Past
Grantees

A two-year commitment of $20,000 was made to the MEDIA ARTISTS RESOURCE CENTER, (formerly MIDWEST MEDIA ARTISTS ACCESS CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of its equipment access program, which serves individual artists. The mission of the Midwest Media Artists Access Center is to promote the production of media works by independent artists from all communities, and to provide access to low-cost media equipment and facilities in a supportive and educational environment. The Center rents media equipment and its facilities at below market rate, offers media arts classes, hosts media arts presentation events and sponsors access grant programs to encourage diverse voices in the media arts.

Author BILL MEISSNER from St. Cloud, received funding to travel in Yucatan, Mexico. Meissner will research Mexican League Baseball and will visit and investigate various settings for his novel-in-progress.

MILKWEED EDITIONS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $33,000 in support of the publication of works by emerging artists, with the majority of those artists being residents of Minnesota and New York City. Milkweed Editions publishes with the intention of making a humane impact on society, in the belief that literature is a tranformative art uniquely able to convey the essential experiences of the human heart and spirit. It publishes distinctive voices of literary merit in handsomely designed, visually dynamic books. Ten volumes containing the works of emerging writers constitute the body of work that the Jerome Foundation grant supports. One of the ten is a poetry anthology; six of the remaining nine are single-author debut works and three are second literary works from writers who debuted with Milkweed. Jerome subsidy will fund a portion of the expense for each of these volumes.

THE MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $40,000 in support of the participation of emerging artists in the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, which Jerome Foundation has supported since 1976. The MAEP is an artist-managed curatorial department of the Institute, devoted to the exhibition of works by artists who live and work in Minnesota. It is directed by a panel of artists elected to two-year terms by Minnesotas artist community. The level of exposure afforded the artists, the rigor of a peer selection process and the meticulous attention given to the exhibitions by MAEP staff and the Institute convinced the Jerome Foundation to offer continued support.

The MINNESOTA CENTER FOR BOOK ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $34,000 in support of the Book Arts Fellowship Program. The Centers mission is to foster enthusiasm for the book as a vital contemporary art form, preserve the traditional crafts of bookmaking and encourage participation in learning, production, interpretive and collaborative experiences. The Fellowship Program awards grants of up to $5,000 to four to six emerging book artists to create new works, which are then presented to the public in an exhibition with an accompanying catalog.

A 16-month grant of $45,000 was authorized to PARTS PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of programs and services designated for emerging artists in Minnesota and New York City; and the publication of arts criticism within the pARTs Journal. The mission of pARTs Photographic Arts is to build a community that supports excellence in photography, and to engage and nurture a broad audience for photography through a program of exhibitions, dialogues, publications and outreach. pARTs aims to promote the best and most compelling work by a diverse group of local and national artists, while stimulating inquiry into and dialogue on social, aesthetic and technological issues raised by contemporary photographic communication. The pARTs Journal is a periodical of images and ideas about photography, initiated in 1995 as a complement to and extension of the gallerys programs. Its goal is to increase understanding and experience of the art form through features and presentation. Toward the critical discourse which is published in the Journal, Jerome Foundation committed $9,000 of its $45,000 total commitment.

A grant of $4,830 was authorized for the MINNESOTA COUNCIL ON FOUNDATIONS.

ZARAAWAR MISTRY, director, actor and nonprofit arts administrator, received a grant to spend five weeks in Great Britain. He will be involved in an intensive residency at Tara Arts, the premier Asian theater company in England.

The MIXED BLOOD THEATRE COMPANY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $16,000 in support of its work with emerging playwrights, with the majority of the resources designated for Minnesota and/or New York City writers. Mixed Blood is a professional, multi-racial theater dedicated to encouraging cultural pluralism, individual equality and artistic excellence. It produces plays using colorblind casting, takes artistic risks in the selection and production of plays, reaches nontraditional audiences, provides professional experiences for actors of color and produces educational programming on racial and cultural themes. It was founded by its current artistic director Jack Reuler in 1976. Subsidy from the Jerome Foundation assists

MOMENTA ART, Brooklyn, New York, received a grant of $10,000 in support of an emerging artists exhibition program. This nonprofit exhibition space is dedicated to increasing the publics awareness of emerging and under-represented artists. Operating in Williamsburg, Momenta is run by and for artists. Its exhibition program features the works of approximately 32 artists each year. Momenta emphasizes two-person shows so that emerging artists have the opportunity to exhibit a substantial body of work. Artists chosen for exhibition must be unaffiliated with commercial galleries and must have a consistent body of thought-provoking work.

Actor ISABELL MONK received funding to travel to St. Louis, Missouri, and Jonesboro, Tennessee, to attend two national Storytelling Conferences. She intends to learn from master storytellers in order to build her expertise in this form.

CLARENCE MORGAN, a painter and Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota, received a grant to spend 10 days in St. Louis, Missouri. Morgan will begin work on a book project with artist Ken Botnick, he will also study an important collection of book art at the Kranzberg Center at Washington University.

A grant was made to EVE-LAURE MOROS and ELIZABETH EMERY in support of Made in Thailand, a 30-minute video documentary about women factory workers in Thailand and their struggle to organize unions in their newly industrialized country.

The NEW YORK FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for performance artist, dancer, choreographer and video maker DEAN MOSS, received a grant of $8,000 to develop a new work titled Spooky action at a distance. It will premiere in the spring of 1999. This will be a multimedia dance work that focuses on the individual as well as shared sensations and perceptions that layer meaning onto experiencein the life of the choreographer as well as the viewer. Moss describes the piece as a meditation on the sensation of togetherness, expressed through a performative deconstruction of the Bojangles dance sequence in the Astaire/Rogers film Swing Time, and in reference to Einsteins sarcastic description of Quantum Theorys tenet of non-locality

A grant of $12,000 was approved for THE FIELD, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for MOVIN SPIRITS DANCE THEATER, founded in 1989 by choreographer Marlies Yearby. Yearby uses movement memories, everyday gestures and dream fragments to explore the human experience. The grant will help to subsidize the development of three projects in the 1998-99 season: Feathers at the Flame, Alaskan Heat and America the Beautiful. Yearby will use workshops, residencies and showcase opportunities to work on these pieces. In the first, Yearby is collaborating with writer and performer Laurie Carlos. In Alaskan Heat, co-artistic director Laurie Carlos will be working with playwright/director Daniel Jones, in a work described as an exploration of intimacy and memory. Finally, America the Beautiful/A Quest for Light is a multidisciplinary project combining the talents of Yearby with performance poet Carl Hancock Rux and composer Vernon Reid. They will explore the dynamics of media and society, and the impact that media images have on shaping and influencing culture. Inherent in this exploration is an indictment of stereotypes and bigotry.

FREDERIC MUNOZ, a painter, received funding to travel to Spain and Morocco. Munoz will reconnect with his roots after 40 years and nourish his painting with compositional elements coming from Moorish architecture.

Julie Murray - Untitled, a 16mm experimental short which will consist of footage the filmmaker will shoot herself along with "found" and archival footage that will be made into a multitude of loops, by sectioning out and splicing end to end shots, or groups of shots, which the filmmaker will combine into multiple overlays within a single film. Spoken and inscribed texts will be used as a narrative vehicle in an associative and non-linear way to render a charged and personal filmic event. Ms. Murray has long been interested in recontextualizing footage from her own and other sources which examines how, through various procedures of isolation, juxtaposition, framing and repetition its logic can be inverted and abstracted and its apparent ordinariness be transformed into a rich poetic and personal landscape.

A grant of $12,000 was given to the AURORA FOUNDATION, New York City, as sponsoring agent for MUSIC AT THE ANTHOLOGY, in support of three commissions offered to emerging composers to create works which will be presented during the 1998-99 season. Music At The Anthology was founded in 1996 by composers Philip Glass, Eleanor Sandresky and Lisa Bielawa. It has three 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. Composers to be commissioned with Jerome subsidy are Anna Weesner, Aaron Stewart and Carlos Carillo

LOUIS W. HILL JR., the brother of Jerome Hill, the founder of the Jerome Foundation, served for many years as a Member of the Foundation. In honor of his contributions, the Directors authorized a $11,700 memorial grant to the NATIVE ARTS CIRCLE, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Circle's mission is to educate the general public in order that they might understand and appreciate Native American art and its related cultural values; and to support and promote artistic development in Native communities. In 1998 two memorial grants will be awarded to artists who are working with endangered environmental materials such as certain types of grasses, pipestone and pit-fired clay vessels. The funds will be directed toward artists who need an opportunity to focus on creating a body of work. The award will not only subsidize creative time, but also provide support for the artists as they interact with a broader community through lectures, demonstrations, workshops, performances and exhibitions. The artists may speak with groups of Native American students, conduct residencies in community centers or develop slide shows to be distributed by the Native Arts Circle.