Past
Grantees

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

BRENNAN VANCE received $8,000 for Like Father, a 30-minute experimental documentary about memory, inheritance and the attempt at reconciliation between the filmmaker and his estranged father, who now suffers from early-onset dementia. The important thing is to remember this while we are still alive in order to live urgently, vibrantly, meaningfully. Like Father examines how the dualities of living and dying, remembering and forgetting, loving and losing manifest in possibly the most bewildering duality of all: father and son. Through the intimate exploration of Brennans fathers battle with dementia, and his own potentially grave genetic relationship with it, Like Father will use a dysfunctional father-son relationship to illuminate the human side of a disease which affects so many and calls our attention to lifes most important and precious possessions: mind and memory, identity and self-awareness, life and death.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, Saint Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer VANESSA VOSKUIL, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $8,000 in support of the creation and production of SHIFT. The mission of Springboard for the Arts 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. Voskuil is a choreographer; director; performer; visual and sound designer; teaching artist; and creator of dances, interdisciplinary performances, and films. SHIFT is an audience participatory, sound and interactive movement environment that includes a movement-base performance component. The work cultivates individual and social health by fostering a sustainable model of communication and social interaction that is of equal exchange.

JOSHUA WEINSTEIN received $18,000 for Off Duty, a feature length documentary that reveals the gritty life of New York City taxi drivers during the current economic downturn. At the center of the film is Eric Ying, a recent immigrant from China, who is struggling to reinvent himself as a cabbie. Like many Americans today, Eric Ying is unemployed and dreams of running his own business. With a wife and two young sons to support, he turns to a seemingly simple job: driving a taxicab. But it is a Herculean task for someone who can barely speak his customers language as well as navigate the citys 6,174 miles of streets. Off Duty exposes a conflicted version of capitalism, one in which a person will do anything to help feed his family, even at the expense of others, something that is never more apparent than on the roads of New York City. The film also observes the garage fraternity of cab drivers, which offers a rare place of community in a world of insecurities.

BRITNI WEST received $20,000 for Tired Moonlight, a feature-length narrative.  This film tells the story of lonely, middle-aged Dawn. Combustible dreams fail to ignite as she is confronted by lost love in a glorified-pit-stop town. Every town has a post office, lovers, guns, switchblades and beer. You just have to know where to look and when to look the other way. Pitting grand landscapes against dinners of fried chicken and the roar of V8 engines on Saturday nights, Tired Moonlight wanders through Solitaire games (always won), secrets lost in cavernous hearts, and the fifty miles of bad road that always gets you home. 

A grant was awarded to MATT WOLF in support of an experimental documentary titled Arthur Russell Video EP, about the life and visionary music of avant-garde cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell. When Arthur Russell ran away from Oskaloosa, Iowa as a teenager, he made his way to a Buddhist commune in San Francisco. By 1973 the twenty-two year old had moved to New York, where future collaborator Allen Ginsberg fortuitously became his next-door neighbor. Soon Arthur met Tom Lee, and the two became longtime boyfriends. Shortly after arriving in the East Village, Russell discovered the Gallery, an underground disco, where he met the influential DJ Nicky Siano. Arthur went on to produce some of the most vanguard disco hits of the era. At this time, Russell also produced luminous works for solo voice and cello. These breathy revelations fell somewhere between the liminal spaces of downtown New York and Iowa cornfields. Arthur died of AIDS in 1992. In the approximate length of an EP record, a series of video tracks, like chapters, will feature an array of materials illuminating Russells life and work. Each track can play individually like an experimental music video. But in combination, these chapters will form and extraordinary portrait.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, Saint Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer CHRIS YON, received $8,500 in support of the development and production of a new work titled The Very Unlikeliness (Im Going to KILL You!). The mission of Springboard for the Arts 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 has supported the arts community with management and consulting services for more than 20 years. Chris Yon, choreographer and performer, is developing The Very Unlikeliness (Im Going to KILL You!), an evening-length duet. Its currently structured in four parts, which reflect four areas of continued interest, four drawers for different choreographic propensities. The duet will organize information in a way that is unpredictable and often impenetrable. It will combine rhythms and gestures into accumulating repetitive sequences that are formal, soulful, still, slick, mysterious, and melancholic. These dizzying structures will give way to a gut-bucket essence.

The BROOKLYN ARTS EXCHANGE, Brooklyn, New York, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer LUCIANA ACHUGAR, received $8,000 in support of the creation, development, and production of the work PURO DESEO. The mission of BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange is to advance artistic development and unite diverse constituencies by providing support for emerging performing artists, arts education for Brooklyn youth from low/moderate income families, teaching residencies in Brooklyn public schools, and an annual presenting season in its theater. achugars PURO DESEO embraces the darkness of the cavernous black box and its inherent magic and mystery. achugar draws inspiration from paranormal phenomena, the occult, and representations of monstrosity in Gothic film and literature. Through a visceral and intuitive experience of sound, movement, and the exaggerated presence of light, long-time collaborator Michael Mahalchick and achugar build their performance as an incantation. PURO DESEO will be produced at The Kitchen in the spring of 2010.

PANGEA WORLD THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for ANICCHA ARTS, also based in Minneapolis, received $7,000 for the creation, development, and production of a new work for a fall 2010 concert. Pangea World Theater illuminates the human condition, celebrates cultural differences, and promotes human rights by creating and presenting international, multidisciplinary theater. Aniccha Arts is an interactive performance dance company whose members strive to find a strong relationship among dance, sound, and media through interactivity while decreasing the divide among audience and stage. Artistic Director Pramilla Vasudevan will work with collaborators to create Words To Dead Lips (dont say it unless I can eat it), an interactive performance that uses a childs perspective to ruminate on the fulfillment of human potential through indoctrination in the historical context of war in America. The piece employs technology as a mechanism for integrating and exploring the relationship of dance, visual media, and sound in three physical spaces.

A grant was awarded to REUBEN ATLAS for The Brothers Hypnotic, a feature-length documentary about an all-brass band of brothers from the South Side of Chicago. Brotherhood has long been a guiding ideal in the African American community. For the eight young men who make up the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, brotherhood has the dual significance of family ties and racial solidarity. Theyre all sons of Phil Cochran, a legendary Chicago trumpeter who turned his back on commercial music to pursue astral jazz (with Sun Ra), proto-funk, and Black Power. What was Cochrans ultimate avant-garde experiment? His own sons. They lived an insular communal existence with Cochran and their two mothers Mama Maia and Mama Aquilla complete with homemade clothes, veganism, and invented holidays. Starting at age three and continuing well into adulthood, the boys performed in the family band and were developed as artists and complex human beings under the ever-watchful eye of their determined father.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer KIMBERLY BARTOSIK, received $10,000 in support of the development and production of a new work. The Field encourages and cultivates appreciation of the performing arts, and frequently acts as a fiscal sponsor for independent artists in the development, creation, and presentation of music, dance, theater, film and video works. Bartosiks choreographic project, i like penises: a little something in 24 acts, is an evening-length spectacle reflecting on ideas of exchangeability, accumulation, and replacement. In this work for four dancers and three designers, Bartosik will examine the American ethos of dont fix it, replace it. Bartoskis work is built upon the development of a virtuosic movement language, rigorous conceptual explorations, and the creation of highly theatricalized environments.

Support was awarded to SIGNE BAUMANE for A Guide to Survival, an animated feature that explores the link between the filmmakers bouts with depression and the depression of her Latvian grandmother, Anna. Where does depression come from? Does it live in a far away country and once in a while come to bestow its evil gifts? Or does it live near its sufferer, or actually inside its sufferer and, like a puppet master with strings attached to the limbs, jerk its sufferer around in a mad, painful dance? A Guide to Survival is a film about the depression and mental illness running in the family of the filmmaker. The story explores her familys history along with Latvias tragic place in two world wars. It also shows how historic events collided with the lives of individual people, forcing them to make difficult choices. The films story connects the past with the present through the filmmakers present day struggles with her inner demons in New York City, and her grandmothers struggles of the past in Latvia. The filmmaker will attempt to answer the question, Can you beat the genes?

A grant was awarded to KEITH BEARDEN for God Hates Kansas, an experimental feature-length narrative that was inspired by Katsuhito Ishiis neo-surrealist drama Cha no Aji. This is the story of an average American family living in small-town Kansas: Mom, twice divorced, out of shape, over-medicated and over-worried, tries to eradicate her normal fears and problems until she becomes the perfect woman of her dreams. Eloise, a shy nine-year-old, precociously fixates on finding true love and the perfect marriage her Mom never had. Dylan, the 22-year-old slacker son who is still at home, has rock star dreams that are five times bigger than his talent or ambition. Uncle John, a regular small town, church-going guy has a big secret: hes gay, and at almost 50, has lost a lot of time in coming to terms with his true self. God Hates Kansas is neither anti-God, nor anti-Kansas. It is a film about how there is great beauty in simple dreams, and the persons we want to be, and lives we want to.

PATRICIA BENOIT received support for Ayiti, Ayiti, a feature-length narrative that examines the social and intimate landscapes of exile through three intersecting storylines. Driven from Haiti to New York, Vita, Yannick and Max struggle to adjust to life in a new land. Vita reunites with her husband and tries to forget a history of assault; Yannick arrives at her sisters in Long Island, unwilling to buy into her sisters American dream; and Max shows up at the doorstep of his estranged son, who spends his days fighting everything his father represents. A final scene of reckoning brings the three together, face to face with the inescapable truths of their past. Through suspense, humor, and drama, Ayiti, Ayiti explores the personal fallout of political bloodshed, and the possibility of love, hope and endurance in a time of violence. The film presents what Benoit describes as an honest, complex portrayal of the diverse lives often ignored in the rush towards sensational headlines and shocking news footage of Haiti. This is Benoits debut as a feature-filmmaker. In addition to directing the work, she is also its writer.