Past
Grantees

PATRICE MALLARD was provided with a grant for BRIARS WILL CUT: My Mother's Line, a video documentary that tells her story as an African-American woman born in the deep South who traces her matrilineal line back five generations.

J. MANDLE PERFORMANCE, New York City, received a grant of $7,500 to support the development and production of two original site-specific performances. The first, titled When, will be performed in the storefront window space of the New Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the museum's exhibition that will examine the social construction of age and aging. The second work, titled Six Square, will be presented at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. In this piece, nine dancers will move inside and outside of the gallery space during the performance, rotating and opening the panels and drawing attention to the special design of the building. This is the second grant Jerome Foundation has awarded to j. mandle performance.

STEVEN MATHESON, St. Paul, MN, received support of $10,000 for News/Year, a 52 episode (30-90 seconds each) online/CD-ROM weekly series of experimental moving-image works investigating the relationship between daily life and the daily news.

Founded in 1989, COLLABORATIVE URBAN SCULPTURE PROJECTS, Brooklyn, New York, supports community-based art projects that foster collaborations among artists and social service organizations. It creates innovative venues for emerging visual and performing artists, and engages diverse audiences in the experience of these works. Jerome funding of $15,000 was authorized for Witness, a public art work by BRADLEY MCCALLUM, which will present experiences of police-related violence in New York City in a series of public art installations. The piece will be installed at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and in communities where incidences of police-related violence have occurred. Audio and sculptural elements will document specific histories of the victims. The working concept for the site-specific sculptures is to create cast iron units, similar to fire department call boxes, installed at street intersections throughout the five counties that comprise New York City.

WYATT MCDILL, Minneapolis, MN, received support of $10,000 for Garbage, a short narrative about life in a disposable society. The life portrayed is a character's named Mouse, a solitary garbage man. Disposable society is manifested everywhere around him, most literally in the garbage he collects and creates, but also in the ubiquitous advertisements he sees, in the consumable TV programs he watches and in the forgettable break-room chatter of his co-workers.

KRISTEN MCDOUGALL, graphic designer, teacher and chair of the design division at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, will travel for 15 days in Havana, Cuba, researching the post-revolutionary poster design of Umberto Pea and Raul Martines. McDougall intends to expand her awareness of another cultures style and design aesthetic to inform her personal and classroom work.

The MEDIA ALLIANCE, New York City, received $23,000 to subsidize radio/sound art fellowships. The mission of this organization is to support, promote and advocate for independent film, video, audio, radio and digital arts in the State of New York. Individual artists may apply to the fellowship program if they are working in sound and/or radio as independent art forms. Support is provided for single channel sound and radio projects, multichannel pieces, Internet projects and installation works. This fellowship program was initiated in 1999. Jerome funding for a second year allows the organization to build upon the applicant base.

MEET THE COMPOSER, New York City, received a grant of $23,000, of which $15,000 will support New York City emerging composers and $8,000 Minnesota emerging composers. Meet The Composer fosters the creation, performance and recording of music by American composers, while also developing new audiences for their work. The objective is to bring men and women who write music into personal contact with their audiences. Jerome support pays composers' fees.

A grant of $6,300 was authorized for the Minnesota Council on Foundations.

The MINNESOTA DANCE THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $45,000 to support four emerging choreographers who are developing new pieces for the company. The mission of Minnesota Dance Theatre is to create masterful and provocative dance performances which entertain and inspire audiences. Under the direction of Lise Houlton, the Minnesota Dance Theatre's repertoire includes classical pieces, contemporary ballet and modern works. Part of Jerome Foundation subsidy will go toward choreographer in residence Cynthia Gutierrez-Garner. Other choreographers included in the grant are Robert Hill, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater; Cathy Young and Matt Jenson, independent choreographers based in the Twin Cities; and Lise Houlton.

The MINNESOTA FILM BOARD, Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a nonprofit state film commission funded as a public/private partnership. It promotes the State of Minnesota as a prime location for filmmaking, provides a wide variety of services to independent producers and develops support for them. Now four years old, the Minnesota Independent Film Fund provides seed money to talented filmmakers who are developing independent feature film projects. The Film Board received $25,000 from the Jerome Foundation for a Screenwriters' Mentorship Program, a one-year pilot that matches nationally recognized screenwriters with three Minnesota Independent Film Fund award-winning projects. The mentor is expected to maintain regular contact with the Minnesota-based screenwriter, read and provide notes on drafts of the script and travel to Minnesota for one-on-one consultations.

The FREDERICK R. WEISMAN ART MUSEUM of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a three-year grant of $48,000 in continued support of the Public Art Commissions Program. This Museum recently celebrated its five-year anniversary in its new facility, where it has housed more than 46 exhibitions, 500 lectures, classes and performances and more than 3,000 guided tours. A previous three-year grant from the Foundation allowed the Museum to pilot a competitively selected, Minnesota artist-created public art commissions project. An open call for submissions will yield artists proposals, which are reviewed by an independent selection committee. The Weisman staff then assists three selected artists in identifying collaborators within the University and in other communities with which they want to work. Artists receive honoraria, funds for materials and retain ownership of their works. The Museum retains the right to exhibit the work for two years. The Museum mounts small concurrent exhibitions in the galleries for the three artists, and sponsors public presentations by them.

The MIXED BLOOD THEATRE COMPANY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $35,000 in support of projects by emerging playwrights. The majority of the funds will be spent on the development and production of new plays by Minnesota and/or New York City writers in the 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 seasons. Mixed Blood is a professional, multiracial theater dedicated to encouraging cultural pluralism, individual equality and artistic excellence. In addition to its mainstage shows, the Theater maintains an extensive touring program, a playwrights' competition, a script submission process, and a mission-driven entrepreneurial wing titled EnterTRaining.

The Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $10,000 to S.A.S.E.: THE WRITE PLACE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for MIZNA, in support of artists' fees and production costs for three upcoming issues of this literary journal.  Mizna was incorporated in early 1998 to organize and promote Arab-American literature.  The first two issues contained poems, essays, stories and art by Arab-Americans.  Many of the writers were local, and a number had not been published before.  Jerome funding will enable the organization to pay reasonable fees to artists and subsidize some production costs.

ZORAN MOJSILOV, sculptor, received a grant to spend six weeks in Belgrade engaged in an artist residency in the countryside and an exhibition in Zemun at Umetnicka Galerija Stara Kapetanija.

The Jerome Foundation made its first grant to choreographer DEAN MOSS in 1998. A second proposal, submitted through the fiscal sponsorship of the NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, requested funding for the creation and performance of a new work titled American Deluxe. Funding of $16,000 over two years was authorized. Moss blends dance, text, music, electronic and other visual media to create intricate performance and video works. In American Deluxe, he will focus on the assimilation of multiple philosophies that define culture in an ever-widening experience of the world; and the effect of that assimilation on transgressive, violent and transcendent elements in American social behavior. Moss intends to establish a dialogue between a world sustained through the sacrifice of blood and a world defined as the functioning of a mind.

THEATER MU, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $40,000 to support new works by emerging artists over the next two seasons. Theater Mu is a professional Asian-American theater company committed to giving voice to Asian-Americans. Through the transformational power of theatrical works, it aspires to redefine Asian-American culture and community. Activities planned for the current season include Song of the Pipa, written and directed by Rick Shiomi and featuring pipa virtuoso Gao Hong. Daughters of the Philippines will be an evening of one-act plays, by Sandra Agustin and Lia Rivamonte. The eighth New Eyes Festival of staged readings and workshop performances will be co-presented with The Playwrights' Center in February of 2000.

ILZE KLAVINA MUELLER, a writer and translator, will spend four weeks traveling in Germany and Latvia, retracing her childhood and collecting material for her memoir A Normal Refugee Childhood.

The Jerome Foundation made a three-year grant of $25,000 to the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART's Department of Film and Video, New York City, to support the acquisition of works by emerging artists who have been supported by the Jerome Foundation's New York City and Minnesota Media Arts Programs. This is the second such grant made to the Museum's Film and Video Department, which serves a national and international film and video constituency. It makes its archives and exhibitions available to the general public, as well as to a large community of film and video scholars, students and professionals. Nearly 650 feature length films and 300 short films are presented annually. The collection is comprised of more than 14,000 titles and spans the history of cinema from the 1890s to the present. Jerome funding gives a boost to emerging film and video artists who benefit significantly from having their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

The Directors awarded a two-year grant of $24,000 to Music at the Anthology, New York City, in support of emerging composers commissions in the Young Composers Commissioning Program in 1999-2000 and 2000-2001. Music at the Anthology has as its goals to commission and premiere works by unaffiliated composers and thereby encourage their entry into a musical community and American musical life; to curate these works in a meaningful context along with recent and older music; and to create a new community of artists and audiences in the East Village at Anthology Film Archives. Special attention is paid to cross-disciplinary work and to composers from Minnesota and New York City.