Past
Grantees

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 (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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The Jungle Theater, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant of $8,600 in support of Two Chairs Telling. This series, under the direction of curator Loren Niemi, provides storytellers with opportunities to share their works with a growing audience in the intimate setting of the Jungle Theater. Storytelling is a wildly diverse art form, whose practitioners span the range of expression from theatrical monologists doing one-person shows to grandmothers telling their children what life was like when they were young. Two Chairs Telling is presented on the second Tuesday of every month at the Jungle Theater.

Arts administrator SANDY KAUL, will participate in the seventh international Workshop on New Museology in Patzcuaro, Mexico. The topic of the Workshop is Contributions of New Museology to the Sustainable Development of Communities. As Director of the Talley Gallery at Bemidji State University, Kaul hopes to gain a better understanding of the role of the arts in rural communities.

Theater artist ANDREW KIM will spend an extended length of time in Clover, Vermont, working with the Bread & Puppet Theatre as a volunteer builder and performer with the Domestic Resurrection Circus Kim is currently a staff artist at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. He will build, write sculpt, discuss, papier mache, eat, paint, sew, rehearse, perform and celebrate along with the company members of Bread & Puppet.

Barry Kimm, Minneapolis, MN, $5,000. For the production of "Meteor", a 15-minute personal documentary film in which the explosion of a meteor in 1875 in rural Iowa is used as a metaphor for the disintegration of a nuclear family.

The Jerome Foundation Directors authorized a grant of $10,460 to the New York City-based EXPERIMENTAL INTERMEDIA FOUNDATION, which acted as fiscal agent for composer and performer MICHELLE KINNEY and the ensemble Mississippi Peace. Funds will be used to commission new works from composers and to record concert works with the aim of producing a CD of works by the lead composer Michelle Kinney.

DARESHA KYI received support for Loosen Knot, Release Me, a one-hour experimental docudrama that will explore how and why many beautiful, talented and intelligent women fall into and pull themselves out of abusive relationships. Using her personal story as the heart of the film, Kyi will create a rich, multilayered tapestry of sound and imagery dealing with the issues involved in domestic violence from personal as well as social, political, spiritual and psychological perspectives. Loosen Knot, Release Me will include elements of poetry and dance. Kyi will collaborate with a choreographer and composer to create musical and visual interpretations of the emotional landscapes the women and she explore.

Subsidy was awarded to choreographer DONALD LACOURSE to attend a folklore festival in Rzeszow, Poland, and an intensive week-long dance workshop in Benesov, in the Czech Republic. He will increase his knowledge of the dances and folklore of these countries and regions. This investigation is being undertaken to create a week-long residency program and develop choreography for the Ethnic Dance Theatre

Musician LEO LARA will spend an extended period in Ecuador and Bolivia to expand his knowledge of the musical and cultural heritage of communities of African origin in those two countries, and to renew his own cultural roots. Hes especially interested in learning how to play the traditional instruments of the Chota Valley, with a secondary area of interest in music and dance in the northwest corner of Ecuador, the Province of Esmeraldas.

Poet, author, lecturer and actor THOMAS FRANCIS LABLANC will travel to research and visualize a novel, Quiet Turtle, and an accompanying stage production, Leading Eagle, both based on 125 years of Dakota experience. The story begins in Minnesota and moves to the Black Hills, down to the Grand Canyon, up to the Rocky Mountains and into Canada. To move forward with the writing project, LaBlanc will retrace the journeys of his ancestors.