Past
Grantees

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer YANIRA CASTRO, received $8,000 in support of the development and production of a new work. Founded by artists for artists, The Field provides services to thousands of performing artists in New York City and beyond. From fostering creative exploration to stewarding innovative fundraising strategies, it helps artists reach their fullest potential. It frequently acts as fiscal sponsor for independent artists' proposals. Formed in 2009, a canary torsi is the name under which New York director/choreographer Yanira Castro makes work alone and collaborates with others. It is engaged in the creation of multidisciplinary interactive environments that have multiple facets: each acts as a stand-alone work and connects to a live performance. Jerome support is directed toward Wilderness, a site-adaptable installation, a dark field within which all elements of the event-audience, performers, and crew-are contained.

RAQUEL CEPEDA received support for SOME GIRLS, a feature-length documentary that follows a group of troubled Latina teens from a Bronx-based suicide prevention program who are transformed by an exploration of their roots via the use of ancestral DNA testing, followed by a trip to the seat of the Americas. On that journey to modern-day Dominican Republic, told from the director Raquel Cepeda's viewpoint, the white supremacist narratives about American history they've been taught are challenged, leaving them free to reconstruct their own respective identities. What does it really mean to be American? And, more importantly, what does that look like in today's socio-political and cultural landscape?

MICHAEL JOSEPH ETOLL, West St. Paul, received a grant for Pilgrimage to the Grave of Tiny Tim, a super-8 experimental narrative color film that will include live action and stop-action animation. Etoll intends to construct a world where delusional behavior is normal. The central characters will fight to express desires that they believe will help them break free from the insane tomb of torment that encases them as they walk to the Lakewood Cemetery to visit the grave of musician Tiny Tim (who was a Lebanese-American). During the journey, they meet a talking camel (a large puppet), and others who join them on the trip to the grave. Upon arriving at their destination, a type of second-rate enlightenment will occur: a false experience that allows them to settle back into their state of delusion with deep satisfaction. Most of the characters in the film will resemble Tiny Tim. Portions of the narration will be in Arabic. The film will be a moving painting with loud noises and shocking music interjected at key points to snap the viewer back into reality. This reality, in turn, is based on the vision of the deranged souls who populate the film.

JAMES GRAFSGAARD, Minneapolis, received support for Midas Rat and ME, an experimental narrative animated film written by the filmmakers son, James T. Grafsgaard, in the year 2000 at the age of 20, just as he was facing the choices and challenges of fitting in or fitting out of the system of institutions called the American Way of Life. Several lines of narration in the film best exemplify its theme: Most people thought we were for all out murderous anarchy. What we really wanted was just a peaceful place where there are no laws. Everyone gets along, but there are no PIGS to push you around. So explains the young woman (known only as ME) who narrates this real world tale of Midwestern alienation and love, which brings her and companion Midas Rat to the Twin Cities. She tells a touchingly authentic story of longing and loss in the context of Minnesotas anarchist punk subculture, giving this work a unique aesthetic and emotional impact.

CRISTINA IBARRA was awarded a grant for Las Marthas, a feature-length documentary that follows Daniella, a third generation Mexican American debutante, and other high school seniors with exclusive lineage, as they are presented in the annual Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball in Laredo, Texas. Imagine an enchanting dress that takes girls back in time to an era when emerging democratic ideals gave shape to a new government and a bill of rights. An exclusive dress that is the heart beat of family legacies as it gets passed down, modified, and updated from mother to daughter, for generations. For 113 years, the Society of Martha Washington has staged its annual Colonial Pageant and Ball on George Washingtons birthday exclusively for the debutante presentation of their 17-year-old daughters. Affectionately called Las Marthas, the Society of Martha Washington studies the quotidian life of George and Martha Washington in order to choose a presumably authentic event as a theme for its Colonial Pageant and Ball. Ibarras film follows several of the Society daughters and an elite dressmaker as they negotiate and prepare for this extraordinary rite of passage. The construction of each dress reveals the pleasure of imagining, performing and negotiating the history, nationality, culture and privilege that creates not only the Mexican American debutante, but also her second-class, darker-skinned, less privileged Mexican American counterpart.

The AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for composer DOUGLAS LITTLE, received $8,000 in support of the creation, development, and presentation of new works by Little. The Forums mission is to enrich lives by nurturing the creative spirit of composers and communities. Composer, bandleader, and musician Douglas Little will create new repertoire for his Latin jazz group, Seven Steps To Havana. The music will premiere in the fall of 2010. Seven Steps To Havana was founded by Little in 2005 and includes musicians from the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and Ethiopia. Little is steeped in the jazz tradition, versed in world music, and fluent in multiple languages. He seeks to challenge himself as a creator and push his musical boundaries.

MARIE LOSIER was awarded a grant for The Ballad of Genesis P-Orridge, an experimental film that is a portrait of one of the most controversial, fearless, and renowned experimental artists of our time. A key figure of the underground music scene for over 30 years, a cult artist in the pre-punk and post-punk bands Throbbing Gristle (1975 to 1981) and Psychic TV (1981 to present), Genesis is considered the father of industrial music and a pioneer of acid house and techno. Collaborations of Genesis with such people as W.S. Burroughs, Derek Jarman, Brion Gysin, and Francis Bacon, to name but a few, have proven seminal. Not content with merely breaking new ground in music, Genesis has instigated a daring assault on the fundamentals of biology. Placing transformation at the core of his life, Genesis and his now deceased lover and collaborator, Lady Jaye Breyer, embarked on a project entitled The Pandrogeny, an attempt to deconstruct their individual identities in order to create a third being, The Breyer P-Orridge. To this end, Genesis changed from a He into a She, embodying a unique life of experiment, of which Lady Jaye remains an integral part in memoriam. Genesis has made his body a shape-shifting work of art. This film will be a playful, agile, raw, cut-up and hand-spliced patchwork of iconic images, capturing the constant activity, flow and theatricality of Genesiss world: an entertaining collision of daily life, fiction, history, music, and myth.

IRINA PATKANIAN was awarded a grant in support of Living Here. Kamchatka tale., an feature-length documentary. The film tells the story of the Russian/Itelmen community of Dolinovka, a village on the Kamchatka peninsula, across from Alaskas Aleutian Islands, on a river that has been eroding its banks for decades. In the 1980s, the central Soviet government decided to save Dolinovka by constructing a modern town in a drier location nearby. Residents packed up their wooden houses in Old Dolinovka and moved to New Dolinovka, where their concrete apartments had plumbing and electricity, and the town had schools and a restaurant. With Perestroika, though, government financing stopped and, in turn, so did the towns supply of water and heat. Residents were ordered to vacate their premises and return to Old Dolinovka. The still-unfinished New Dolinovka turned into a ghost town, where the ghosts of the Soviet regime found permanent refuge. Today, New Dolinovka is a monument to a failed Soviet dream, completely reclaimed by wildlife. Through this highly experimental and very nontraditional documentary film, Irina Patkanian wants to give audiences a glimpse into the lives of four individuals, all representative of the common people of Russia, and in looking into their lives reflect on such urgent universal themes as abandonment and responsibility, security and freedom.

A grant was awarded to ANN PRIM, St. Paul, for Little Words, a narrative short that is the first story of The Vellum Trilogy, a collection of three fictional vignettes written by Ann Prim in the fall of 2009. Each story of The Vellum Trilogy takes a brief but intimate look into the lives of gay women writers and painters. The view is a private glimpse, where life and art intersect and memory is a story of interior landscapes. The Vellum Trilogy was conceived to be seen either as a single work or as three individual short films. Little Words is the story of a young writer, Rhys, who values her private world of words over all else. She is a Post-Modernist outsider who methodically strips from her life that which interferes and distracts. Beginning work on her second novel and awaiting word on whether her first novel will be published, she leaves her lover only to encounter someone who completely fractures her solitude and gives her the opportunity to reassess her reclusiveness.

JENNIFER REDFEARN received a grant for Sun Come Up, a character-driven documentary that follows the relocation of some of the worlds first environmental refugees, The Carteret Islandersa matrilineal society of 3,000 people living on a remote island chain in the South Pacific Ocean. The Carteret Islanders inhabit six pristine islands, 50 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and share a rich tradition of music, dance, and storytelling. For centuries, theyve lived on a diet of fresh fish, bananas and vegetables, and without cars, electricity, or running water. Their carbon footprint leaves one of the lightest impressions on the planet. Now, however, a modern crisis has intruded upon them, and their idyllic community is on the verge of dramatic change. Their small islands stand at the frontlines of climate change. Rising seas contaminate their fresh water and gardening land, erode their shoreline, and contribute to severe and unpredictable weather. The Carteret Islanders currently face three urgent problems: increasing population, decreasing access to food and water, and the rapidly shrinking land mass of the islands. Sun Come Up follows charismatic and passionate relocation leader Ursula Rakova and a group of young people from the Carteret Islands as they search for a new place to call home.

JESSE ROESLER, Minneapolis, received a grant for The Starfish Throwers (formerly Give Me Your Hungry), a 60-minute documentary that aims to explore ways that several driven and daring individuals have taken the war against hunger into their own hands in unexpected, innovative and sometimes controversial ways. Allen Law is a retired Minneapolis schoolteacher who will hand out over 170,000 sandwiches this year. Mary Risley is the founder of Food Runners, a San Francisco based food redistribution organization that delivers more than 22,000 pounds of food each week to shelters and group homes. Greg Pettengill is the founder of Guerilla Gardeners for the Homeless in Orlando, Florida. Give Me Your Hungry will chronicle the stories of these individuals who are on the front lines of the war on hunger. Roesler will weave their stories together into a larger narrative on ending hunger in Americaone act of food sharing, redistributing or growing at a time.

DUSTIN ROSEMARK, Rochester, received support for Blue Hands, a series of experimental films exploring a new animation process the filmmaker calls the Cyanograph. Blue Hands will consist of six to eight, twenty to thirty second films created to mimic certain films within the Edison Library. Rosemark is immensely interested in the films that make up the Edison Library, a collection of works produced between the 1890s and 1920, which eventually came under the control of the Motion Picture Patents Company, owned by Thomas Alva Edison. The films are among the earliest ever created and are of great importance to the history of cinema. They deal with simple subjects such as Record of a Sneeze (1894), The Kiss (1900), Feeding Seagulls (1900), or Freight Train (1898), and are best described by the term actuality films. Rosemarks films will be similarly minimalist in technique and subject, but will also be very specific, as they will focus exclusively on hands in the act of creation. Rosemarks cyanographic process will also be a feature that distinguishes Blue Hands from the Edison filmsa painstaking and very involved motion picture version of the blue-tinted photographic Cyanotype. The films are intended as a commentary on contemporary film craft and an expression of Rosemarks personal identity as an artist/filmmaker.

JENNY SCHMID, Minneapolis, received a grant for VLD SK8R GRL (Veiled Skater Girl), a 20-minute live action and animation video that engages the layered meanings of the headscarf as a contested political and cultural symbol. This project aspires to present a compelling visual depiction of the powerful young Muslim woman through the cultural filter of the headscarf. Schmid believes the West focuses on the headscarf as a symbol of oppression, while this clothings function and fashion are much more complicated. As the Iranian protests demonstrate, womens political power is not limited by their choice of dress. The headscarf, however, remains a point of contention, especially in Europe where the debate around limits on wearing the headscarf have become very public. The revival of the headscarf might also be embraced as a statement of unity against ubiquitous Western influencean event that is taking place both militarily and culturally. Schmid believes that the Western media has hyped this symbol as a one-dimensional threat; it has become a polarizing flashpoint. She will travel to Istanbul, Turkey, where East and West converge, and use it as an allegorical backdrop for this projects conceptual foundation. Her hope is that VLD SK8R GRL will play a role in creative resistance to assumptions and controversies surrounding the headscarf.

ANAL SHAH, St. Cloud, was awarded a grant for ChalChitra-RailYatra, a 60-minute experimental documentary tale about Railways and Cinema, the marriage between the two, by way of revisiting images of railways in Indian Cinema interwoven with a personal journey of the filmmaker aboard various trains in India. India has the worlds largest railway network; it is also the biggest film industry in the world. While one is a mode of transportation, the other is a medium that transports us. We stand in long lines for their tickets. The Train takes us on a journey, which may provide the longest tracking shot of the Indian landscape. The Movie, on the other hand, suspends our disbelief and takes us on a journey of its own diegesis. Both of these vehicles, individually and combined, blur, break, bridge and ultimately redefine the notion of borders and boundaries in the collective experience that constitutes and continues to evolve as the Indian Psyche. Structurally and visually this film will shunt seamlessly between the two parallel tracks. One will trace the memory of trains in films as seen through clips/shots of archival material accompanied by the filmmakers commentary. The other will be the filmmakers own personal journey with a camera aboard trains through an intimately observed cinema verite approach. The first track evokes history and memory, while the other invokes reality.

An experimental dance company based in New York City, JILL SIGMAN/THINKDANCE, received a grant of $8,000 to support the creation and production of The Hut Project. Jill Sigman presents work that exists at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual installation, often employing non-traditional environments, formats, and ways of engaging the viewer. This project marks a departure for Sigman from the traditional cycles of dance production, and is informed by shifts in her aesthetic, her evolving artistic process, changing financial realities, and a desire to find a form for her artmaking that makes it sustainable in its current economic-social-cultural context. The Hut Project is a series of artistic experiments centered around her studio space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. These experiments will lead to a culminating production in 2010. The experiments within The Hut Project are focused on themes of sustainability, shelter, survival, and real estate. The activities within it include small studio-based performance events, open rehearsals, live art installations, video artifacts, physical durational rituals, and after-parties with music. At the core of this series of activities is the construction of a series of huts, small structures made from found materials.

TICKLE THE SLEEPING GIANT, New York City, received $8,000 to support the development and production of choreographer Trajal Harrell's Antigone Sr. / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (L). Tickle the Sleeping Giant was founded by Artistic Director Harrell in 1996. Its primary purpose is to advance interest in and understanding of post-modern and contemporary dance and their application to everyday life. The organization creates original dance works, performances, interdisciplinary collaborations, and publishing initiatives. Since 2001, Harrell's work has been based on a theoretical conversation between the parallel aesthetic histories of the voguing dance tradition and the early post-modern dance tradition. He explores issues of coolness, community, sincerity, and the relationship between voguing's realness and the authenticity of early post-modernism.

Maia Wechsler received support for a documentary on a dramatic act by Melvin and Jean McNair, marking the beginning of a long journey that transformed them into fugitives from American justice and a cause celebre in France.

GABRIEL WINER received a grant for The Terrors of Basket Weaving, a narrative short thriller about a woman who becomes possessed after discovering a basket near her beach home. The woman is in her late thirties and is a hardworking New York publicist who has never had children. When she mends the basket, she is struck by a feeling of terror, and soon becomes haunted by an ancient presence. She struggles with this strange possession, moving between the alienating modernity of the city and the escapist cottage on the cape that she shares with her husband. She tries to ignore the basket, or to treat it normally, but it continues to haunt her. When her husband refuses to believe her suspicions of the basket, she loses her self-control and destroys it in desperation. She returns to New York hoping the ordeal is behind her, but the terror remains, somewhere inside of her. She has no choice but to listen to the voices within her, accept her fate, and live.

A grant was awarded to JESSICA WOLFSON and PAUL LOVELACE, for Radio Unnameable, a feature-length documentary about legendary New York City disc jockey Bob Fass, who revolutionized free expression on the airwaves with his long running FM program Radio Unnameable, which has served as a cultural hub for music, politics, and audience engagement for nearly 50 years. Fass changed the landscape of radio by developing a patchwork of music, politics, ideas and news from the streets, and cultivating it into an exciting freeform experiment. For half a century, he revolutionized the New York City airwaves at midnight on listener-sponsored WBAI. This film documents his eventful career and his involvement with some of the most gripping cultural movements of our time, while placing his story in a larger context of struggling to keep free expression on the dial.