Past
Grantees

DON BERNIER received a grant for In A Nutshell (working title),a one-hour documentary about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Yassa Tashjian, a.k.a. The Nut Lady. Ms. Tashijan, who founded the Nut Museum of Old Lyme, Connecticut, is viewed by some as a fascinating eccentric and by others as a nut case. Bernier probes the life of this artist, philosopher, entertainer and curator.

INTERMEDIA ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for THE BODYCARTOGRAPHY PROJECT, received $6,000 in support of the development and production of new work by choreographers Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad. Bieringa and Ramstad will use the lens of film creation as a structure for live performance, balancing the weights of dance and video in real time in front of an audience, creating an opening for an evolution of live work that charges audiences and challenges their attention. In their new work, Bieringa and Ramstad are interested in highlighting and contrasting different seasons, urban and wilderness locations, and wildlife spaces re-emerging in urban environments. The work will be presented in theaters and in public spaces, in a minimum of ten towns throughout Minnesota. All events will be documented and presented as part of an exhibition accompanying performances in Minneapolis.

The BLACKLOCK NATURE SANCTUARY, Moose Lake, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $43,000 for emerging artists' residencies. The Sanctuary, founded in 1994 by the Blacklock family, is dedicated to preserving undeveloped land and providing artists with uninterrupted time and space to develop new work. It fosters creative growth through direct experience, study and interpretation of nature. The Emerging Artist Fellowship Program, the focus of Jerome support, provides emerging artists, selected competitively from an open call and jury review, with the support needed to create work in the performing, visual or literary arts via a significant period of uninterrupted residency time for research and field work.

The AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for the B MAGIC ORCHESTRA, received $10,000 in support of the commissioning of two emerging composers to make new works for the B Magic Orchestra and the presentation of those works in the Community Jazz Concert Series at The Dakota Bar & Grill, a leading jazz club in the Twin Cities. The Orchestra provides a versatile voice for modern day jazz composers. The call for submissions will be undertaken in collaboration with the American Composers Forum. A jury will select two emerging Minnesota jazz composers, who will be commissioned to write new work for this jazz ensemble, founded in 1998 and led by composer/conductor William Banfield.

TAMARA BRANTMEIER, a painter living in St. Paul, will spend 35 days studying at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy. She will take two intensive, month-long drawing and painting courses, and attend weekly lectures, technical demonstrations and additional drawing classes. Each student receives two critiques per day. Brantmeier will visit specific collections, museums and art centers. This travel and study experience is designed to expand her abilities and strengthen her technique. She is pushing toward increased self-confidence, a visual understanding that is subtle, and more precise powers of description.

BART BUCH, a Minneapolis puppet artist and teacher, will travel to Portland, Oregon, where he will spend seven days attending Sojourn Theatre's Summer Institute for adults working in theatre, education and community settings. The workshop will be led by Michael Rohd, author of Hope is Vital, Theater for Community, Conflict and Dialogue. This workshop will inform Buchs interest in community change through the use of puppetry.

NICOLE CATTELL received a grant in support of Revolucin: Visions of Cuba Since the Revolution, a feature documentary that explores how photographers from four different generations tell the story of Cubas utopian dream and its unfolding since the 1959 revolution.

CAVE CANEM, New York City, received $18,000 in support of three programs. Its mission is to promote the artistic and professional development of emerging African-American poets. Its programs demand rigor and discipline within a context of support and constructive critique. Jerome dollars are directed to scholarships for emerging poets from Minnesota and New York City to attend the summer retreat, a week-long immersion in writing and critique of their work with renowned poet/teachers. Each summer, 50-52 emerging poets participate in the retreat. Jerome dollars will also support two 10-week workshops at the Poets House in New York City, open to emerging African-American poets in the area. Finally, Cave Canem offers an annual master class in the Twin Cities for emerging African-American poets based in Minnesota. The master class begins with a reading on a Friday evening followed by a day of intensive work under the direction of a nationally recognized poet.

CHERRY LANE THEATRE, New York City, received a two-year grant of $52,000 in support of the Mentor Project. Cherry Lane's mission is to perpetuate its legacy of artistic freedom, exploration, and camaraderie, by providing a haven for emerging playwrights and by breathing fresh life into classics. The Mentor Project is the cornerstone of the Theatre's New Play Development Program. Through a nomination and competitive review process, the Theatre identifies emerging playwrights and pairs them with highly experienced and respected playwright mentors. Over the course of a season, the emerging playwright and the mentor are in regular contact with one another. Playwrights are given production teams and directors who will best advance their plays. There are first draft readings, public staged readings, rehearsals and workshop productions. Mentors for 2004 are Ed Bullins, A. R. Gurney and Michael Weller.

The Jerome Foundation authorized a grant of $17,800 to THE CHILDREN'S THEATRE COMPANY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of commissions to three playwrights and developmental workshops within Playground Expansion. The Theatre's mission is to produce significant theater experiences, created especially for young people and their families, by sustaining a creative ensemble of the highest professional quality. The Children's Theatre Company develops new works by living playwrights. For the past three years, the Jerome Foundation has provided support to the Playground program, a developmental activity undertaken in cooperation with New Dramatists, New York City. Playground introduces emerging playwrights to the challenging and growing field of theater for young people, encouraging them to create new work that is aesthetically challenging and refreshingly contemporary, and offering them time and support to do so. Thus far, six promising theater pieces for young audiences have been developed through Playground. This recent Jerome grant enables the Company to further pursue three of those projects through commissioning and developmental workshops.

WILLIAM CLEVELAND, a Minneapolis-based arts administrator and writer, will spend twelve days in Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro to conduct field research to document the history of Dah Theater Company's artistic responses to social and political upheaval in Serbia. He will attend the theater's first retrospective conference, where he will conduct interviews. He will use this research for the theater section of a book he is writing about artists working in communities facing extreme social, political and/or military upheaval.

CLUBBED THUMB, New York City, received $9,000 in support of the development and production of works by emerging playwrights in the 2004 Summerworks Festival. The theater's mission is to develop and produce strange, funny and provocative new plays by living American writers. Now in its eighth season, Clubbed Thumb has produced over 50 plays, 20 readings and five vaudevilles. It is committed to providing opportunities for women in the theater. Clubbed Thumb develops and produces work at every stage, from improvisational sketch nights, informal in-house readings, staged readings, and development runs to full productions. The 2004 Summerworks, Clubbed Thumb's flagship event in terms of the identification and development of new work, will include four plays, among those new works by Sheila Callaghan, Brighde Mullins and Rinne Groff.

COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $25,000 to support the publication of three titles by emerging poets. Coffee House is a nationally recognized literary arts organization and nonprofit literary publishing house with a reputation for presenting award-winning writers and beautifully designed books. Jerome subsidy will be directed toward three volumesa first book by Ted Mathys, a second book by Ange Mlinko and a first book by Matthew Shenoda. Somewhere Else by Matthew Shenoda will be the first collection of poetry published in the United States by a Coptic American author. Starred Wire by Ange Mlinko is a reflection of the poet's desire to produce the lovechild of Frank O'Hara and Gerard Manley Hopkinspoems that create a wilderness in the city and a rigorous language of unsentimental ecstasy. The poems in Forge by Ted Mathys investigate what it means to construct a poem in contemporary America, recognizing the imperfection and politics of language but avoiding fashionable irony and despair and choosing instead to forge through, in an attempt to make sincerity itself a form of innovation.

COFFEE HOUSE PRESS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $25,000 in support of the publication of three books by emerging authors. This nonprofit literary publishing house is a vital, nationally recognized literary arts organization. Jerome grant dollars will support the publication of a second book by Mark Nowak, a text by poet Stephen Healey, and a first book by Selah Saterstrom. Individualized service distinguishes the Press's work with authors on design, editing and promotion to advance the works and careers of three emerging writers.

A grant of $10,000 was authorized for THE COLLAPSABLE GIRAFFE, Brooklyn, New York, in support of the creation and presentation of two new works. This experimental theater company integrates all forms of contemporary technology as well as borrowed vocabularies from different forms of dance and film in its productions. The first work, Letters from Earth, a collaborative creation by the core members of the company, Amy Huggans, Jim Findlay, and Iver Findlay is inspired by Twain's novella Letters from the Earth. It will be visually and spatially constructed to present a dual image performance. The second work, Retarded Shit by Amy Huggans, is based on B-grade interracial prison break movies and deadly earnest scared straight driver's education videos. The performances will likely take place in unauthorized public spaces through event hijackings.

The Council on Foundations, Washington, D.C., is a national membership association of foundations and corporations organized to promote responsible and effective grantmaking. It articulates a code of ethics for grantmakers, represents organized philanthropy to government and the media, and educates the public on the role and value of foundations in American life. It has more than 2,000 members including community foundations, corporate foundations/corporate giving programs, family foundations, and independent foundations. The Jerome Foundation made a general support and membership grant of $8,165 to the Council.

NORMAN COWIE received a grant in support of The Dimension In Which It Reigns Supreme, an hour-long experimental video essay on the US Governments enactment of global military supremacy and its effects on everyday life in the country. The tape will study the Pentagons concept of "full spectrum dominance" to reveal the human cost and social distortions of this policy.

RANDY CROCE, St. Paul, received support for If Stone Could Speak (Se la pietra potessero parlare), a documentary that examines the migration of stonecutters from northern Italy to Barre, Vermont. It emphasizes their struggles to both preserve their traditions and adapt to America, and to cope with working conditions that killed most of them by age 40. The stonecutters (scalpellini) invigorated the arts and culture in their new homeland.

JOSEPH CULTRERA received a grant for Hand of God, a firsthand account of a man abused by a Catholic priest in a Massachusetts town in 1964 as retold by his brother (the filmmaker). The film is also about the Cultreras, a family of Catholics recovering from broken trust, abuse and outright theft. Its a story about fathers given, lost, acquired and assumed.

DANSPACE PROJECT, New York City, received a two-year grant of $55,000 in support of commissions to New York City and/or Minnesota emerging choreographers for new works to be presented at Danspace. Danspace is an international leader in the commissioning and presentation of contemporary dance. Its mission is to stimulate, promote and present challenging new work in dance from a broad range of artistic voices within a distinguished and nurturing environment. It encourages choreographers to take risks and is committed to assisting artists in realizing their creative visions within a professional setting. An open and continuous application process, guided by an advisory council of choreographers, enables Executive Director Laurie Uprichard to determine the emerging choreographers who receive Jerome-supported commissions. Since inception in 1993-94, Danspace Project's commissioning initiative has supported the creation of 237 new works, often in collaboration with national and international colleagues.