Past
Grantees

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.

A two-year grant of $50,000 was awarded to NAUTILUS MUSIC-THEATER, St. Paul, Minnesota, in support of Rough Cuts and the Composer-Librettist Studio. It is the mission of Nautilus to explore the dynamics of individual and communal integrity through the creation, development and production of new operas and other forms of music-theater. Nautilus is committed to process and to the collaborative development of new works. Rough Cuts is a series of works-in-progress, dialogues between artists and audiences, and explorations of the creative process. There will be eight Rough Cuts in the current season. The Composer-Librettist Studio is an intensive two-week studio focusing on the process of collaboration and engaging composers and librettists in a series of exploratory assignments that deal with the challenges of writing for the music-theater form.

CELESTE NELMS, an artist, received a grant to spend two months at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, in the summer of 1998. This is an international program, which selects 20 artists each year from approximately 350 candidates for residencies in which the artists focus solely on producing their work.

A grant of $10,000 was authorized for the HOUSE OF DANCE, also known as NETA PULVERMACHER AND DANCERS, New York City, in support of the development of a full-length dance, music and theater work titled Doopy. Founded in 1986, Neta Pulvermacher and Dancers brings contemporary performance art to the public, promoting artistic collaboration among artists working in different media and supporting innovative artistic activities. Pulvermacher will collaborate with composer Roy Nathanson and writer/director David Cale to create Doopy, a series of introspective moments that reveal the full emotional breadth of a marital composition.

The Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $10,000 to NEW DRAMATISTS, New York City, in support of the participation of emerging composers and playwrights in the 1998 Composer Librettist Studio. Scheduled for June of 1998, the Studio will be directed by Nautilus Music-Theater Artistic Director Ben Krywosz. This studio is a workshop for playwrights and composers seeking an introduction to the collaborative process of music-theater creation.

THE NEW GROUP, New York City, received a grant of $12,000 in support of developmental activities to advance the work of emerging American playwrights. The mission of The New Group is to produce provocative, new plays that reflect the spirit of our times with immediacy, fearlessness and discipline. Established in 1991, it supports a Playwrights Unit, a New Play Reading Series and mainstage productions. The Literary Department scouts new writers and scripts.

THE NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, New York City, received a two-year grant of $32,000 to support the participation of emerging artists in the Public Access program. Founded in 1977, The New Museum collects, preserves, displays and interprets to the general public objects and artifacts related to predominantly American, post-1970 painting, sculpture, photography, graphic arts, video and the performing arts. Public Access encourages the development and presentation of artists' projects that incorporate audience participation as a central element of the works. The New Museum expects the majority of artists participating in this program will be emerging, hence the connection to the Jerome Foundation's program focus. Public Access exhibitions will explore themes such as family, human rights and the social construction of age, designed to attract new cross-over audiences.

The Directors authorized $16,000 to NEW RADIO AND PERFORMING ARTS, Staten Island, New York, to support commissions to emerging artists to create new works for Turbulence, a World Wide Web project. New Radio and Performing Arts was founded in 1981 to stimulate and advance the publics awareness of innovative work in the arts by producing and promoting experimental work for radio and live performance; and by encouraging and participating in the development, production and distribution of high quality audio recordings for video and other means of distribution. Turbulence commissions emerging and established artists to develop new works and explore the specific characteristics of the World Wide Web medium, making use of multimedia and on-line technologies. It commissions artists from a variety of disciplines, and is particularly sensitive to the needs of groups that do not as yet have a large presence in multi-media undertakings.

NEW RIVERS PRESS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $36,000 to continue the Jerome Foundations support of the Minnesota Voices Project. For 30 years, New Rivers Press has discovered new writers, provided them with editorial guidance, published their work in handsome editions and endeavored to build an audience of readers for their work. Volumes of poetry, prose and memoir are produced. The Minnesota Voices Project is a publication competition for emerging writers. Jerome funding assists with the publication of four books each year, two poetry manuscripts and two prose manuscripts. The competition is announced through an open call, with judges identified by publisher C. W. Truesdale. Authors play integral roles in the publication and marketing of their books.

Funding was awarded to writer MARC NIESON to spend one month traveling in Mexico City, Belize and Costa Rica to conduct onsite research integral to the rendering of a novel-in-progress. Nieson will follow the route of the novels protagonist.