Past
Grantees

RED EYE THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $31,500 in support of the 2011 New Works 4 Weeks and an emerging playwrights commission. Red Eye is a multidisciplinary theater that supports the development and production of pioneering performance work. Innovative, experimental, and out of the ordinary, Red Eye is a passionate champion of new work for the stage. In addition to presenting its own multimedia theatrical productions, Red Eye is an incubator and producer of other artists works. New Works 4 Weeks is the presentation framework for two programs: Works-In-Progress and Isolated Acts. Works-In-Progress gives emerging artists access to space and other practical resources in order to develop ideas for performance. It brings together artists from different disciplines and points of view to develop their works and to respond to each others work. The program emphasizes the development of original pieces for performance, primarily in terms of conceptual development and staging. Isolated Acts is a curated, multidisciplinary program providing artists with access to space and resources, including critical response sessions, to support the development of new works in a creative laboratory setting. The works are then fully produced. Red Eye will also give an annual commission to an emerging playwright/theater creator to make a work for full production by the Theater.

The Jerome Foundation Board approved a grant of $14,000 to RHIZOME.ORG, New York City, in support of a commissions program for emerging artists. Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Through open platforms for exchange and collaboration, its website encourages and expands communities around those practices. Initiated in 2001, the goal of the Rhizome commissions program is to support emerging artists by providing grants for the creation of significant works of new media art. New media art encompasses projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies and works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Jerome funding is restricted to the participation of emerging artists based in New York City and/or Minnesota

YORUBA RICHEN was awarded support for a feature-length documentary, The New Black (working title), which uncovers the complicated and often combative histories and intersections of the African-American and LGBT civil rights movements. Specifically, the film examines homophobia in the black communitys institutional pillar the black church, and reveals the Christian right wings strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in pursuit of an anti-gay political agenda. The New Black goes from New York to Washington, D.C. to California to document the stories of the gay gospel singer Tonex, and Sharon Lettman, the head of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), who are challenging homophobia in the black church and confronting traditionally white gay organizations around issues of race. The film also follows Bishop Harry Jackson, one of the leading anti-gay black ministers as he fights efforts to advance gay rights. Through these stories and other secondary characters, the film reveals a political alliance between members of the black church and the Christian right that has shaped the fight for gay rights over the last 20 years.

PEYTON SCOTT RUSSELL, graffiti artist, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to multiple locations in the United States: San Francisco, Kansas City, New York City, and Denver, to learn more about visual art and public murals that incorporate and emphasize graffiti art. He will meet with Graffiti Masters to further polish and sharpen his skills as a muralist and aerosol artist.

JOSHUA SANCHEZ received a grant for a feature-length narrative called Four. Written by Pulitzer Prize finalist playwright Christopher Shinn, the film juxtaposes the relationships of two couples struggling with their desires and demons on one Fourth of July evening. Theres Joe, a seemingly straight, middle-aged black man who carries on a closeted gay relationship with a white teenager named June. And theres Abigayle, a suburban, African-American teenage girl, and coincidentally the daughter of Joe, who is courted by a white teenage boy named Dexter. Dexter has designs of luring Abigayle into the bedroom, and although Abigayle knows she should resist him, she succumbs. As these four individuals move from strangers to intimates, their tolerance and acceptance of each other break down. When Joe returns home the morning after a night with June, he and Abigayle are forced to confront Joes secret and its impact on their relationship.

CARRIE SCHNEIDER received $9,000 for an experimental film called Burning House.

Carrie Schneider received $9,000 for her experimental film Burning House (2011–2015). Shot over the course of two and half years, Schneider built fifteen identical wooden houses (measuring 8 x 6 x 8 feet) on an island in the middle of a lake in rural Wisconsin and burned each house down, all while filming from the same vantage point on land. The original score was composed and performed by Cecilia Lopez, using electrified sheets of scrap metal. About the Artist Carrie Schneider is a visual artist working in photography and film. Her screenings and exhibitions include the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Kitchen, New York. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ArtForum, VICE, Modern Painters, and The New Yorker. She received a Creative Capital Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, attended the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, and is currently faculty at Pratt Institute and the International Center of Photography/Bard’s MFA Program. Carrie is based in Brooklyn, New York. http://carrieschneider.net

The JAMES SEWELL BALLET, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $12,000 in support of the 2011-12 Ballet Works Project. The mission of the company is to create and perform works that connect artists with audiences and to advance contemporary ballet. This company of dance artists challenges their physical limits and expands their notions about ballet. The Ballet Works Project has a 15-year tradition in the Twin Cities. Emerging choreographers from outside as well as inside the company are provided with the resources they need to create and develop new works on the dancers, moving forward with inventive freedom. The new works created will be presented in concert in February 2012.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for artist KAREN SHERMAN, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant totaling $21,000 in support of the creation and production of One With Others. The mission of Springboard for the Arts is to cultivate vibrant communities by connecting artists with the skills, information, and services they need to make a living and a life. Sherman, a choreographer and performer, will create a performance work incorporating dance, text (spoken word, projected, live-written), original music/sound, and live feelings. The work examines the ways individuals are defined by their relationships with other individuals, and the premise that the self is made up of aspects of others that rub off and stick.

SMACK MELLON, Brooklyn, New York, received a grant of $10,000 in support of the Artist Studio Program and solo shows of works by emerging artists in the Exhibition Program. Smack Mellons mission 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 work space, 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 work space, and $5,000 fellowships for eleven months.

THE SOAP FACTORY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $25,000 in support of the participation of Minnesota and New York City emerging artists in the 2011 Exhibition Program. The Soap Factory is dedicated to the production, presentation, and promotion of emerging contemporary practice across the visual arts. Committed to experimentation and risk-taking, The Soap Factory offers audiences a real and immediate experience of the arts, encouraging a wider understanding of and appreciation for artists and their work. Located in an historic 48,000 square-foot warehouse, The Soap Factory offers raw spaces to showcase sculpture, installation, painting, performance, photography, film, and video. It supports emerging artists and their works not only by providing exhibition and studio space on a large scale but by also providing a staff skilled in supporting new work, paying stipends to both artists and curators, and securing press and critical attention for the work.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, Saint Paul, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $62,000 in support of professional development services for emerging artists. This arts service organization builds the reciprocal relationship between artist and community, so that artists are active, engaged, organized, and valued for the contributions they make. The mission of the organization is to cultivate a vibrant arts community by connecting artists with the skills, contacts, information, and services they need to make a living and a life. Springboard offers economic development services to artists, including workshops, one-on-one consultations, career counseling, fiscal sponsorship, an incubator program, loans, emergency grants, health care resources, attorney referrals, publications, resource guides, organizational consulting, an artist resource center, and a patron education program. Springboard works with individual artists in all disciplines and small to mid-size arts and cultural organizations in the five-state Upper Midwest. Jerome support is dedicated to activities that support emerging Minnesota artists.

JAY STERN received $10,000 for The Adventures of Paul and Marian, a romantic musical comedy about two young lovers struggling to find a way to stay together. Its also about capitalists and revolutionaries, growing up, and finding, losing, and then re-finding lost love. Paul and Marian have eloped against Marians fathers wishes. Hiding out at Pauls uncles book depository deep in the woods, Paul quickly realizes he cant support Marians opulent lifestyle, so he heads out into the world to make his fortune while Marian waits for him. Stranded at the book depository, Marian starts reading, and fired up by revolutionary fervor she decides to change the world. But her father, a corporate giant known as The General, hasnt changed at all in fact, hes sent two goons to hunt for his daughter, and theyre closing in fast. Meanwhile in the Big City, Paul discovers that he has a hidden business acumen and a taste for the rat race while Marian continues to find her calling and remains determined to bring about violent revolution. When Paul and Marian meet again, it will be in the company of corporate henchmen, mad bombers and lots of singing and dancing. How can their love survive?

JENNIFER STOCK, sound artist, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Hauterives, Chartres, and Chambourcy, France, to study three important outsider architecture sites as inspiration for future sound and video installations and to attend the Sonar Festival in Barcelona, Spain. Her installations and live performances combine instrumental music, video and field recordings to create illusionistic landscapes.

STREB, Brooklyn, New York, received a grant of $21,000 in support of the Emerging Artist Commissioning Program. Under the direction of choreographer Elizabeth Streb, this organization is committed to creating a laboratory for testing specific principles on the body, inventing action ideas that are archetypal, noticeable, and understandable. S.L.A.M., STREB Lab for Action Mechanics, is an open-access venue that models a new kind of artist-driven community institution welcoming all ages and types of people to the building, infused with the driving force of art and action. In the Emerging Artist Commissioning Program, emerging artists whose work is movement/action-based, including choreographers, aerialists, and circus artists, are given subsidy and access to the SLAM facility. The artists capitalize on the resources distinct to SLAM to inform and inspire new creative experiments. They receive commissions to support their creative work, opportunities to showcase their work in development, and critical feedback.

THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM, New York City, received a two-year grant of $28,000 in support of the Artist-In-Residence Program. The Studio Museum in Harlem is a nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by black culture. It is a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society. The Artists-In-Residence Program provides three emerging artists with studio space for one year, a stipend, an allowance for materials, professional mentoring, and an exhibition of their work at the end of the residency. The program was created to provide young artists with opportunities to experiment with new ideas and to present large bodies of their work to the Museums local, national, and international audiences. The artists receive serious critical attention from the art media at an important time in their careers. The artists are guided through both the business and creative processes underlying the art world through meetings with art critics and curators during their residencies. Public programs and personal tours of their studio spaces offer the artists chances to interact with the public and provide the Harlem community with opportunities to view new developments in contemporary art. Artists are selected via an open, competitive process.

JACOB SWANSON (Duluth, Minnesota) received $15,000 for A Walk Amongst The Living (working title) a 60-minute experimental narrative about the schism between the institutions we commit to and our personal desires. According to filmmaker Swanson, work, family, marriage, friendship and religion are institutions that imprison us in our daily lives. As an aspiring filmmaker, he struggles everyday with his commitment to these institutions. The protagonist in this story is an unnamed woman who is weighed down by her day-to-day routines. She is killed in a car accident and wakes in an afterlife on an abandoned road. She is confronted with the choice of going back on the road the world of the living or travel down the road into the unknown. Unable to make a choice, she walks into a nearby forest. The woods act as a gateway to observing scenes played out by the people she was close to in life. She watches her husband make love to another woman, her parents walking on a beach, her best friend smoking on the culvert where they played growing up. After watching and at times interacting with those amongst the living, she makes the decision to walk into the unknown rather than return to her former life.

THE TEAM, Brooklyn, New York, received $5,000 in support of the development and New York premiere of Mission Drift. Founded in 2004, The TEAM (Theatre of the Emerging American Moment) is dedicated to creating new performance works that dissect and celebrate the experience of living in America today. Mission Drift is a new musical that uses the history of the New Amsterdam Colony, the mythology of the frontier, and the build/bust of Las Vegas to examine the particular character of American capitalism. Mission Drift imagines Las Vegas as both a capitalist cathedral and a small town trying to survive unreasonable growth.

The TEXTILE CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-part grant of $30,800 in support of Fiber Artists Project Grants and programs and services for emerging artists. The mission of the Textile Center is to honor textile traditions and promote excellence and innovation in fiber art. Fiber art is broadly defined to include a wide range of forms such as weaving, quilting, knitting, sewing, dyeing, felting, needlework, lacemaking, basketry, and beading. The Fiber Artists Project Grant Program was launched in 2008 to advance the professional development of emerging fiber artists in Minnesota and foster vitality and excellence in the field of fiber art. In response to an open call, emerging fiber artists apply with individually designed project proposals. They receive monetary awards, professional development opportunities, and a culminating exhibition. Grants are used for such activities as devoting time to studio work, experimenting with new techniques and materials, studying with a mentor, travel, purchasing equipment and supplies, and renting studio space.

KAO LEE THAO received $20,000 for GAO ZOUA PA, a 15-minute animated short, which the filmmaker describes as the first 3D animated Hmong short ever created. It will capture an age-old Hmong folktale that has been verbally passed down through generations of Hmong people. The film follows one if its two primary characters, Orphan Boy, as he overcomes the taboo of having no parents while trying to create a life for himself. He encounters mythical people and creatures that guide him to his true love, a young woman named Gao Zoua Pa. After he turns his back on her love, she is lost to the dragon in a lake, who holds her captive. Orphan Boy must complete 3 tasks that test his character and courage in order to win back her love.

CORI THOMAS, playwright, New York, New York, will travel to Liberia, West Africa, to interview rehabilitated child soldiers for the purpose of research for the final play in The Liberia Project. This trilogy explores historical and personal family experiences that Thomas is uncovering around the Liberian Civil Wars.