Past
Grantees

Artist RAFALA GREEN will spend an extended period of time exploring the cultural and spiritual relationship to the creative process among Navajo weavers. The trip will afford her an opportunity to experience creative and spiritual energies within another culture with which she feels some affinity. Greens work is grounded in her particular realities and experiences. She recognizes an ever increasing need to build bridges of respect and meaningful communication with others whose realities and experiences are different.

AARON DAVIS HALL, New York City, received $8,000 to support commissions given to emerging creative artists within the Fund for New Works program. Under the direction of curator Laura Greer, the Fund makes it possible for artists to develop new works. Monies are used for such purposes as paying collaborators fees and subsidizing rehearsal time. Many Fund supported works are presented in one of the Halls most prominent series, New Faces/New Voices/New Visions, now entering its fifth season as a program which presents contemporary directions and innovations in the arts, and features multicultural performers who are in the vanguard of creating new traditions in their field.

Harvestworks, New York City, provides sound and computer technology and related services to emerging and mid-career artists through a Production Access Studio and a multimedia laboratory. Jerome Foundation funding of $18,000 over a two-year period will assist Harvestworks in continuing its Artist-in-Residence program.

The ILLUSION THEATER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for playwright JEFFREY HATCHER, was awarded a grant of $9,500 to support the Hatcher production of The Turn of the Screw. Hatcher is working from the Henry James novella to create a new work scheduled for presentation in 1997. He will direct the work as part of a strategy to promote the idea of playwrights becoming entrepreneurial. The Foundations grant allows this playwright to exercise new creative muscles, and to advance his work and career.

Writer and editor SUSAN CARROL HAUSER will travel, by passenger boat, on the Mississippi River from Saint Paul to New Orleans for the purpose of reflecting on the progress and future of her writing career, as illuminated by the progress of the river from its origin near her home in Northern Minnesota to its delta in the Gulf of Mexico. She will reflect not only on her horizons, both personal and geographic, but on her writing and how it expands to match her experiences, and how her experiences expand to match the writing; and finally, on the motion and destination of water.

A grant of $7,000 was authorized for IN THE HEART OF THE BEAST PUPPET & MASK THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of the development and production of a new work written by emerging playwright Andrew Kimm and based on a short story by Gabriel Garcia Mrquez. In The Heart of the Beast performs professional puppet and mask theater for the entertainment and enrichment of audiences of all ages and cultures, creating a sense of community among performers and audiences, and building a vital and healthy culture through art, festivity, work and play. A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings will be Kimms first full-length production as both writer and director. He intends to make careful use of puppets, masks, movement and sound to speak the need for personal and collective change, in the language of dreams.

Patrick Hennessey, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the completion of "The Homeless Home Movie", a feature-length video documentary about the wide diversity of people who are homeless in Minnesota, as well as some of the activists who aim to assist them.

Theater director MICHELLE HENSLEY will spend four days in Austin, Texas, participating in the 1996 RAT Conference. While attending, she will further her work with San Francisco playwright Erik Ehn on a new theater piece he and her theater company, 10,000 Things, are in the process of creating. The RAT Conference is a loose collective of small theater companies from across the country, born in 1994 at a conference held at the University of Iowa.

The Great American History Theatre, St. Paul, Minnesota, received an 18-month grant of $20,000 in support of emerging playwrights stipends, royalties and workshops. The History Theatre produces theatrical works which mirror the lives of the people of Minnesota and the Midwest, with a window back to other people and other times. This grant allows the History Theatre to commission new works that dramatize the history, folklore and social issues of its region.

A grant of $3,000 was made to COMPAS, St. Paul, Minnesota, acting as fiscal agent for HOLY COW! PRESS, published by Jim Perlman from a base in Duluth, Minnesota. This supplementary grant will support expanded marketing activities on behalf of two books of poetry which the Jerome Foundation Directors had elected to support earlier in the calendar year.

Funding of $9,000 was awarded to COMPAS, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal agent for Holy Cow! Press, in Duluth, Minnesota, to assist with the publication of books by Roseann Lloyd and Thomas Tommaro. Under the direction of editor/publisher Jim Perlman, Holy Cow!s objectives are to give publishing opportunities to emerging writers of merit and to increase the visibility and readership of work which has not received the recognition it deserves.

DEJUNIUS HUGHES will travel to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in West Africa, for the 15th Biennial Pan-African Film and Television Festival. This Festival provides an occasion for an exchange among filmmakers, fans and independent exhibitors, many of whom present film festivals similar to the one hughes and his associates have established in Minnesota within the Juneteenth celebration. The trip should strengthen his leadership capacity and revitalize his artistic spirit.

Thne Jerome Foundation approved general support and membership grants of modest sizes to the MINNESOTA ALLIANCE FOR ARTS IN EDUCATION in the Twin Cities; the COUNCIL ON FOUNDATIONS in Washington, D.C.; THE INDEPENDENT SECTOR in Washington, D.C.; and the MINNESOTA COUNCIL ON FOUNDATIONS.

INTAR, New York City, received $10,000 for its Developmental Theater Project. INTARs mission is to identify, develop and present the work of Hispanic-American theater and visual artists, and to introduce works by internationally respected Latino artists to American audiences. The Developmental Theater Project supports and develops new writers, directors and actors. The focus is on creation as opposed to production. Artists are encouraged to experiment. The participation of emerging playwrights is supported by the Jerome Foundation.

INTAR (Hispanic American Arts Center), New York City, received a $14,000 grant to support the participation of emerging American artists in the 1996-97 Gallery exhibition program. INTAR shows works by local, national and international artists, selected on the quality of their work and the probable impact of an INTAR show on their development. The 1996-97 season will begin with an exhibition of works by contemporary Dominican-born visual artists.

A two-year grant of $82,000 was awarded to Intermedia Arts Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, in support of the Installation Art Commissioning Program and artists services. The majority of the funding will go toward the 1996-97 and 1997-98 program years of the Installation Art Commissioning Program, an endeavor which provides opportunities for artists and fosters exploration of the installation art form. A smaller portion of the grant is dedicated toward artists services provided by Intermedia Arts Minnesota.

INTERMEDIA ARTS MINNESOTA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, acted as fiscal agent for the independent production of the Berangia project, a performance work conceived by poet and performance artist JAMISON MAHTO and poet STANLEY KUSUNOKI. The work is based on the theory that indigenous peoples of the Americas originally migrated from Asia over a land bridge that is now the Bering Strait. The land bridge will be used a metaphor to explore parallels between Asian, specifically Japanese, and Native American cultures. Mahto and Kusunoki will incorporate poetry, Native drumming and newly composed music to reveal philosophical and spiritual similarities between cultures. A grant of $8,000 was awarded for this production.

Intermedia Arts Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $18,000 in support of artists fees and materials for the HomeWork program. Intermedia Arts has moved to a new facility on Lyndale Avenue South in Minneapolis. As the architectural plan for renovation and use of the space evolved, Intermedia made an important policy decision to include the visions of artists in the building design. Of the nearly 100 proposals submitted to the design team in response to an invitational call, 11 were chosen. While the Jerome Foundation does not authorize funding for capital projects, it does provide commissions and materials to emerging artists who are undertaking the construction of public works of art. The Jerome Foundations $18,000 grant to Intermedia will enable eight artists/artist teams to design and construct a variety of installation projects including floor and wall tiling in the lift, restrooms and walkways; an all glass entryway with an illuminated inverted skylight ceiling; a series of drawings and text installed in a restroom, investigating Victorian attitudes toward cleanliness and sexuality; railings and stairways; and a time capsule, among other project ideas.

A grant to poet LOUIS JENKINS will enable him to visit areas in which he lived as a child and young adult in order to write a luminous landscape. He will travel to places that have provided some of the imagery of his poems and the icons of his personal mythology, in order to revitalize his work.

Artist RICHARD JOHNSON will travel to Sweden to collect images, photographs and sourer material for his artist book project, and to participate in the opening of a juried invitational exhibition within an exchange program between Duluth, Minnesota, and Vaxjo, Sweden. This is part of a festival centering on the Swedish-Minnesota connection via immigration.