Past
Grantees

The TEXTILE CENTER, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $30,800 in support of Fiber Artists Project Grants and programs and services for emerging professional fiber artists in the Centers 2010-11 program year. The Center is a locally-based national center for fiber art. Its mission is to honor textile traditions and promote excellence and innovation in fiber art. The Fiber Artists Project Grant program was launched in 2008 to advance the professional development of emerging fiber artists in Minnesota and foster vitality and excellence in the field of fiber art. Open to emerging artists living in Minnesota, the program provides artists with stipends, a culminating exhibition, and opportunities for networking and professional development. The program is designed to expand opportunities for emerging fiber artists in Minnesota, supporting artists as they undertake specific and individually designed artistic projects. Three $4,000 grants will be awarded to support a wide range of project activities.

TICKLE THE SLEEPING GIANT, New York City, received $8,000 to support the development and production of choreographer Trajal Harrell's Antigone Sr. / Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (L). Tickle the Sleeping Giant was founded by Artistic Director Harrell in 1996. Its primary purpose is to advance interest in and understanding of post-modern and contemporary dance and their application to everyday life. The organization creates original dance works, performances, interdisciplinary collaborations, and publishing initiatives. Since 2001, Harrell's work has been based on a theoretical conversation between the parallel aesthetic histories of the voguing dance tradition and the early post-modern dance tradition. He explores issues of coolness, community, sincerity, and the relationship between voguing's realness and the authenticity of early post-modernism.

TOFTE LAKE CENTER, Ely, Minnesota, received $16,000 in support of residencies for emerging New York City and Minnesota-based artists in the summer 2011 residency season. The Center is a creative retreat located on the shores of a beautifully secluded lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota. From May through September, Tofte Lake Center offers artistic residencies for individuals and groups creating new works. Residencies balance group activities, personal work time, facilitated conversation, and the exchange of work. Residencies are structured around the specific needs of the artists. The emerging artist residencies are open to both individual creative artists and collaborative teams of artists who wish to focus attention on the development of current work. The program will subsidize two periods of week-long residencies for seven emerging artists each week and one residency for a performing arts project led by emerging artists who will have exclusive use of the facilities for an entire week. The aim is to provide space and means of support for individual artists wishing to further their creative endeavors in the visual, literary, and performing arts. An open call for applications with independent panel review constitutes the selection process.

The TOFTE LAKE CENTER, Ely, Minnesota, received a grant of $14,610 for a program that will provide individual creative artists and a collaborative team of artists with residency time to focus on current work. sponsors artists residencies designed to support creative work. The Center provides artists with shared experiences, engagement with the environment, access to artistic workspace, and the stimulation of new conversations and community. It will engage artists from Minnesota and New York City. The program is open to emerging creative artists working in theater, literature, music, dance, and the visual arts. An open call will be issued with artists proposals reviewed by selection panels.

REBECCA L. THOMAS, New York, New York, will travel to Madrid, Spain, for an intensive study of abanico (fan) and manton (manila shawl), two Flamenco techniques she plans to incorporate into her repertoire for future artistic work. She will study with Concha Jareo and La Truco at Amor de Dios: Centro de Arte Flamenco y Danza Espaola. Thomas is driven by the desire to infuse flamenco with a modern edge, but feels it is critical to have a mastery of the traditional elements.

KA VANG, St. Paul, Minnesota, will travel to France and Germany to research the lives and folklore of Hmong communities in order to inform new work and improve as a fiction writer. Vang is a fiction writer, playwright, and creative nonfiction writer. Shes previously researched the lives and folklore of the Hmong in Australia, Laos, and China. She often writes about identity and heritage themes while interweaving magic realism throughout her work. Direct experience of Hmong identities in other countries will help her develop complex and real characters in order to write more authentically about the Hmong diaspora. No level of research removed from place can substitute for actually talking with Hmong people in France and Germany, listening to them, and writing about their issues and voices.

VOCALESSENCE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $27,000 in support of Essentially Choral 2011. The mission of VocalEssence is to champion choral music of all genres, celebrating the vocal experience through innovative concerts, commissions, and community engagement programs. VocalEssence seeks to engage and enrich its audiences, who expect the unexpected. Its focus is on commissioned and first performances of music as well as important, but rarely heard, works of the past. Essentially Choral focuses on the creation, development, and production of new works by emerging artists. In partnership with the American Composers Forum, VocalEssence selects five emerging composers from Minnesota and New York City, who travel to the Twin Cities to fine tune new work, receive constructive feedback on their compositions, engage in reading sessions with the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, and receive a recording of their compositions during the last reading session. Composers receive an honorarium, travel and lodging subsidy, and an opportunity to receive a commission for a work to be premiered by VocalEssence.

VANESSA VOSKUIL, Minneapolis, Minnesota, will travel to the United Kingdom and Austria to conduct individualized study and research for new work and expand her knowledge of dance for the camera. As research for The Prophet Commissions, new work based on ideas from Kahlil Gibrans The Prophet, Voskuil will spend time at the London-based School of Life. She will also attend the moves11 and Constellation Change Festivals, both dance for the camera festivals in the United Kingdom. These festivals will provide opportunities to expand her skills as a choreographer interested in making movement work for the screen. She will also attend ImpulzTanz, an international dance festival in Vienna to engage with other choreographers around performance aesthetics and practice.

VSA MINNESOTA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a two-year grantof $38,000 for the VSA Minnesota/Jerome Foundation Project Grants for Artists with Disabilities. The organizations mission is to create a community where people with disabilities can learn through, participate in, and access the arts. The program assists emerging artists in moving forward in their artistic careers, resulting in new work and providing new skills or resources so that new work may be created. This program operates on the basis of an open call and independent jury review. It is open to artists working in any arts discipline. The programs goals are to recognize excellence in arts produced by persons with disabilities; provide tangible encouragement and financial awards to artists with disabilities who wish to undertake creative projects to benefit their careers; and identify Minnesota artists with disabilities whose art is a serious pursuit guided by a personal, artistic vision.

KAO CHOUA VUE, St. Paul, Minnesota, will travel to Laos to study the traditions and history of his parents homeland and bridge the gap between Hmong American and Hmong Lao through film. Being a displaced people, without a written language, oral tradition is a critical means for the Hmong people to sustain their language, stories and traditions for future generations. Vues father began using the video camera as a visual extension of oral tradition, without any knowledge of filmmaking. Vues self-proclaimed goal is to use film to preserve the essential elements of Hmong identity. He has the technical skills his father lacks, but lacks the visual, physical experience of having been to Laos. This travel to his cultural homeland will give him an opportunity to understand how Hmong people living in Laos today are using media.

Maia Wechsler received support for a documentary on a dramatic act by Melvin and Jean McNair, marking the beginning of a long journey that transformed them into fugitives from American justice and a cause celebre in France.

GABRIEL WINER received a grant for The Terrors of Basket Weaving, a narrative short thriller about a woman who becomes possessed after discovering a basket near her beach home. The woman is in her late thirties and is a hardworking New York publicist who has never had children. When she mends the basket, she is struck by a feeling of terror, and soon becomes haunted by an ancient presence. She struggles with this strange possession, moving between the alienating modernity of the city and the escapist cottage on the cape that she shares with her husband. She tries to ignore the basket, or to treat it normally, but it continues to haunt her. When her husband refuses to believe her suspicions of the basket, she loses her self-control and destroys it in desperation. She returns to New York hoping the ordeal is behind her, but the terror remains, somewhere inside of her. She has no choice but to listen to the voices within her, accept her fate, and live.

A grant was awarded to JESSICA WOLFSON and PAUL LOVELACE, for Radio Unnameable, a feature-length documentary about legendary New York City disc jockey Bob Fass, who revolutionized free expression on the airwaves with his long running FM program Radio Unnameable, which has served as a cultural hub for music, politics, and audience engagement for nearly 50 years. Fass changed the landscape of radio by developing a patchwork of music, politics, ideas and news from the streets, and cultivating it into an exciting freeform experiment. For half a century, he revolutionized the New York City airwaves at midnight on listener-sponsored WBAI. This film documents his eventful career and his involvement with some of the most gripping cultural movements of our time, while placing his story in a larger context of struggling to keep free expression on the dial.

JEREMY XIDO received support for The Angola Project, a documentary film about peopleAfrican and Chinesewhose lives are intimately intertwined through the Chinese reconstruction of the Benguela Railway in Angola. Its a road movie. Or in this case, a rail movie. Travelling across country, Simo Branco de Sousa, a former child soldier, passes through the lives of a series of characters, Chinese and Angolan, who have all pinned their hopes and dreams for the future on this massive reconstruction project: Jing-Wei Zhang (aka Linda), a pretty young vivacious translator working for the CR-20 construction company; Manuel, the equally young and hopeful Angolan train driver finally living his childhood dream; Filomena, the owner of a tiny bar and mother of a sick girl; Ji Hong, a fifty-two-year-old Chinese transport train driver with a crush on Filomena; and finally, Sheng Li Xiao, a worn down construction worker with a deep gambling debt who lays train tracks in the middle of nowhere. As the train plunges through the countryside, the film will dive into the intimate personal stories of these people who have clustered around the train line like moths drawn to a light bulb in the middle of the night. They each put an idiosyncratic human face to one of the major Global phenomena of the 21st century the Chinese reconstruction of Africa.

ZEITGEIST, St. Paul, Minnesota, received a grant of$13,500 for the Zeitgeist/Composer Workshop, designed to give emerging composers opportunities to develop their creative ideas and stretch their artistic boundaries in an environment that celebrates exploration and experimentation. Zeitgeists mission is to enliven todays music and expand its public with performances that absorb, stimulate, and hearten. A family of musicians animated by a spirit of adventure and collaboration, Zeitgeist presents works of substance with passion and integrity, and strives to forge new links between musicians and music lovers through concerts, commissions, recordings, and dialogue with its audiences. This new music chamber ensemble consists of two percussion, piano, woodwinds, and violin. The focus of the Workshop is not on the completion of a composition but rather on the generation and development of ideas and the exploration of musical possibilities. Three emerging composers are selected each year to participate in a five-day intensive workshop. Each composers developmental track is designed in collaboration with the ensemble.

The ZENON DANCE COMPANY AND SCHOOL, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received $25,000 in support of commissions for emerging New York City and Minnesota choreographers to create, develop, and set new works on the Zenon Company. Zenons mission is to sustain an artistically excellent, professional repertory dance company by presenting the commissioned works of emerging and locally, nationally, and internationally recognized modern and jazz choreographers to the broadest and more diverse audiences and communities possible. It accomplishes this through performance, education, and outreach. Jerome dollars enable Zenon to identify and commission three emerging choreographers each year to produce new works for the company. The choreographers benefit from individually designed residencies that focus on their needs and the services they require to create and set new works.

JOSHUA ZUCKER-PLUDA, New York, New York, will travel to Tokyo, Fujiyoshida, and Narusawa, Japan, to conduct research and interviews for an experimental documentary film on Aokigahara Jukai, a forest in Japan where people go to commit suicide. Zucker-Pluda has arranged to work with Professor Shinichi Nakazawa, Director of the Institute for Art Anthropology at Tama Arts University, who specializes in religious studies and folklore and their impact on contemporary culture, and Dr. Takahashi Yoshimoto, a scholar and researcher on the phenomenon of Aokigahara Jukai and Deputy Chief at the Department of Psychology at the Tokyo Institute of Psychiatry. This research will be used for a new film, The Sea of Trees, about the relationship among memory, sleep, dream, and death.

JOHN AKRE, Minneapolis, Minnesota, received a grant for Walker and Driver, an animated feature comedy musical about what happens when cars get a little too important. Walker, one of two central characters in the film, is a race car ace who grew up in the grandstands of a motor raceway and was born to drive. After a tragic accident during a big race, he gives up driving and secretly walks from place to place for transportation. His wife, Penny Driver, the other central character in the film, writes copy for automobile advertising. She seeks to transcend her daily life by creating advertisements that strive to convey the sensation of the absolute perfect driving experience. As world traffic jams increase, Walker has to try harder and harder to hide his secret life as a pedestrian. His wife is close to discovering his secret when a series of car crashes incapacitate most of her body. But her head is preserved, which allows her continue to develop automobile advertising that inspires the world to continue dreaming about ideal automobiles. When all the cars of the world smash into a massive Wreckage Mountain, it is up to Walker, who has found a spot on top of the mountain, to teach the rest of the world how to walk again. This animated tale is a direct expression of the filmmakers personal viewpoint as a pedestrian who often feels like an outsider in a world occupied by cars.

The AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM, St. Paul, Minnesota, received $97,000 in support of the Jerome Composers Commissioning Program, the Minnesota Emerging Composers Award, the Subito program, and consulting services to composers. The Forum enriches lives by nurturing the creative spirit of composers and communities. It provides opportunities for composers and their music to flourish and engage communities in the creation, performance and enjoyment of new music. Much of the grant supports the Jerome Composers Commissioning Program, which subsidizes the creation of new musical works by emerging composers, composer/performers, improvisers and sound artists. The Program welcomes applications in all musical genres including jazz, experimental, classical, improvised, sound art and international styles. A proactive initiative designed to increase commissions for composers working in a more diverse range of musical styles and genres will be undertaken by the Forum, using a rotating nominating process. Portions of the commitment from Jerome Foundation will also support the Subito program for Minnesota emerging composers and consulting services offered by Forum staff to composers. Subito provides small grants to composers for a variety of purposes such as recording expenses and extra rehearsal time to improve performance quality of new work.

THE ANDERSON CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES, Red Wing, Minnesota, received $14,400 in support of emerging artists residencies. The Anderson Center is a regional cultural resource that provides an environment for the pursuit of creative projects by artists and writers while advancing appreciation of the arts by presenting cultural programs and events for residents of the Red Wing area and its surrounding communities. Residencies of two to four weeks in duration are offered from May through October of each year. Jerome support is directed toward the residencies of emerging artists from New York City and Minnesota, enabling the artists to advance works-in-progress and initiate new works. Independent panels composed of artists and curators review applications and select artists for residencies.