Past
Grantees

The Jerome Foundation made a two-year grant of $80,000 in support of the Bessie Schnberg/First Light Commissioning Program of DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP, New York City. Dance Theater Workshop is a leading contemporary arts organization devoted to connecting artists with audiences. DTW works to identify and encourage talented and culturally diverse artists and companies; to stimulate and develop a broader audience for these artists and their work; and to create opportunities for artists to participate in an interactive community laboratory for the working imagination and its essential, practical application to the world. This program provides funds to emerging choreographers and performance artists to make new work for presentation at DTW.

Wilderness guide and writer JUDITH NIEMI received a grant to spend three weeks in Pelly Bay, Nunavut, Canada, taking part in a sea kayak tour guided by Inuit hunters and living in an Inuit village. Niemis writing often deals with being an outsider in a particular culture.

Dance instructor MARY NOEL, a resident of Crookston, will travel to New York City and Buffalo, New York, to see a Broadway musical and to attend Dance Masters of America, a dance teacher accreditation program.

The NORTHERN CLAY CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a $5,000 grant in support of the exhibition Revelations of the African Potter, a selection of extraordinary historical and contemporary African pots from two private collections in Chicago and Iowa. Douglas Dawson, a potter who is guest curating the exhibition, owns the Chicago-based collection. The Northern Clay Center will offer a two-day workshop led by Sana Musasama, a ceramic artist who lives in New York City and who has worked extensively with Yoruba womens collectives in West Africa. This is a strategic initiative designed to broaden participation in the Northern Clay Centers programming and provide an exemplary service to the Twin Cities community. Subsidized workshop slots will be reserved for emerging African-American artists. There will be a public lecture in conjunction with the workshop.

The NORTHERN CLAY CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $25,000 to continue the Jerome Artists Project grants in the year 2000. The Clay Center promotes excellence in the work of clay artists, provides educational opportunities for artists in the community and encourages the public's appreciation and understanding of the ceramic arts. The Clay Center administers a regranting program in which emerging ceramic artists submit applications, reviewed by a jury, for grants of $6,000. Purposes include experimenting with new techniques and materials, working or studying with a mentor, bringing a respected figure to Minnesota to critique work, purchasing equipment to facilitate an aesthetic or technical investigation, renting studio space, subsidizing time working in the studio, purchase supplies, collaborating with other artists, pursuing education and exhibition opportunities and travel. It is ordinarily the case that at the end of the project year, a culminating exhibition features work made by project grant recipients.

THE FIELD, a New York City-based service organization supporting the work of independent artists, served as fiscal agent/sponsor for a proposal from TERE OCONNOR DANCE. The Jerome Foundation Directors awarded a two-year grant of $24,000 to The Field in support of the development and production of new work in 1999. Tere OConnor Dance was founded in 1987. OConnor challenges the boundaries of dance through a dense eclectic movement style filled with reference and nuance, and a fierce commitment to encountering stark emotional territory. His persistent themes include the unveiling of an inner emotional dialogue, and the frailty and nobility of an individual life accented by a frequently hilarious sense of humor. Funds will primarily support a new evening-length work in which OConnor continues to develop a synthesis of language and movement. The predominant themes are the changes in human nature provoked by technology, and the way that personal anger grows into political fervor.

Performance Space 122, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for independent choreographer Cynthia Oliver, received a grant of $10,000 toward the development and production of a new work entitled SHEMAD. Oliver's new work will utilize the mythologies behind madness and women, address methods that are designed to manage women who are "certifiably" mad by the standards of the day, and will explore the ways in which categories of speech are employed to determine women who do not behave as mad.

Artist and professor PATRICIA OLSON will travel to Pompeii, Italy, to visit the ancient Roman murals at the Villa of the Mysteries, for inspiration, reflection and the collection of materials for an expanded body of work based on her previous series, The Mystery Paintings.

The new literary arts building Open Book, Minneapolis, Minnesota, was awarded funding of $60,000 over a two-year period in support of emerging artist projects and interventions. This grant will provide opportunities for artists to encounter the building and imagine and create interventions utilizing existing and/or salvaged materials. The works designed by emerging artists will receive high visibility in the literary center that will attract writers, book artists, readers, students and general audiences. Open Book, a literary center scheduled to open in 2000, is a collaboration between The Loft, Milkweed Editions and Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

ST. LUKE'S Chamber Ensemble, New York City, was awarded a grant of $24,000 to support the Second Helpings series at the Dia Center for the Arts. St. Luke's is committed to contemporary composers and new music programming. This series presents repeat performances of recently written works and premiere performance of new works. The grant from the Jerome Foundation will support three commissions to emerging composers.

P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER, Long Island City, received $14,000 to support emerging artists expenses in creating, fabricating and installing works for the exhibition Some Young New Yorkers III. Twice a year, the curators at the newly reopened P.S. 1 showcase the work of emerging New York City artists. The third installment in this series opens in January of 1999. The exhibition is a platform on which young, relatively inexperienced artists may show their work, selected by top international curators, in a space that tells the story of discovery again and again. This particular show focuses on collaboratives, artists collectives and interdisciplinary projects involving more than one artist.

GREG PAK received a grant for Brother Killer Wolf, a feature-length documentary that tells the stories of several very different Americans whose lives are intertwined with wolves, including: members of the Nez Perce tribe, who manage the Idaho wolf reintroduction program; a wolf trapper in Alaska; a cattle rancher dealing with wolf depredation; a biologist studying a wolf pack; an activist involved in the save-the-wolf campaign; and a suburban owner of a wolf-dog hybrid.

SARAH PENMAN, photographer and filmmaker, was awarded funding to travel to Costa Rica with a delegation of North American Indians to meet with traditional Native leaders. Penman will include South and Central American Indians in a ten-year photography/essay project.

PENUMBRA THEATRE, St. Paul, Minnesota, received a grant of $49,000, of which $34,000 was designated for the Late Night Series and $15,000 for Cornerstone staged readings. Penumbra presents artistically excellent productions that respectfully and accurately reflect the richness, diversity and reality of the African-American experience. The Cornerstone project develops and supports new work by African-American playwrights. It includes script development, readings, workshops and productions. Jerome funding will enable Penumbra to produce three staged or semi-staged readings in the current season. Piloted in 1997, the Late Night Series brings a new group of voices to Penumbra in the form of cutting edge performance work. This season, Late Night will be programming on nine weekends, under the direction of Laurie Carlos.

The Jerome Foundation authorized a grant of $10,000 to the MINNESOTA DANCE ALLIANCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as fiscal agent for choreographer JELENA PETROVIC. Petrovic will use the funds to create and present new, larger ensemble work in 1999. One will be a duet with dancer Eric Boone, focusing on partnering in a complex physical vocabulary. She'll create a second section for a duet titled We Begin Standing. Finally, she'll create a theatrical group piece centered on the themes of self-promotion, self-love and self-betrayal. This is the second grant the Foundation has made to Petrovic for the development of new work.

AMERICAN INDIAN ARTISTS, INC., New York City, acted as fiscal agent for two projects conceived by visual artist GREGORY LEE PICKARD, and titled EXPO 2000. Founded in 1987, American Indian Artists advocates, enhances and promotes the growth of emerging and established Native artists of the Americas in the visual, performing, literary and media arts through a variety of programs and services. Packards works are intended to provoke thought, invite questioning and induce contemplation. Jerome funding of $15,000 was authorized for Powwow, which involves Native American teepees floating/congregating on the waters of New York Harbor. The second, Boat Show, features three boats, filled with water and video monitors carrying the faces of children and the voices of Native American ancestors, to be exhibited in a gallery. Pickard describes himself as a conceptual artist, and a composer of ideas, using cultural imagery and iconography.

A grant of $4,000 was authorized for PILLSBURY NEIGHBORHOOD SERVICES, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of the development of a new play by writer Dwight Hobbes. The Hobbes play Shelter will be presented in the 1999 season of the Pillsbury House Theatre, which aims to produce provocative plays by American playwrights, both established and emerging. Shelter is described as a grim, unsparing account of one mans descent into homelessness. It attacks a system that pits oppressed against oppressed, as three African Americans living in a shelter fight to get on an exclusive list for better housing.

The Jerome Foundation has supported emerging playwrights in residence and the development of their works at THE PLAYWRIGHTS CENTER in Minneapolis since 1976. A two-year grant of $158,000 was authorized to subsidize the Jerome Fellowship Program, Many Voices initiatives and services to emerging member playwrights. The Playwrights Center fuels the theater providing services to support playwrights and playwriting. It is committed to the following core values: artistic excellence, playwright initiative and leadership, the practice of cultural pluralism, the discovery of emerging artists, advocacy of playwrights and their work, and new visions of theater. The Center is a regional and national resource for script development, providing a range of services for writers at all stages of their careers and including public readings, workshops, classes, conferences, roundtables, residencies and fellowships. The Jerome Fellowship Program, operating since 1976, provides monetary and developmental support to emerging American playwrights who have had no more than two professional productions of their work. Jerome Fellows have priority access to the Centers creative resources, including the Lab program. Many Voices was created in 1992 to give writers of color better access to Center programs. In addition to services and Laboratory development, Many Voices regrants funds in the form

THE POETRY PROJECT at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, New York City, received $16,000 to support a Manuscript Development Workshop and a Seminar Series. For 33 years, The Poetry Project has sponsored programs supporting new and experimental poetry. They include reading series, performance series, emerging forms, multimedia events, writing workshops in a variety of genres and styles, a newsletter, a literary magazine, symposia, lectures, discussions, the annual New Year's Day marathon reading, publication parties and special events. The Manuscript Development Workshop will assist six to ten emerging poets in the preparation of full-length poetry manuscripts. The workshop will be taught by a published poet, with extensive editorial experience, over 26 two-hour weekly sessions. Subsidy was also authorized for single-session seminars taught by prominent writers, critics, editors and translators. They'll cover a variety of subjects from surveying trends in the current scene to finding audiences and readership for one's work.

The GIVENS FOUNDATION FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $10,100 to support the further development of THEOLOGY: Love & Revolution by J. OTIS POWELL!. Its first form was a published prose poem, then a performance art event. With Jerome subsidy, THEOLOGY will now become an expanded text published by Spout Press and a CD recording.