Past
Grantees

The Loft Literary Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $124,000 in support of the Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant Program. The Loft advances the artistic development of writers, fosters a thriving literary community, and inspires passion for literature. Each year, the Loft engages more than 3,000 beginning, intermediate, and advanced writers in learning opportunities; hosts more than a hundred writers in readings and dialogues; collaborates with at least 30 local and national organizations to enrich the literary environment; and makes contracts, awards, and grants that pay  writers more than $400,000. The Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant Program provides financial support and professional assistance to develop and implement multi-faceted plans to further the artistic work and careers of Minnesota writers. Writers may receive grants of up to $10,000 to underwrite projects of their own design.

The Field, New York City, as fiscal sponsor for Loan Wolf Tribe, Brooklyn, New York, received $8,000 in support of the development and production of The God Projekt by Kevin Augustine.  Founded by artists for artists, The Field is dedicated to providing strategic services to thousands of performing artists and companies in New York City and beyond.  It fosters creative exploration, stewards innovative management strategies, and helps artists reach their fullest potential.  Lone Wolf Tribe, under the artistic direction of Kevin Augustine, is a puppet theatre ensemble blending history, sociology, and psychology into brutally poetic contemporary narratives.  Its visceral and fantastical productions explore the edges of theatrical style and human experience.  The God Projekt is described as a raucous investigation into the mysteries of the universe.  Featuring a tour-de-force solo performance by the Man Upstairs himself, bloody puppetry, and Catskill-style stand-up comedy, the show daringly takes on two subjects not to be discussed in polite company: religion and politics. 

MA-YI THEATER COMPANY, New York City, received a two-year grant of $30,000 in support of the creation and development of new works by emerging playwrights in the Writers Lab.  The mission of Ma-Yi is to develop and produce new and innovative plays by Asian American writers.  It is one of the country’s leading incubators of new work, shaping the national discourse about what it means to be Asian American today.  Founded in 2004, the Ma-Yi Writers Lab is a professional peer-based workshop of Asian American playwrights in residence at Ma-Yi.  The Lab is a community resource, brain trust, and place of artistic growth for its members.  It is often the place where writers share first drafts of new works and the place where they continue refining works until they are ready for production.  The Lab is also Ma-Yi’s primary resource for production material. 

MABOU MINES, New York City, received a two-year grant of $60,000 in support of the Suite Resident Artist Program for emerging artists based in New York City. Mabou Mines is an artist-driven experimental theatre collective generating original works and re-imagined adaptations of classic plays through multi-disciplinary, technologically inventive collaborations among its members and a wide range of contemporary composers, writers, musicians, puppeteers, and visual artists. The Mabou Mines/Suite Resident Artist Program, established in 1991, is a laboratory for experimenting with performance ideas, developed with the particular needs of emerging artists in mind. Suite is open to small companies and individual artists in all fields, anyone with compelling performance ideas in need of investigation. Each emerging artist receives mentoring, rehearsal space, a stipend, and a public showing of the work at the conclusion of the residency. The program operates on the belief that process-focused development is the best way to create original work, and that the opportunity to work in this way can prove crucial to an artist’s career.

SPRINGBOARD FOR THE ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for the ensemble MAD KING THOMAS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $8,000 in support of the development and production of The Home Project. Springboard is a nonprofit artist service organization whose mission is to cultivate a vibrant arts community by connecting artists with the skills, contacts, information, and services they need to make a living and a life. Mad King Thomas is the choreographic collaboration of Tara King, Theresa Madaus, and Monica Thomas. Known for its sense of humor, delight, and irreverence, Mad King Thomas investigates power, gender, and the possibilities of live performance, opening up discussion, igniting revolution, and subverting the status quo. The Home Project (working title) looks at what it means to make a home, to be far from home, and to make dances in one’s hometown versus in a chosen home or while being far from any home. The trio investigates questions of family, distance, intimacy, belonging, self-determination, accountability, dislocation, longing, the vastness of the United States, and disparities of culture.

Marchetti, Anthony, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Fort Myers, Florida to conduct research  to contribute to the photographic documentation of his maternal grandmother's post World War II journey as a Hungarian refugee.  His artistic goal is to photographically trace this journey of loss and starting anew. He will interview his grandmother’s older sister, who will share details of the journey and provide a structure for the photographic project. Although the first impetus was personal, the narrative is universal, that of leaving home and beginning again, of crossing borders and bringing one’s original culture while acquiring new culture.  It continues his exploration of place and how humans interact with space to assimilate the familiar and unfamiliar to create a new life. 

SHONA MASARIN, received a grant in support of Ghost line, a 16mm experimental film that invokes the spaces of Vaudeville through a Dada/Surrealist eye. The film plays with abstract patterns, rhythms, and alchemical techniques to conjure a lost world. It begins with a vaudevillian preparing to perform for a nonexistent audience. Viewers find themselves in an old theater, shut down and eroding where vaudeville, a relic of the past, has been long forgotten. Summoning this lost history through a non-sequitur that channels multiple characters and personalities, the viewer imagines “lines" of history on a fragile emulsion.

Mayobre, Esperanza, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to the Carpathian Mountains: Targu Jiu and the Monasteries of Bucovina and Bucharest, Romania, to research The Brancusi Trail Part 3, from the geometric pattenrs of the Convent of Muscovina to the Endless Column in Targu Jiu.   Mayobre started her research on Brancusi at the Guggenheim Museum and continued her investigation at the Philadelphia Museum and the Atelier Brancusi in Paris. The geometric patterns, frescoes, Romanian folk art, and wood carving at the Convent of Bucovina are said to have been a main influence on Brancusi.  She’ll travel to Targu Jiu to visit his famous outdoor sculptures.  Mayobre expects the trip to allow her to explore a new territory in her work, taking her work to outside spaces. 

Springboard for the Arts, St. Paul, Minnesota, as fiscal sponsor for Kathy McTavish, Duluth, Minnesota, received $9,000 in support of the development and production of a new work, the origin of birds.  Springboard’s mission is to cultivate a vibrant arts community by connecting artists with the skills, contacts, information, and services they need to make a living and a life.  A cellist, composer, and multimedia artist, McTavish blends cello, found sound, electronic effects, and abstract, layered, still-motion film.  the origin of birds includes new compositions and stories presented in a transmedia platform, utilizing the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms using current digital technologies.  The immersive installation of the origin of birds includes multiple projections, live cello performance, and portals into an interactive web environment for viewers with mobile devices.  

METCALFE, ANNA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to Big Island, Hawaii, to research boat forms and floral design at the Donkey Mill Holualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture, where she has been accepted for a one month residency.  In a new body of work, she will explore the mythologies, traditions, and boat forms of the Polynesians, a culture that inspires formal aspects of her work.  She’ll participate in workshops at the Center and will apprentice with Scott Seymour, a master floral designer who specializes in Native Hawaiian plants and the cultural significance of local flora.  She hopes to make flower design an integral part of the way she designs flower boats.  She’ll be conducting research at the Hawaii Maritime Center and Bishop Museum along with other Hawaiian cultural museums and monuments.

MILKWEED EDITIONS, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $20,000 in support of the publication of three books by emerging writers. Founded in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent book publisher whose mission is to identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it. Milkweed publishes works of fiction, literary nonfiction, poetry, and literature for young readers. With Jerome’s subsidy, it will publish two collections of poems and one work of creative nonfiction by emerging writers based in Minnesota.

The Minnesota Council on Foundations, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a membership and general support grant of $5,555.  The Minnesota Council on Foundations works to expand and strengthen a vibrant community of diverse grantmakers who individually and collectively advance the common good.  Members of the Council represent three-quarters of all grantmakers in the state, awarding almost $1 billion annually.  They include private, family, and independent foundations; community and other public foundations; and corporate foundations and giving programs.  The Council is an advocate for ethical and responsible charitable giving and a resource for grantmaking, creating and sharing information for and about grantmakers. The Jerome Foundation has been a member since 1976.

MIXED BLOOD THEATRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grant of $15,400 in support of the commissioning, development, and production of new works by emerging playwrights.  Mixed Blood Theatre, a professional, multi-racial company, promotes cultural pluralism and individual equality through artistic excellence, using theater to address artificial barriers that keep people from succeeding in American society.  Its vision is to be the definitive destination where theater artists and audiences representing the global village can create and share work that spans a ripple effect of social change and revolutionizes access to theater.  The development and production of new works are central and longstanding components of Mixed Blood Theatre’s work.  Jerome’s support allows the Theatre to develop and produce new works by emerging playwrights based in New York City and Minnesota. 

CRYSTAL MOSELLE received funding for The Wolfpack, a documentary that tells the unbelievable story of six teenage brothers who come out of exile and into the world in New York through meeting their first friend.  The six black-clad and long-haired Angulo brothers have been nicknamed “The Wolfpack.”  Bonded by the extreme circumstances of their childhood –– never allowed to leave their tiny family apartment, never allowed to cut their hair, never introduced to the Internet, and almost no contact with the outside world –– they became near-mythical characters.  This is the story behind the myth, of an unusual family locked away from society in the middle of a Manhattan housing project. Dressed like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, the over-caffeinated brothers, ranging in age from 13 to 20, eventually display the psychological repercussions of constant reclusion.  This culminates in one brother’s escape from the family apartment while donning the mask of Halloween’s Michael Myers, which results in his admission to a mental hospital. Throughout the documentary, Makunda, the Wolfpack’s 17-year-old alpha brother, takes us on the brothers’ Kafkaesque journey, starting with their personal stories and archival photos found in their dark cave of a home.  We discover the teachers who have carved out their personalities, a mother who firmly believes in home-schooling, and an alcoholic, Yogi father who enforced the boys’ isolation.  And lastly, their television –– loaded with a library of Scorcese and Tarantino –– through which the Angulo boys have found their biggest moral compass. 

MOVEMENT RESEARCH, New York City, received $25,000 in support of the creation and development of new works by emerging New York City-based choreographers in the Artist-in-Residence program.  Valuing individual artists, their creative processes, and their vital roles within society, Movement Research is dedicated to the creation and implementation of free and low-cost programs that nurture and instigate discourse and experimentation.  Movement Research strives to reflect the cultural, political, and economic diversity of its moving community.  The Artist-in-Residence program provides commissions, rehearsal space, performances, national and international exchanges, and related opportunities designed to support the individualized creative processes of the participating artists.

MU PERFORMING ARTS, St. Paul, Minnesota, received $45,000 in support of the Mu/Jerome New Performance Program.  Mu produces great performances born of arts, equality, and justice from the heart of the Asian American experience.  It strives to create global acceptance of Asian American culture and perspectives through theater and taiko.  Founded in 2006, the New Performance Program offers opportunities to Asian American artists to work with Mu Performing Arts in the development of new performance works.  The concept underlying the program is to bring in artists who are not primarily playwrights to create new works for the theater. Commissions, readings, and workshops develop these new works for production.

New York Foundation for the Arts, New York City, received a disaster relief grant of $5,000 for losses and damages from Superstorm Sandy.

 New York Live Arts, New York City, received $35,400 in support of commissions for the creation and production of new works by emerging choreographers. New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering to audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation, and engagement with social, political, and cultural currents of this time. It commissions, produces, and presents performances and serves as the home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Commissions support the creation of new works by artists, providing individualized and comprehensive support, and carrying forward a legacy of supporting artists in the creation of new work. Jerome’s support is primarily directed to the creation of new work by emerging choreographers for full production in the 2013-14 season. A portion of the Jerome grant will be used to commission new works that will be presented first in the Studio Series, a research laboratory for in-progress showings, and then commissioned and fully produced.

Nguyen, Stephen B, Brooklyn, New York, will travel active geologic sites in Iceland to create an “idea seed bank” of images, video, audio, sketches and other data.  This will inform the development of immersive sculptural installations that convey the same sense of phenomenal presence as the moving landforms themselves. Nguyen is drawn more to the energy and movements that shape landscape than the landscape itself.  Iceland is a rich location to witness current and active reshaping of the landscape.  At Pingvellir, he will visit the visible junction of the Eurasian Plate and North American Plate and witness the tension of their separation.  He’ll visit Iceland’s most volatile volcano, which lies under a massive glacier, a relationship that has the potential to cloud the skies with ash and moisture for thousands of miles.  He’ll visit other glaciers and evidence of subterranean activity at the Geysir Hot Springs Geothermal Area.  He expects the trip to help him imagine ways of conveying a sense of movement and presence through more abstract means in his works.

Nigoghossian, Jo, Brooklyn, New York, will travel to North Pantanal, Brazil, on a research trip to observe sentient life forms and their encounters to inform new sculptural works.  Without any tools for documentation other than her senses, for two weeks, she plans to visit the depths of a barely touched habitat.  She’ll investigate several ongoing interests in her work—confrontation of new form, anthropomorphism, and organic force through resistant materials. Due to its annual flooding and undisturbed nature, the Pantanal Basin is a habitat for 200 species of mammal and 650 species of bird.  She wants to witness the way plant life and animals interact with each other, the connections, the morphing and camouflage, their construction methods, and their own viewing systems.  She hopes that the trip will alter ideas about construction and behavior and produce more phenomenological results in her work.