Past
Grantees

PATRICK SCULLY, a choreographer, performance artist and nonprofit arts administrator, will spend three months in Ireland to research a new performance piece. He will gather stories and experiences to create a work that draws parallels between two contemporary conflicts: the Irish and British in Ireland, and Native Americans and European-Americans in Minnesota.

SECOND GENERATION PRODUCTIONS, New York City, received $10,000 to produce a musical, Making Tracks, about the Asian American experience. The work is described as a rock musical about an angst-ridden new media producer who kidnaps her dying grandfather from a suburban hospital to grant him his last wishto bring him home. She embarks with the old man on a fantastical journey across the country and into the history of Asians in America, guided by storytellers who challenge the granddaughter to rethink her journey in a new light as a continuation of those before her, and the beginning of those yet to come. The production unfolds in 12 fictional scenes including the building of the railroads, picture brides, World War II internment camps and the role of Asian American engineers in contributing to the construction of the high-tech backbone of this country. Following a first draft workshop production of Making Tracks in January of 1998, a select team of five of the original collaborators are developing the piece for full production in early 1999.

A mid-career project grant of $10,000 was authorized for SHAPIRO & SMITH DANCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of the further development of an evening-length dance/theater collaboration titled Babel. Danial Shapiro and Joanie Smith are collaborating with the Ilkhorn Theater Company and composer Dmitry Yanov-Yanovski to explore how human relationships inform choreographic

GIDEON SHMORAK was awarded support for An Ocean Apart, a one-hour documentary in two parts (30 minutes each) about fifty African-American and Jewish students from the Frederick Douglas and Stuyvesant high schools in New York, who were united with Palestinian and Israeli students from high schools in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Nazareth. The documentary will follow these students on their journeys to Israel and the United States, where they toured historical sites, visited with families, and took part in leadership and conflict resolution workshops. Through the students' perspectives, the documentary contrasts the Black-Jewish and the Israeli-Arab relations and presents their testimonies of how the Crown Heights riots, the Million Man March, the Palestinian uprising, and the terrorist suicide attacks affected the students' lives. By observing this group of youngsters, the documentary provides a study of how complicated race relations affect young adults when they try to communicate with members of a different race.

DANNELL DEVER received a grant to spend three weeks at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine. Dever will be involved in a course of intensive study in contact improvisation with master teacher Nancy Stark Smith.

NANDINA SIKAND was awarded support for Don't Fence Me In, a twenty-seven minute coming-of-age story of a young woman in post-colonial India. With the use of personal narrative, this documentary will weave together memories, photographs, letters and interviews to create a story of her mother, Krishna Sikund. This will be a retelling of the personal history of Krishna Sikund, who was born in the fall of 1938 and grew up in a country struggling for independence from the British. It was a nation which was just beginning to develop a national identity. This is a personal story told against the backdrop of a political and social context, it is not a historical documentary. It is the story of Krishna Sikund's life, her choices and her personal battles. It is a personal narrative of a life that is poignant and humorous, ironic and passionate. Don't Fence Me In will also look at the parallels between the life of Krishna and her two daughters, who have immigrated to the United States. Ironically, even though both daughters have grown up in different eras, many of the choices they face are the same as their mother's - choices that cut across lines of time and space.

A grant of $10,000 was authorized for SKEWED VISIONS PERFORMANCE COMPANY, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Specifically, the support will cover expenses in the remainder of the 1998 season which features two works, The Eye and the Door, Part II (the second in a series of performance installations) and Sniper 2, the second in a series of by-mail performances. Skewed Visions aims to encourage multi-perspective thinking about the correlation among art, theater and performance in public spaces. This emerging performance company specializes in site-specific performance, works engaging in and engaged by their physical environment. A Skewed Visions performance is an interplay of written text, performance, visual language, space and place.

NO NAME EXHIBITIONS/THE SOAP FACTORY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $34,000 in support of programs serving emerging visual artists in the 1998 and 1999 exhibition seasons. The mission of No Name is to support emerging artists; enhance public understanding and appreciation of their artistic expressions; and foster strength and vitality within the arts, cultural and educational communities. No Name is a community-driven entity operated by artist volunteers who believe in its mission and take action to insure its implementation. Artists are chosen through an open review process following a public call for entries, through the solicitation of references and through studio visits by volunteer staff and curators. One of No Names most significant assets is The Soap Factory, a raw and unencumbered building seen as an exciting exhibition space.

SOCRATES SCULPTURE PARK, New York City, received a two-year grant of $35,000 to support the Emerging Artist Fellowship Program. It is the aim of Socrates Sculpture Park to encourage creative interaction among artists, their art and the community through a series of programs. The Emerging Artist Fellowship Program, subsidized primarily with grants from the Jerome Foundation and the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship Program, provides eight artists with subsidized residencies and stipends to create new works onsite for two major exhibition seasons in the fall and spring. Technical assistance is provided to the artists. Artists are selected for these fellowships via an open call and competitive review.

JOE SOLA was awarded support for The Anxiety of the Rented Room, a ten-minute experimental video about anxiety in hotel rooms. Mr. Sola will check into a business hotel in midtown Manhattan for a period of five days. He will not leave the hotel at any time, nor will he have any visitors apart from those that are instrumental to the workings of the hotel. With two video cameras, one surveillance camera and one Hi-8 camera, he will record his daily activities and his relationship to the environment as it deepens over time. The goal of this project is twofold; one intellectual and the other aesthetic. The visual narrative will articulate the attitudes and moods that exist within the mass produced, impersonal objects of the hotel room, ultimately exploring the spiritual void of this space. And aesthetically it will build a new visual vocabulary that uses the colors, patterns and textures of the objects in the hotel room. The mass produced objects of this room survive in a narrow bandwidth of color, density and saturation: Dull brown flowery bedspread, the crushed yellows of the low watt tungsten lights, the hazy white of the marble bathroom tile counter, the garden flower faucet, a lightly braised rust wallpaper, a frail pink lamp, and so on. The list is indefinite.

KAREN TORKELSON SOLGARD will travel to Telemark, Norway, for five weeks to study Hardanger fiddle in the tradition of Vinje, the community from which her grandparents emigrated. Solgard will learn from two aging Hardanger masters.

DEBRA SOLOMON was awarded support for EBP (aka, Everybody's Pregnant), an animated short which examines identity issues related to pregnancy. In the theatre of the body the individual must sacrifice to attain socially accepted goals. The goal for increasing numbers of women is pregnancy. Fertility in the end proves the self and is the final stamp of gender. This film pits the self-negation of infertility against the process of infertility treatment itself.

THE SOUTHERN THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $60,000 in support of programs serving emerging creative artists as well as the arts criticism section of the Southerns publication The Artists Voice. The Southern presents alternative performances by artists working at the grassroots of the Twin Cities varied cultural, political and economic communitiesartists who are creating performance that responds to situations that are often invisible to mainstream society. The Southern supports all performance media and artists who are working at all levels of career development. It is interested in work that blends forms, and artists who work collaboratively. The Southern presents artists who are developing new work that reflects personal artistic growth, and represents new aesthetic challenges.

THE FIELD, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for ROSEANNE SPRADLIN DANCE, received a grant of $6,000 in support of the ensembles 1998-99 season. Spradlin explores movement and themes that express emotional and physical states; and she creates work that reveals under-disclosed facets of human behavior. She believes that the exploration of ones physicalityhow ones history is carried in the body and how that history is expressed in movement, however unlovely and strange that movement may beis a pathway to emotional, intellectual and moral growth. Funding will contribute to the revision and touring of Ends of Mercy and the development of

Poet FRANCINE STERLE from Iron, received a grant to spend a month at a writers colony, where she will continue work on a series of poems.

A grant was awarded to choreographer and dancer ROBIN STIEHM to spend 30 days in Yaroslavl, Russia. Stiehm will attend an international dance festival and develop collaborations with Russian dancers.

Author JOYCE SUTPHEN will travel to Sligo, Ireland, to attend the 39th Annual Yeats International Writing Festival. Sutphen intends to establish relationships with writers.

The Jerome Foundation authorized $12,000 to DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP, New York City, acting as fiscal agent for choreographer WIL SWANSON AND DANCERS. The funds authorized will support the development and production of new work for Swansons 1998-99 season. Swanson, an exemplary dancer in the Trisha Brown Company, has choreographed sporadically over his dance career. A year ago, upon his departure from the Brown Company, he dedicated himself to choreographic and teaching pursuits, and secured support from the Jerome Foundation, among others, for his 1997-98 season at Dance Theater Workshop. For the upcoming season, Swanson will trim his company to five dancers in order to create a tighter ensemble and secure residencies. He is exploring the idea of unison, prompted in part by a commission he received from a dancer in the Lyon Opera Ballet to set a solo piece. He will take what hes learned from that commission and translate it to a unison group piece for six dancers, including himself

Artist and teacher CY THAO will spend one month traveling in Laos, Thailand and China. He will retrieve and compile Hmong art in order to inform his own contemporary painting.

THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY, New York City, was founded in 1970 as a center for new and innovative theater arts. Its purposes are to discover new plays, nurture and develop playwrights and act as a bridge between playwrights and audiences. Each year, it produces 30 to 40 new American plays by early and mid-career writers, the majority of whom are emerging. While the resources for each production are modest, the creators make their own decisions and pursue their own visions in production. A Jerome Foundation grant of $13,000 will enable Theater for the New City to provide ten commissions/creative subsidies to emerging playwrights in the 1998-99 season.