Past
Grantees

JANE MINTON, Executive Director of Independent Feature Project/North, received a grant to travel to Dublin, Galway and Donegal, Ireland to meet with media arts organizations and Irish filmmakers. She will study grant programs in Ireland and seek out short films for a curatorial program at IFP/North.

A two-year commitment of $32,000 was authorized for the MIXED BLOOD THEATER COMPANY, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of the development of emerging playwrights through productions. This theater is a multi-racial company dedicated to encouraging cultural pluralism, individual equality and artistic excellence. The theater provides professional experiences for actors of color, produces educational programs on racial and cultural themes, and employs colorblind casting. It mounts a mainstage season each year, a mix of original scripts, contemporary classics, regional and national premieres and adaptations. There is an annual playwriting contest and a season-long play submission review which provide to Mixed Blood over 400 scripts per year to consider for production. Jerome Foundation funding will be used toward emerging playwrights commissions and for the costs associated with the competition and script review process.

MOMENTA ART, Brooklyn, New York, received $7,500 in support of the participation of emerging visual artists in the 1997-98 exhibition program. Located in Williamsburg, Momenta is dedicated to increasing the publics awareness of emerging and under-represented artists through exhibitions. This is an artist-run organization concentrating on two-person shows, which allow emerging artists to show a substantial body of work. Artists chosen must be unaffiliated with commercial galleries and must have a consistent body of thought provoking work.

The Directors authorized a two-year grant of $12,000 to MOVEMENT RESEARCH, New York City, in support of contributing writers fees for the publication The Performance Journal. Initiated in 1990, the Journal addresses the need of dancers and choreographers to illuminate the terms on which they make work. The Journal provides a context for dance and performance work; and is intended to provide a lively and engaging debate about the place of dance and performance in contemporary culture. This publication addresses the Jerome Foundations interest in arts criticism, and in supporting a vibrant dialogue about the place of the arts in American society. The Performance Journal places emphasis on reaching younger, emerging choreographers, artists of color whose work is marginalized, artists working outside of New York City, and choreographers working across disciplines.

A two-year commitment of $30,000 was authorized for THEATER MU, Minneapolis, in support of the development and production of new works. Theater Mu is a professional Asian-American company committed to giving voice to Asian-Americans through the transformational power of theatrical works. The organization produces two or three mainstage productions each season, and a New Play Festival. It offers community outreach performances and workshops, and an ongoing training program for Asian-American actors, playwrights and directors. New works by Maria Cheng, Sandra Agustin, Jeffrey Bailey, Santwana Dasgupta, Veena Deo, Ranee Ramsawamy and Mithu Schwartz will be featured.

SUSAN MUSKA AND GRTA LAFSDTTIR received funding toward a 60 to 90-minute documentary titled The Brandon Teena Story, based on the Humboldt triple murder and how and why it took place, destroying the lives of at least five young people forever, and significantly affecting friends, family and lovers left behind. The themes of homophobia and self-hatred are embedded in this story.

NAUTILUS MUSIC-THEATER, St. Paul, Minnesota, received a grant of $25,000 in support of the Composer-Librettist Studio and Rough Cuts. 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. The Composer-Librettist Studio is a professional development program which focuses on the process of collaboration between composers and writers through exploratory assignments that deal with the challenges of writing for the music-theater form. Rough Cuts is a monthly series of works-in-progress, dialogues between artists and audiences, and investigations into the creative process.

Appalachian folk dancer TERESA NEBY received a grant to travel through Western North Carolina, Virginia and Eastern Tennessee. Under the guidance of folklorist Phil Jamison, she will study Appalachian traditions and dance.

NEW DRAMATISTS, New York City, received $7,500 in support of the Composer-Librettist Studio. New Dramatists was founded in 1949 to provide a safe haven in which playwrights could develop their skills and learn more about the theater. Its mission is to find gifted playwrights and give them the time, the space and the tools to develop their craft, so that they may fulfill their potential and make lasting contributions to the theater. For the past 11 years, New Dramatists has facilitated a Composer-Librettist Studio under the direction of Ben Krywosz of Nautilus Music-Theatre, St. Paul, Minnesota. Studio writers and composers explore the basic elements of music-theater in a collaborative atmosphere. The Studio has introduced more than 100 playwrights and composers to one another. The subsequent collaborations of these playwrights and composers have fueled the growth of music-theater in the country.

NEW RADIO & PERFORMING ARTS, New York City, was founded in 1981 to stimulate and advance the publics awareness of innovative and experimental work in radio. The program Turbulence commissions emerging and established creators to develop new works which explore the specific characteristics of the World Wide Web and make use of multimedia and on-line technologies. Turbulence commissions artists from a variety of disciplines as well as cultural and aesthetic backgrounds. It is particularly sensitive to the needs of groups that do not as yet have a significant presence in multimedia undertakings, such as women and artists of color. The four artists to be commissioned with Jerome subsidy of $14,500 are Diane Bertolo, Jen Meacher, Nick Didkovsky and Brenda Nielson.

NEW RIVERS PRESS, Minneapolis, received a grant of $16,000 in support of the Minnesota Voices Project, first funded by the Jerome Foundation in 1980. New Rivers has a particular commitment to emerging writers and the publication of their first books. The editor works closely with competitively selected Project winners to review their manuscripts, edit the texts, design and produce the books, and promote them. The annual competition draws a large number of manuscript submissions, read by five judges who select three winners in prose and three in poetry.

DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP, New York City, a leading contemporary arts organization devoted to connecting artists with audiences, works to identify and encourage talented and culturally diverse artists and companies; to stimulate and develop a broader audience for these artists and their works; 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 that surrounds us. The First Light Commissioning Program provides funds to emerging choreographers and performance artists to make new work for presentation at DTW. The Jerome Foundation made a two-year commitment of $70,000 to the program. In addition, the Foundation made a commitment of $75,000 in support of artists services and general operating expenses during the three years of a proposed capital campaign. This is a highly unusual commitment for the Foundation.

DANCE THEATER WORKSHOP, New York City, a leading contemporary arts organization devoted to connecting artists with audiences, works to identify and encourage talented and culturally diverse artists and companies; to stimulate and develop a broader audience for these artists and their works; 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 that surrounds us. The First Light Commissioning Program provides funds to emerging choreographers and performance artists to make new work for presentation at DTW. The Jerome Foundation made a two-year commitment of $70,000 to the program. In addition, the Foundation made a commitment of $75,000 in support of artists services and general operating expenses during the three years of a proposed capital campaign. This is a highly unusual commitment for the Foundation.

The NEW YORK MILLS ARTS RETREAT AND REGIONAL CULTURAL CENTER, New York Mills, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $32,000 in support of an Emerging Artist Residency program. The Center presents arts and cultural programs which provoke dialogue about the relationship between rural and urban worlds. In using art, the aesthetic experience and the power of human creativity, the Center brings people closer to each other, and by extension, to themselves. Jerome subsidy for the Emerging Artist Residency program allows five to six artists per year to spend two to four weeks each as residents of New York Mills, provided with living quarters as well as access to studios for work. The artists are expected to work on their art and provide some community and educational service, an interaction described as generative and purposeful, for a minimum of eight hours a week .

NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP, New York City, received a two-year grant of $30,000 in support of the 1997-98 and 1998-99 Play Development Program. New York Theatre Workshop, founded in 1979, produces challenging new theater and develops the work of a diverse group of writers. The Play Development Program serves established and emerging playwrights in a variety of formats. There is a Monday reading series of new plays, a festival of staged works-in-progress, a summer residency program for the development of new works, playwright fellowships for artists of color, and services to an extended community of theater artists known as the Usual Suspects. The Play Development Program is designed to nurture each individual playwright and supply the necessary resources for plays to grow at any stage of their development. Jerome subsidy supports the participation of emerging playwrights.

The Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a $4,400 grant to the NORTHERN CLAY CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of an exhibition, workshop and related educational programming featuring the work of Eddie Dominguez, a major figure in American ceramics and artist whose work strongly reflects his identity as an individual of Mexican descent. The Clay Center will work closely with CreArte to engage local emerging artists in a workshop with Dominguez.

Subsidy of $20,300 was authorized for the NORTHERN CLAY CENTER, Minneapolis, to support the 1997-98 Jerome Artists Project Grants. The Center is a regional organization whose mission is to promote excellence in the work of clay artists, provide educational opportunities for artists and the community and encourage the publics appreciation and understanding of the ceramic arts. Jerome funding supports Project Grantssums of money intended to advance the work of emerging ceramic artists. Projects may include, but are not necessarily limited to, experimentation with new techniques and materials, work or study with a mentor, the purchase of equipment to facilitate an aesthetic or technical investigation, rent for a studio, and freeing an artist to work in the studio.

The Jerome Foundation Directors pledged $30,000 to support a regranting fund for individual artists ravaged by the 1997 floods in northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. It is likely that this regranting fund for individuals will be cooperatively managed by a Minnesota arts organization and a corresponding agency in North Dakota. Two members of the Board of Directors and the Foundations President were empowered to design the program.

P.S. 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 the new work Unremovable Jacket. Olivers mix of dance, theater and the spoken word incorporates Caribbean themes and cultural conflicts. In Unremovable Jacket, Oliver will create a work which implicitly and explicitly engages the burdens of race and classification as entities that are signs and cannot be removed. Oliver will explore the volatile territory of race awareness, unawareness, relations and talk wrapped up in a confusing tangle of fashion.

PANGEA WORLD THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received its second grant from the Jerome Foundation, a sum of $12,000 to support work with emerging writers in the development and production of new works. Pangea is committed to works, styles and traditions which illuminate the universal human condition, end divisiveness and celebrate differences. Its goals are to create an international literature for theater, a change in casting practice to promote more diverse casts, the creation of new theatrical possibilities for more diverse audiences, and the encouragement of collaborations between local and international artists. Upcoming productions which engage creative, emerging artists include a play based on poet Li-Young Lees memoir The Winged Seed, a piece on war and refugees using various poems included in the Anthology Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poems of Witness, a performance work based on an anthology of classic Tamil love poems translated by A. K. Ramanujan, and a play focusing on the injustices of the evacuation, relocation and internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.