Past
Grantees

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.

Artist CHRISTIAN TOMASZEWSKI, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to the Lake Titicaca Region, Puma, Peru, to study with Uro Indians the art of creating an artificial island. The installation works that he creates explore the narrative potential of space, architecture and habitat. He is investigating the physical craft of making a functional island and the more philosophical aspect of creating one's own space or land. This trip will be an opportunity to reexamine his practice and approach to art-making.

Artist LAN TUAZON, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Berlin, Prague, Paris, Palermo and Vienna to understand each city's unique features of urban planning that historically made them susceptible to riots and insurrections. Tuazon's work is about the urban landscape, how political history is written (or erased) and how social spaces modify the social life of the city. She will make observational drawing studies to inform her understanding of the life and flow of cities and to generate an ideal political and social space.

KATIE KA VANG, Hmong performance and spoken word artist living in St. Paul, Minnesota, will travel to Wisconsin, California, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina to gather interviews from Hmong Bollywood choreographers and dancers to enrich her next project Hmong Bollywood, a performance art piece in which Bollywood movies recount pivotal moments in her life. The politically exiled Hmong have extensively reworked and re-produced Bollywood movies, including Hmong dubbing of these Hindi films. Vang is interested in using this phenomenon to explore issues of identity as a second generation Hmong woman.

VOCALESSENCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $26,460 in support of Essentially Choral 2009. VocalEssence explores music for the human voice, from spoken word to choral singing. It has an unwavering commitment to contemporary composers and has been recognized for its adventurous programming of contemporary music. Jerome support is directed toward Essentially Choral, a program nurturing emerging composers in the field of writing for the human voice. An annual open call for scores for developmental reading sessions designed to benefit participating composers is issued. Reading rehearsals, one-on-one and group meetings with conductor Philip Brunelle and an established composer mentor and professional development seminars make for a comprehensive immersion experience, over three days, for emerging composers.

VOICE & VISION, New York City, received $8,000 in support of the 2009-10 ENVISION Retreat. Voice & Vision develops and produces vibrant theater works with women artists at the core. It has a multi-faceted program that supports the creation and development of new works by emerging playwrights. The ENVISION Retreat is a two-week summer residency in which six to eight projects involving core artists with a variety of backgrounds, artistic disciplines and methods are developed according to their individual goals. A majority of the artists participating are emerging and based in New York City and/or Minnesota. The artists are encouraged to share their work through an open rehearsal process. Select projects from the Retreat are further developed through the ENVISION Lab, which takes place over the course of the following year.

MEGAN E. VOSSLER, artist, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to national parks and land art sites in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. She will visit, explore and draw in these areas for the purpose of broadening her use of landscape in drawing. The focus of her current work is the tense, exploratory relationship between human beings and an overpowering landscape. The trip will allow her to explore more dramatic vistas and collect first-hand reference material.

BRYAN C. VUE, Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, and MONG VANG, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant in support of Skies of Autumn, a feature-length narrative about a Hmong American man named Teng, whose personal journey coping with his imminent death, and the hardships that arise from his terminal illness, lead him to a lake cabin where he can be one with nature and live his life in solitude. While there, he meets Amy, a woman who helps him gain appreciation for his family, find peace within himself, and ultimately conquer his fear of death. The twist to the story is that Tengs journey to the cabin never really took place; it was a spiritual journey to the other side, a concept, deeply felt by Hmong people, which espouses the belief that when a person dies, his or her soul returns to its place of origin and is reunited with ancestral spirits.

REMY WEBER received a grant for a documentary entitled Kiss the Past Goodbye. In 1972, the radiant, hell-bent photographer and filmmaker Daniel Seymour mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Cartagena, Columbia. Seymour was 27 years old and enjoying youth, a bohemian existence and recent artistic success. He had just beaten his addiction to heroin and stood to inherit as much as $30 million from his mother, Isabella Stewart Peabody Gardner, a member of one of Bostons richest families. Traces of Danny are everywhere. Theres an unprinted picture of him taken by renowned photographer Annie Liebovitz on a contact sheet. Theres Danny rolling sound and shooting up with groupies in Robert Franks black market documentary of the l972 Rolling Stones tour, Cocksucker Blues. Scratch the surface a little further theres Danny in his Bowery loft with Yoko Ono and John Lennon shooting their film The Fly. Theres Dannys name in the credits of Larry Clarks groundbreaking monograph, Tulsa. For a number of years, all roads led to Danny; rock n roll, film and art all intersected at his door. In the quest for clues to Dannys disappearance buried within his mysterious wake, Weber has sought out those closest to him, like Paco Grande and his wife at the time, actress Jessica Lange. The elusive Robert Frank, in addition to other well-known artists like Larry Clark and Danny Lyon, is also interviewed.

Support was awarded to GABRIELLE WEISS for The Color of Land, a documentary about John Boyd, the leader of an unassailably good cause, but a leader who almost always loses. A young African American from Virginia, Boyd is one of few black farmers in the country who still owns his land and makes a living from it. He is also the founder of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA), an organization dedicated to fighting for the thousands of African-American farmers who have not been so fortunate as Boyd, and who are now struggling against powerful odds to hold on to their land and their livelihoods. Boyds crusade is about to enter its second decade. He and the other NBFA members brought a class-action suit against the US Department of Agriculture in 1999, claiming the agency had systematically denied black farmers loans while providing ready financial assistance to white ones. Although the USDA admitted to discrimination and agreed to pay each demonstrably wronged farmer $50,000 the victory proved hollow. Thousands of black farmers were shut out of the settlement because they lacked access to USDA documents that would have proved their claims; thousands more simply never received their promised checks in the mail. More bitter still, very few farmers were able to get back their lost land that often had been in their families for generations. This film tells their stories from the perspective of John Boyd.

ROSEMARY WILLIAMS, artist, St. Paul, Minnesota, will travel to Davos, Switzerland, to gather material on the World Economic Forum, which meets there each year, and to explore the setting of Thomas Mann's 1925 novel The Magic Mountain. She will mine visual and conceptual material to build a new body of work centering on these two facets of the small mountain village. This research trip continues her exploration of the intersection of capitalism, society, power and institutions, as well as public and private spheres.

Jerome Foundation Directors made a grant of $10,800 to YOUNG JEAN LEE THEATER COMPANY, Brooklyn, New York, in support of the creation, development and production of a new experimental work based on Shakespeares King Lear. This work was commissioned by Soho Rep, New York City, and will be written and directed by Young Jean Lee. The work will be an angry love song to fathers, forefathers and patriarchsa thorny and complicated exploration of the ways in which they exert control and influence, and the weird and unexpected ways in which women respond to them. Lees work is geared toward unsettling complacency, both in herself and in her audiences, because she believes that contradiction and uncertainty bring people closer to the truth than pat ideologies.

ZEITGEIST, St. Paul, Minnesota, received $12,150 in support of the 2009 Zeitgeist/Composer Workshop. Founded in 1977, Zeitgeists mission is to enliven todays music and expand its public with performances that absorb, stimulate and hearten. The new music chamber ensemble consists of two percussion, piano, woodwinds and violin. Zeitgeist forges new links between musicians and music lovers through concerts, commissions of new work, recordings and dialogue with audiences. Since 2000, Jerome Foundation has supported the Zeitgeist/Composer Workshop, which has engaged 27 composers. The workshop is designed to give composers the opportunity to develop their creative ideas and stretch their artistic boundaries in an environment that celebrates exploration and experimentation. The focus is not on the completion of a composition but rather on the generation and development of ideas and the exploration of musical possibilities. Emerging composers bring sketches of material they would like to develop using the musicians as a compositional laboratory.

ZENON DANCE COMPANY AND SCHOOL, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $25,000 in support of the commissioning and performance of new dance works by three emerging choreographers. The mission of Zenon is to sustain an artistically excellent, professional dance company by presenting the commissioned works of emerging and locally, nationally, and internationally recognized modern and jazz choreographers to the broadest and most diverse audiences and communities possible. It accomplishes this through performance, education, and outreach. To date, with Jerome support, it's commissioned and worked with over 30 emerging choreographers. Zenon chooses to work with emerging choreographers because they bring a certain excitement and risk to their work. There is often close collaboration between the Zenon dancers and the commissioned choreographers.

KYLE ABRAHAM, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Berlin, Germany in search of inspiration for a new creative process and ideas and imagery for a dance-related project in 2009. This will be a research-based trip looking at the cultural expression of sexuality in German and Japanese cultures. Among other activities, he will spend time with the collection at the Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum, which houses an Asian section of shunga by Utamaro, Harunobu and others alongside the major works of the Weimar-era artists. As a black American choreographer, he is interested in the ways Japanese and European cultures are synthesized into hip-hop culture, especially through gender and sexuality roles.

ACCINOSCO, Brooklyn, New York, received $10,000 in support of the development and production of a new work titled The Success of Failure (or, The Failure of Success). Accinosco is a collective of performing artists, designers and musicians dedicated to creating groundbreaking original works that meld music, text, technical and theatrical design, and video with unbelievable fact and outrageous fiction. The collective was founded by Cynthia Hopkins, Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg. The new work is an epic folk tale told by a post-human creature via a live science-fiction film about rival strategies for surviving the imminent death of the sun. The story is thematically linked to the first two parts of The Accidental Trilogy through the exploration of amnesia, remembrance, shifting identities and shifting realities in a multifaceted stage world.

A grant was awarded to NATALIA ALMADA for a documentary entitled El General. Dictator, iron-man, nun-burner, father of modern Mexico, Natalia Almada's great-grandfather, Plutarco Elias Calles was the president of Mexico from 1924 to 1928. El General is a feature-length film about the conflicting history Almada inherited as the great-granddaughter of one of Mexico's most controversial figures and the socio-economic injustice that has prevailed from the Revolution of 1910 to the present. El General is a journey into the past of Almada's family and an intimate portrait of Mexico then and now.

ANANYA DANCE THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $12,000 in support of the creation and production of the new work Daak, Call to Action. Ananya Dance Theatre, under the direction of Artistic Director Ananya Chatterjea, is a company of women artists of color, diverse in age, race, nationality and sexual orientation, but uniformly committed to artistic excellence and passionate articulation of their dreams, hopes and desires. Choreographer Chatterjea incorporates the sculpturesque forms, strong foot work and emotional articulation of the Odissi classical style, with the purity of line and breath release of yoga, the abstract theatrical potential of Indian ritual practices, and the urgent energy of street theater. Daak responds to the aggressive land rights violations in agricultural communities for the purpose of establishing global industries. The project will share stories of women affected by such violations in Third World communities. The works will articulate the struggle over land rights through the innovative use of space and by imagining different relationships between bodies and land/ground.

THE FIELD, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for choreographer KIMBERLY BARTOSIK, received $8,000 in support of the creation, development, and production of Ecsteriority1&2, a dance in two parts for four performers. In this work, Bartosik explores various kinds of wars, and delves into the deaths and chaos they breed. The work will premiere in the fall of 2008. Bartosik believes in the visceral possibilities of performance and the importance of critical social inquiry. Her choreography is a mixture of movement virtuosity and stripped-down, charged stillness.

ELANA BELL, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to Jerusalem, interviewing citizens, documenting observations and developing language skills to inform Holy. Land. Holy. Land., an in-progress collection of poems and poetic fragments in multiple voices exploring questions of identity and displacement as they relate to the land of Israel/former Palestine. Bell is an American granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and sees herself as a narrator/searcher with a fragmented and complex relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. She will delve into the subject firsthand and participate more fully with communities.