Past
Grantees

The Jerome Foundation Board of Directors approved a request from INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, to foster the 2009-10 Naked Stages program through an agreement with PILLSBURY HOUSE THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The program will continue to operate as it has in the past with the same mission and artistic direction.

PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS, New York City, received $20,700 in support of the American Voice artistic development activities for emerging playwrights and production. The mission of Playwrights Horizons is to support and develop the work of contemporary American playwrights, composers, and lyricists, and to produce their new plays and musicals. As a writers theater dedicated to producing new works, development is a crucial component of the theaters mission. The American Voice developmental activities include evaluation of script submissions, cultivation of relationships with writers and scouting new writers, developmental readings, workshops, and commissions. Select works move forward to production.

THE PLAYWRIGHTS CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $91,900 in support of the Jerome Playwright Fellowship Program and the Many Voices Fellowship Program. The Playwrights Center champions playwrights and plays to build upon a living theater that demands new and innovative works. Throughout its history, the Center has launched and expanded programs that support the growth and development of new work for the American theater. Since 1977, the Jerome Foundation has provided support for a named fellowship program for emerging playwrights. This Jerome grant supports a new structure for the Jerome Playwright Fellowship Program in which fewer playwrights will be supported but the level of the fellowship stipend will increase. This is an open application program in which Jerome fellows are selected by an independent panel. The Many Voices Fellowship Program provides stipends, seminars, critiques, readings, and workshops for writers of color residing in Minnesota. The program operates in two tracks for emerging playwrights and beginning playwrights, also competitively selected by an independent panel in response to an open call for applications. The placement of these two programs at The Playwrights Center creates a synergy that builds upon the value of each one. The Center adds depth through its expertise in the field and strong programmatic connections with national and international theaters and theater leaders.

MARLO PORAS received a grant for Untitled China Documentary (working title), a feature-length documentary about a spirited daughter of a rapidly disappearing matriarchal society, who is thrust into China's recent economic downturn when she loses the only job she's ever known. As she scours a hustling wholesale market in Beijing for affordable gifts to bring home to her family, 25-year old Jua Ma stretches $40 far beyond its imaginable value. Arms loaded with bags, she's nostalgic as she crowds onto the subway and heads to the tiny basement apartment she shares with nine of her co-workers. It's her last night in Beijing and she is still reeling from the recent closure of Madami, the ethnic minority themed bar where she's worked as a hostess and performer for the past four years. Beijing's fiercely competitive job market and rising cost of living have left her with only one option-to return home to her remote village in Yunnan Province, leaving the city for good. With her life savings of $360 safely tucked in her bra, Jua Ma sets off on a three-day train ride home. Untitled China Documentary is about her journey to this point in her life and beyond, where hopes surrounding the Olympics and other possibilities of new employment failed to materialize.

STEPHANIE POWELL, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Yokosuka, Japan, to research the history of the U.S. Military naval base where she was born and to Tokyo to study the theatrics and narrative structure of the post World War II art form, Butoh, at the Dairakudakan School. Powell's intent is to learn through Butoh new ways of using the body in space. She also hopes to find inspiration for future images to express the tensions of being mixed race, Japanese and American.

RED EYE THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $29,400 in support of New Works 4 Weeks, Works-in-Progress, Isolated Acts and Critical Core programs serving emerging artists. Red Eye embraces the process of discovery, serving as an alternative multidisciplinary laboratory that supports the development and production of new work. The Works-in-Progress program emphasizes the creative process as it concerns conceptual development and staging. Up to five artists or teams, selected through an open call, are supported in developing new work. The culmination of the process is public Works-in-Progress performances in the festival New Works 4 Weeks, a multidisciplinary festival that links the performance components of Works-in-Progress and Isolated Acts, a curated series in which artists develop fully mounted work for public presentation and critical exposure. Red Eye looks for emerging artists who show evidence of a clear vision, an idiosyncratic personal perspective and a concept or idea large enough to benefit from an extended developmental period and flexible enough to incorporate what is discovered in the process. The developmental programs share joint feedback sessions through the Critical Core program.

RHIZOME, New York City, received $13,500 in support of the Commissions Program. The mission or Rhizome is to support the creation, presentation and preservation of contemporary art that engages new technologies in significant ways. It supports art that takes emerging technology as a tool, produces it as an object, and reflects on its social and cultural resonance. Rhizome is dedicated to nurturing artists working in emerging media whose relevance in culture grows daily. The Commissions Program, launched in 2001, supports the creation and presentation of new media art. An annual open call solicits more than 400 applications, which are reviewed by an independent jury. Commissions range from $1,000 to $5,000. Jerome support is directed toward commissions for emerging artists based in Minnesota and/or New York City.

ROULETTE INTERMEDIUM, New York City, received $39,600 in support of the Contemporary Music Series and the Jerome Commissioning Program. Roulettes purpose is to provide opportunities for innovative composers, musicians, sound artists, and interdisciplinary collaborators to present their work in accessible, appropriate, and professional productions. The Contemporary Music Series presents and promotes new work by emerging artists at the outset of their professional careers. The Series is a major steppingstone for young artists making their first professional statements. The Jerome Commissioning Program awards $4,000 commissions to four emerging composers for the creation of new works. The Program identifies and supports young artists of promise whose explorations have the potential to make valuable contributions to the development of contemporary music.

The JAMES SEWELL BALLET, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $10,800 in support of the participation of emerging choreographers in the 2009-10 Ballet Works Project. The mission of the Ballet is to create and perform works that connect artists with audiences and to advance contemporary ballet. The eight-dancer chamber ensemble, operating under the direction of choreographer James Sewell, is known for a broad and surprising range performance work. The Ballet Works Project encompasses the creation of new choreographic works by Sewell, invited established choreographers, and emerging choreographers. Jerome funding is directed toward the participation of emerging choreographers in the Project, including the creation and fully staged productions of new works. The Project gives choreographers liberal room to experiment and push movement boundaries.

JENNIFER SHYU, composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist residing in Bronx, New York, will travel to Dili, East Timor, and throughout West Timor, to research and document Timorese music focusing on the ritual music and dance of the Wehali Settlement. She is also investigating the transmutation of fado music from the Portuguese colonization of East Timor.

Playwright AAMERA SIDDIQUI, St. Paul, Minnesota, will travel to Mumbai, India, to participate in the 8th Women Playwrights International (WPI) Conference. Siddiqui is invested in the conference's aim to explore new emerging relationships among nation states, cultures, races, languages, religions and faiths with special reference to liberty and tolerance. She expects to return from this conference with increased knowledge, a deeper understanding of her craft, renewed energy to create, and more meaningful ingredients to add to her work.

A grant was awarded to ROSEMARY SINDT, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of Love-Life, a film that is a poem, a love song, and an image journey to elucidate faith, hope, and connectedness. The characters in the film are Rosemary Sindt, the films director, producer, and poet laureate, who endeavors to recreate the images of her poems and the emotions of her life; and Chris Thomas, the cinematographer, editor, image voyager and experimental rule breaker. Love-Life is a tale of the quest for the sacred and spiritual that is available in the everyday; beauty waiting to be recognized, captured and kept. The film appears in broad strokes of watercolor. With her moviemaker eyes wide open, the filmmaker will explore the concept of love in the physical and ethereal world.

DUNCAN SKILES AND MASIE COCHRAN were awarded support for a feature-length documentary titled Still Life. The subject of this documentary, Frank Newmyer, is an evangelical taxidermist whose glory days are behind him as he struggles to create the crowning work of his career. According to filmmakers Skiles and Cochran, there is a cultural backlash against taxidermists in the country. Starting from its earliest stages, taxidermy, outside of the museum, was stigmatized and banished to backrooms, basements, and dusty attics. The cultural backlash against taxidermists is not surprising. Taxidermy is unsettling, first because the process is grisly, but also because it blurs the line between life and death. Dead things that mysteriously come to life-zombies, vampires, ghosts-are frightening. A dead animal posed to look alive embodies the idea of the living dead. However, at the same time, the need to preserve an animal that was lost or destroyed gets at something essentially human. Taxidermy charms death to a halt, if only to suspend it in an eerie half-life. For Frank Newmyer, the subject of Still Life, taxidermy is not a reminder of death-it's an affirmation of life.

WILLIAM SLICHTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received support for The Feathered Ogre, a narrative short based on an Italian folk tale by Italo Calvino, and reinterpreted by Slichter as a modern satire. It will integrate live action with surreal animated paintings to deliver a story of art and political fantasy. The work is centered on a man who seeks a feather from an ogre to heal a king. The man ultimately gains the ogre's wisdom from acquaintances he makes as he sets out on a journey pursuing the feather. The film contains classic themes such as the triumph of good over evil, where the wicked are punished and the brave hero is rewarded for his courageous good deeds with wealth and marriage to a beautiful girl. This revised version of the original story will emerge as a collision of imagery from modern environmental calamities and themes of social injustice, framed against a 12th century Italian story, characters and landscape.

THE SOAP FACTORY, Minneapolis Minnesota, received $21,600 in support of the participation of emerging artists in the 2009 Exhibition Program. The Soap Factory is dedicated to the production, presentation and promotion of emerging contemporary practice across the visual arts. It presents four or five exhibitions each season. By maintaining an open structure and involving guest curators, The Soap Factory ensures that no single aesthetic dominates its vision, thereby providing an outlet for a multiplicity of voices and a democratic programming vision. The Soap Factory presents exhibitions, film and video installations and screenings, performance and theater events, dance, live music and spoken word, functioning as a multimedia space for cutting-edge artistic endeavors.

TRAVIS SPANGLER, AKI SHIBATA, KATHLEEN MALONEY AND MARCUS YOUNG, St. Paul, Minnesota, constitute Grace MN, an artists' collective and behavioral art studio whose work centers on the internal and civic life, creating personal practice and collective experiences. The collective will travel to Thich Nhat Hanh's Blue Cliff Monastery, New York, and to New York City. The Monastery will be a retreat for meditation, research and development of collective practices. In New York City, the collective will do further research and development for an ongoing work of public dancing titled Don't You Feel It Too?

STREB (Ringside), Brooklyn, New York, received $20,580 in support of the Emerging Artist Commissioning Program, which was piloted one year ago with support from Jerome Foundation. STREB supports and presents the work of choreographer Elizabeth Streb while bringing the audience and community into the artistic process. Since 1979, Streb has developed a lexicon of action, a way of moving that investigates and deconstructs many notions about dance. The company's home, the STREB LAB FOR ACTION MECHANICS (SLAM), is an open-access venue that models a new kind of artist-driven community institution. The purpose of the Emerging Artist Commissioning Program is to capitalize on the resources distinct to SLAM to inform and inspire new and creative experiments by emerging artists. There is an open call for applications, which are reviewed by company members and Elizabeth Streb, who makes the final selections. Artists are given residencies, six months in length, with opportunities to showcase work throughout and at the conclusion of the residencies.

THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM, New York City, received $12,500 in support of the 2009-10 Artists-in-Residence Program. The Museum is a nexus for black artists 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 offers three artists individual studio spaces in the Museum for 12 months, stipends of $20,000, allotments of $1,000 for materials, professional mentoring for a year, and an exhibition at the end of the residency. Each artist is paired with a curator, artist, scholar, or critic with whom they can exchange ideas and discuss their work. There are multiple opportunities for community engagement. The selection process is based on an open call for applications and a panel review.

The TEXTILE CENTER, Minneapolis Minnesota, received $12,000 in support of programs and services for emerging fiber artists. The mission of the Center is to honor textile traditions and promote excellence and innovation in fiber art, broadly defined to include weaving, quilting, knitting, sewing, needlework, lace making, basketry and beading. The Center uses Jerome support strategically to provide services and programs for emerging professional artists. This encompasses exhibitions in its gallery; workshops, seminars and classes; and access to the dye lab. The workshops and seminars are designed to develop artistic, technical and professional skills.

The TEXTILE CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $10,800 in support of programs and services for emerging Minnesota fiber artists during its 2009-10 fiscal year. The Center is a regionally-based national center for fiber art. Its mission is to honor textile traditions and promote excellence and innovation in fiber art, which encompasses a wide range of forms including weaving, quilting, knitting, sewing, dyeing, felting, needlework, lace making, basketry, and beading. Jerome dollars will be directed to the exhibition program, which features the works of emerging artists; intensive seminars and workshops for emerging professional textile artists; access to the state-of-the-art Dye Lab; and other programs and services benefiting emerging artists.