, an annual program that offers artists of color across all disciplines the opportunity to launch public art projects. The Laundromat Project (The LP) is a non-profit organization that amplifies the creativity already existing within communities by using arts and culture to build community networks, solve problems, and enhance a sense of ownership in the places where community members live, work, and grow. The LP sees artists as one of the world’s greatest assets. Its programs seek to provide platforms for emerging artists to realize original and high-quality public art projects and avenues for sharing their creative vision with everyday people—inspiring innovative thinking in all of us. The LP believes art, culture, and engaged imaginations can change the way people see their world, open them up to new ideas, and connect them to each other.

MELINA LEON received support for a 90-minute narrative called Song Without a Name. Set at the height of the Shining Path's grip on 1980's Perú, Song Without a Name details the bittersweet journey of Georgina Condori, a young girl from the Andes whose baby gets stolen in a fake clinic. After a lot of vain efforts to find help, Georgina arrives at a well-known newspaper where she meets Pedro Campos, a young and lonely journalist who is commissioned to follow the case. The film explores several primary questions: What is the meaning of being socially invisible? What could be in someone’s mind to join a terrorist group? What is the meaning of denying one’s sexual identity? These questions define the lives of the three primary characters: Georgina, who by losing her kid discovers the magnitude of her social invisibility; Leo, who joins Shining Path (a violent Maoist group); and the young journalist Pedro, who lives a double life in his effort to hide his homosexuality. Georgina and Leo are the quintessential representatives of social invisibility; Pedro is clandestine in his own way, because of his hidden sexual identity. And the stolen baby is a symbol of this society of phantoms who became a fading memory from the day she was born. The film will be shot on black and white 16mm film, which is a statement about the sad times in which the story occurs and its total suppression of color.

LEWIS, NATHAN, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Rochester, New York, to attend the Spirit Photography workshop, taught by process Historian Mark Osterman, at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, to learn the basics of making ferrotypes and "ghost" photographs. This workshop will allow Lewis to continue primary source and technical research about the history of Spirit Photography and its place in Modern American Spiritualism. As Rochester is one of the seminal locations of the Spiritualist movement, and Osterman is a leading authority on the process, this study opportunity will offer him a deeper level of understanding and credibility.

LOVELEE, AMANDA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Copenhagen and Køge Denmark, and nearby Malmö, Sweden, to research the roles artists have played in building this innovative urban center that thinks so creatively about space, community, and the eco-system. Lovelee works in public space and the civic sphere. She is currently an artist-in-residence in the City of St. Paul, Minnesota and works to create visually and conceptually creative spaces for gathering while also considering ecological and social issues. Copenhagen, labeled one of the greenest and happiest cities in the world, and home to many artists, is a prime research location. Lovelee’s experiences will enhance her artistic practice.

MABOU MINES, New York City, received a two-year grant of $60,000 in support of the Mabou Mines/Suite Resident Artist Program for emerging artists in New York City. Mabou Mines is an artist-driven experimental collective, generating original works and re-imagined adaptations of classics through multi-disciplinary, technologically inventive collaborations among its members and a wide world of contemporary composers, writers, musicians, choreographers, puppeteers, visual artists and filmmakers. In addition to the creation of new theater works, Mabou Mines is dedicated to fostering and developing the next generation of performing artists through the Mabou Mines/Suite Resident Artist Program.

ANJA MARQUARDT received support for WOLF, an experimental feature about a Native American tracking unit who patrol the southern Arizona border zone, targeting drug and human trafficking. The unit hunts like a wolf pack, analyzing physical evidence (footprints, tracks, threads of clothing, etc.). Their tracking skills have been passed down from generation to generation, recalling ancient beliefs that the trackers walk slowly across the hot desert sand, and where most people would only see sand, dirt, rocks and some small plants, they see a story. Told from the perspective of one tracker in training who must reconcile conflicting narratives before him, this compelling film will be shot entirely on iPhone cameras.

Springboard for the Arts, Saint Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for composer Kathy McTavish, Duluth, Minnesota, received $12,500 in support of the development and production of the new work The Railway Prophecies. The mission of Springboard for the Arts is to cultivate a vibrant arts community by connecting artists with the resources they need to make a living and a life. McTavish is a cellist, composer, and multimedia artist. In live performance, installation, and online environments, she blends improvisational cello, found sound, text, data, and abstract, layered, moving images. Her recent work has focused on creating generative methods for building multichannel video and sound environments. The Railway Prophecies is an evolving tale that centers on an everyman character named Pullman, whose story revolves around planetary climate change and the extinction of animal species. The work explores themes of over-consumption and meaningless productivity through its central character who travels through oceans of data washing over us every day.

Media Impact Funders, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received a $1,000 membership commitment from the Jerome Foundation in this network of funders working broadly on media and technology issues. Media Impact Funders serves as a learning resource for grantmakers using media to further their missions; a catalyst for philanthropic partnership and networking; and a convener to advance technology-focused philanthropy. Its members are foundations, government agencies, donor affinity groups, philanthropic advisors, and individual donors.

MILKWEED EDITIONS, Minneapolis, Minnesota received $23,000 in support of Transformative Publishing in an Era of Transformation, the publication of three individual titles by emerging artists, including one collection of poems, one work of creative nonfiction, and one to-be-determined project. Both of the two determined titles are first books. The mission of Milkweed Editions is to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it. Milkweed’s commitment to publishing emerging writers has been foundational since its inception.

The METROPOLITAN REGIONAL ARTS COUNCIL (MRAC), Saint Paul, Minnesota, on behalf of MINNESOTA CITIZENS FOR THE ARTS–CREATIVE MINNESOTA TASK FORCE, Saint Paul, Minnesota, received a grant of $1,500 to support the involvement of individual artists in the development of a Creative Minnesota Task Force survey on the economic impact and social indicators of individual artists in the state. This survey builds on the 2015 Creative Minnesota Report that was developed by a collaborative of arts and culture funders in partnership with Minnesota Citizens for the Arts. MRAC’s vision is to strengthen arts communities, as well as stimulate diversity of expression, communication, and commemoration of communities and cultures, and to work toward all people having opportunities to engage in the arts. Minnesota Citizens for the Arts (MCA) is a statewide arts advocacy organization whose mission is to ensure opportunity for all people to have access to and involvement in the arts.

The MINNESOTA COUNCIL ON FOUNDATIONS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $7,600 in general and membership support for its 2015 operations. The Minnesota Council on Foundations, with over 170 grantmaker members, works to expand and strengthen a vibrant community of diverse grantmakers who individually and collectively advance the common good. Its members represent three-quarters of all grantmaking in the state, awarding more than $1 billion annually. Members include private, family, and independent foundations, community and other public foundations, and corporate foundations and giving programs. The Council is an advocate for giving, a resource for grantmaking, and a catalyst for philanthropy. Jerome Foundation has been a member and has provided operating support since 1976.

MIXED BLOOD THEATRE COMPANY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $16,000 in support of the commissioning, development, and production of two new plays by emerging playwrights. Mixed Blood, a professional, multi-racial theater, promotes cultural pluralism and individual equality through artistic excellence, using theater to address artificial barriers that keep people from succeeding in American society. Mixed Blood annually serves 75,000 people through a main stage season, regional tours of five to seven repertory shows, and a series of customized productions addressing workplace diversity and inclusion.