2018 MEDIA ARTS
AND PERFORMING ARTS
ABDU ALI
BALTIMORE
to support the composing of music for FIYA!!!, an album that will explore narratives surrounding the Black queer experience through a fusion of electronic music, digital soundscapes, and analog instruments.
PIERRE BENNU
BALTIMORE
to support the development of The Inner Children’s Show, a multimedia variety show that utilizes the format of classic children’s television programming to tackle tough issues for grownups using humor, satire, and music.
ALEXANDRA GARDNER
BALTIMORE
to compose Tides, a four-movement work for saxophone quartet and electronics that is inspired by the notion of tidal shifts from both an environmental and cultural standpoint.
BONNIE JONES
BALTIMORE
to support 10 Siberian Tigers, 1500 Red-crowned Cranes, an immersive sound and video art project that will use found sounds, field recordings, and text-based video interviews to explore themes of migration, borders, and the wild nature that can grow within in-between spaces, specifically that of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
A. MOON
BALTIMORE
to support Hapaxes, an experimental non-fiction video which uses reenactments and voice-over commentary to mine meaning from a previously-hidden trove of personal photos in an effort to understand a suppressed family history as well as the denotative limits of visual representation.
GIANNA RODRIGUEZ
BALTIMORE
to support I Know I Can’t Do This Forever, a dance theater piece inspired by the impact of living with multiple sclerosis and which explores concepts of losing control, giving in, and adapting life through objects, bodies, and figures.
JULES ROSSKAM
BALTIMORE
to support Dance, Dance, Evolution, a short documentary film that explores transgender people’s relationship to dance.
2017 LITERARY ARTS
AND VISUAL ARTS
M. SAIDA AGOSTINI
BALTIMORE
to support uprisings in a state of joy, a collection of poems that meditates on the cost of freedom and joy found in liberation as located within Afro-Guyanese, immigrant, and Black queer history.
OLETHA DEVANE
ELLICOTT CITY
to support an international commission in which the artist will create a mosaic in the public plaza of Camp Coq, Haiti.
ELIZABETH EVITTS DICKINSON
BALTIMORE
to support work on The Grace and the Torment, a memoir that uses the artist’s grandmother’s suicide at age 48 top explore the nature of inheritance, family history, and the consequences that long-held secrets and trauma can have across generations.
CELESTE DOAKS
BALTIMORE
to support a collection of historical poems that reflect on the life of Mary Ellen Pleasant, also known as Mammy Pleasant, who is noted as an extraordinary 19th century entrepreneur and mother of the West Coast early civil rights movement.
TIFFANY LANGE
BALTIMORE
to support The Shoestring Project, a series of vignettes that use puppets and crafted scenes to illustrate personal responses to modern issues and locally relevant topics.
ADA PINKSTON
BALTIMORE
to support Landmarked, a performative intervention and installation about historical landmarks, monuments, and their relationship to contemporary community.
KATE REED PETTY
BALTIMORE
to support Practice Losing Faster, a novel about a woman who helps evacuate her hometown after a catastrophic flood and, in the process, confronts her own submerged memories—as well as larger themes of collective guilt, grief, and climate change.
ERNEST SHAW AND KENNETH MORRISON
BALTIMORE
to support an interdisciplinary project that will create portraits, poetry, and record interviews to explore the complexity of Black manhood.
2017 MEDIA ARTS AND PERFORMING ARTS
PHAAN HOWNG
BALTIMORE
to support No Man’s Land: Call to Arms, a video piece that uses a choreographed drumline and colorguard, camouflaged into a painted environment to symbolically represent Nature readying itself against mankind’s ecological destruction.
DONNA JACOBS
ELLICOTT CITY
to support UnShamed, a work of choreography that looks at domestic violence and the secrecy that surrounds it.
TAVIA LA FOLLETTE
BALTIMORE
to support Ancient Instincts, a performance that will use soundscape to evoke instinctual responses to an individualized experience that investigates ecology, perception, and the psychology of sound.
ELISSA BLOUNT MOORHEAD
BALTIMORE
to support research for and development of As of A Now, a film projection to be located on currently vacant buildings that imagine and evoke the stories of their varied occupants’ past, present, and future.
ALEXIS RENEE
BALTIMORE
to support Sweet Tea and Stardust, a multidisciplinary dance piece from the Masala Soul Project, a dance and theater project that centers the stories and imaginations of communities of color across multiple diasporas. The work will weave together sound, spoken word, text, film and dance to present and perform Black and Brown collective magic and joy as resistance.
KATIE SHLON
BALTIMORE
to support the production and exhibition of a sculptural sound installation which investigates how we experience sound visually and spatially, as part of work with an international arts collective.
LENDL TELLINGTON
BALTIMORE
to support ...that's why He made momma, a feature length documentary following four generations of a black family as they piece together a legacy after America’s Great Recession.
TT THE ARTIST
BALTIMORE
to support Dark City: Beneath the Beat, an experimental, musical, documentary film that reimagines the narrative of Baltimore City through the break beats of Baltimore club music and dance.
2016 LITERARY ARTS
AND VISUAL ARTS
THEA BROWN
BALTIMORE
to support Loner Forensics, a collection of writings that investigate the transitory silence that descends and recedes in the aftermath of public violence through the central metaphor of a shadow city.
ANDRIA NACINA COLE
BALTIMORE
to support Memphis and Haddassah and Barbara and Keisha and Pip (Or, How Tony Learned to Stay Young), a collection of short stories that examines and honors the inner lives of Black men and their experiences with love, children, work, fear, police brutality, power, Black women, racism, homosexuality, and death.
HOESY CORONA
BALTIMORE
to support the development and creation of new wearable sculptures for Alie[N]ation, an immersive multimedia installation and performance that investigates and dismantles hyperbolized alien tropes, xenophobic language, and the archetype of the scapegoat.
MICHAEL DOWNS
BALTIMORE
to support Sefton Stories (Miniatures), a series of short nonfiction essays that explore lives, events, and relationships within the author’s Baltimore neighborhood during the Great Recession.
CARLA DU PREE
COLUMBIA
to support Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, a novel that speaks to loss, regret, and blessings as told through the voices of Eudora, the daughter, and M'dear, the mother, both part of a young, African-American military family traveling by car through the uncivil South during the 60s and early 70s.
KIMI HANAUER
BALTIMORE
to support Press Press, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that will act as a site of social exchange at its new storefront location downtown on 427 N Eutaw Street that will house publishing resources, a library, and programming space.
KEI ITO AND ANDREW PAUL KEIPER
BALTIMORE
support Afterimage Requiem, a large-scale photographic and sound installation that contemplates the development of the atomic bomb, the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and the ongoing legacy of this history.
ANDREW KLEIN
BALTIMORE
to support Breezewood, a collection of poems that take as its subject the history, highways, geography, and mythology of a small town in Southern Pennsylvania.
SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ
PHOENIX
to support Brotherly Love, a novel about two immigrant Arab American families adapting to life in South Philadelphia during the 1970s.
RENÉ TREVIÑO
BALTIMORE
to support Codex / Constellations, a series of paintings on animal hide that combine imagery from ancient Mexican codices with queer symbols and narratives to produce new, imagined constellations.
2016 MEDIA ARTS AND PERFORMING ARTS
THEO ANTHONY
BALTIMORE
to support Rat Film, a feature length documentary that uses the city rat and the people who deal with them as a vehicle to explore historical, sociological, and philosophical threads in the story of Baltimore and beyond.
ERICK ANTONIO BENITEZ
BALTIMORE
to support La Frontera, a multimedia immersive installation that uses video, interviews, and found site materials to evoke experience and awareness regarding modern migration, the border, and the lives it affects.
JEFF CAREY
ODENTON
to support the composition of Hypercube, a solo performance of electro-instrumental visual music, that will use synthesized sound, strobe, color, and laser lighting and is inspired by the concept of an n-dimensional cube (also known as a hypercube).
TEMPLE CROCKER
BALTIMORE
to support Come Shining, a performance and installation where the stories of older adults living with dementia and memory loss are embodied and shared. Come Shining hopes to provide an alternative to the cultural narrative that defines aging as a steady process of loss and degeneration, instead revealing the imaginative potential at every stage of life.
AMBERLY ALENE ELLIS
MILFORD MILL
to support Reclaiming Douglass, a documentary film that follows the journey of ten African American students from Frederick Douglass Senior High School, in West Baltimore, as they travel to Cuba to experience an alternative history program exploring the African Diaspora.
MARGARET RORISON
BALTIMORE
to support Restoration of a Memory, a silent short film, to be shot in 16mm, which documents the architectural landscape and formal beauty of the city of Baltimore.
ADAM ROSENBLATT
BALTIMORE
to support a new interpretation of Laplace Tiger, a composition for drumset and electronics by Alexander Schubert, which will include expanded instrumentation and audience participation.
PAUL RUCKER
BALTIMORE
to support LIVEMORE, a community-based, interdisciplinary installation that examines and re-envisions the history of the transatlantic slave trade between Liverpool, England and Baltimore.
JULIA KIM SMITH
BALTIMORE
to support The Real Wi-Fi of Baltimore, a digital video featuring a punny and nuanced view of the city of Baltimore through the names of its wi-fi networks.
2015 LITERARY ARTS
AND VISUAL ARTS
JAMES ARTHUR
TOWSON
to support work on Entanglement, a poetry collection that is diverse in style and subject matter, but broadly speaking, a manuscript about love.
DALE BERAN
BALTIMORE
to support a book on the Baltimore City school system and the lives of its students, which will incorporate historical research, interviews, and illustrations by the author.
ERICKA BLOUNT-DANOIS
BALTIMORE
to support the writing of a science fiction film screenplay, with cinematographer Arthur Jafa, that seeks to explore the theme of historical perspective and what martyrdom does to the personal lives of historical figures.
MARIAN GLEBES
BALTIMORE
to support a year-long, collaborative, interdisciplinary project that explores relationships with the materials of home and connects them to the larger notion of place.
JEN GROW
BALTIMORE COUNTY
to support My Father’s House, a series of photographs with a personal essay that explore ideas around loss of home, identity, and history.
NATE LARSON
BALTIMORE
to support a project of photographic portraits of Sandtown-Winchester community members and make visible their lives, their struggles, and their triumphs to create a fuller portrait of life in Baltimore.
COURTNEY SENDER
BALTIMORE
to support work on the novel The God of Longing, that follows three characters from each of the Abrahamic religions over the course of 40 years into their futures and 4,000 years into their families’ pasts.
TONY SHORE
BALTIMORE
to support the creation of new paintings in response to the Baltimore Uprising.
STEPHEN TOWNS
BALTIMORE
to support Take Me Away to the Stars, a quilting project that will explore ways in which one processes violence through escapism, religion, and myth using the historic and mythological tales of Nat Turner’s rebellion.
2015 MEDIA ARTS AND PERFORMING ARTS
ELLEN CHERRY BALTIMORE
to support the music composition for and filming of The Holey Land: An Allegory, a ten-minute “crankie” (hand-cranked puppet piece) created by artist Valeska Populoh that examines current environmental issues and the consequences of industry on our communities.
BRIAN FRANCOISE
BALTIMORE
to support the development of Covenants, a devised play infused with spoken word performance, physical theatre and digital storytelling that will celebrate “neighborhood voices” while exploring the history and legacy of restrictive covenants with residents who live in Greater Northwood.
HELEN GLAZER
OWINGS MILLS
to support Above, Below, and Within the Ice, a series of hand-colored photographic prints and sculptures of ice formations, source material for which will be gathered during the artist’s upcoming research trip to Antarctica.
NAOKO MAESHIBA
BALTIMORE
to support Subject/Object, a solo performance project that investigates the nature of “self” through deconstruction and redefinition with the use of video, sound, poetry and clowning as the exploration tools.
A. MOON BALTIMORE
to support I Am Learning to Abandon the World, a 16mm, silent film composed of the non-explicit shots culled from a trove of vintage “adult” films that will create a narrative that studies female subjectivity, mood without action and that which cannot be represented.
MARA NEIMANIS
BALTIMORE
to support Cross Over Stories, a series of three onsite aerial performance pieces designed to transform Baltimore urban spaces into innovative performance spots.
JUANITA ROCKWELL
BALTIMORE
to support the creation of the script, lyrics and music for A Little Patch of Ground, a darkly comic play with songs set in the bloody aftermath of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
OLU BUTTERFLY WOODS
BALTIMORE
to support the creation of the first three installments of Lookout, a grassroots documentary film series on the rhythm and hustle of Baltimore’s performing arts and live music scene.
2014 LITERARY ARTS AND VISUAL ARTS
AMY BERNSTEIN
BALTIMORE
to support Work Force, a one-act comedy featuring a cast mainly of adults with disabilities and which addresses the shared struggles to find place and purpose in life. A pre-show panel discussion will highlight the challenges and preconceptions facing artists labeled as disabled..
AMANDA BURNHAM
BALTIMORE
to support RFP, a “living drawing” installation and subsequent art book that will be designed in dialogue with Baltimoreans responses when asked to describe their visions, ambitions, and ideas for the city’s future.
ZOË CHARLTON
BALTIMORE
to support Cultural Currency: Tourists, Trophies, and Tokens, a series of large-scale figure drawings that will contribute to discussions of blackness/ otherness by a strategic shift in subject matter in which White women and men are depicted adorned with objects representing their exoticized relationships with ethnicity.
LOLA PIERSON
BALTIMORE
to support A Day by Yourself, a collection of twelve short stories that embrace action, tone, and other theatrical elements as expressed through language. The structure of the work will be cumulative rather than a linear narrative, and will present a series of literary snapshots, constructing a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
REBEKAH REMINGTON
CATONSVILLE
to support the completion of Sliced Bread and Wine, a book-length manuscript of meditative lyric poems that explores the fraught intersections of mothering, consumer culture, and the redemptive act of making.
GREGG WILHELM
BALTIMORE
to support the completion of Backbeat the Waves, a novel set in 1977 in Patapsco City, in which an ailing one-armed cousin from Appalachia upends the world of a teenaged protagonist. Also supported is a related city-wide literary geo-caching campaign and public lecture.
MELISSA WYSE
BALTIMORE
to support Moon Over Sand Island, a collection of short fiction set during World War II and linked by its characters’ complex relationships with wartime Hawaii. The stories delve into the experiences of lei sellers, soldiers, civil servants, and pineapple plantation workers who wrestle with ties of nationality, gender, and ethnic identity.
LU ZHANG
BALTIMORE
to support I Spent a Year with The George Peabody Library, a site-specific book that documents the artist’s exploration of the Library’s archives and which will reside in its permanent collection and be part of an accompanying exhibition.
2014 MEDIA ARTS AND PERFORMING ARTS
CARLA BROWN
CATONSVILLE
to support the documentary film about her grandparents, Everyone But Two: The Life, Love and Travel of Benjamin and Frances Graham, which traces the cross-country travel experiences of an African American couple in the 1960s and 1970s.
LYNN CAZABOBN
BALTIMORE
to realize Portrait Garden, a multi-part project based on work with long-term inmates at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women and presented via interactive posters located throughout Baltimore-area commercial display spaces.
GRAHAM COREIL-ALLEN
BALTIMORE
to create SiteLines, a series of sharable videos that explores the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday urban environment, and which will present a compelling portrait of Baltimore and its civic space potential. .
ERIC DYER
BALTIMORE
to support the creation of The Zoetrope Tunnel, a 9-foot tall by 20-foot long working walk-through sculpture whose interior animation describes the evolution of the bicycle, both in mechanical development as well as in social impact.
RICH ESPEY
TOWSON
for research and development of a new play, Tea with Nelson and Betsie, which explores the moment in 1995 when Nelson Mandela had tea with the widow of Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd (the “architect of apartheid”) in the all-white enclave of Orania, South Africa.
CARL GRUBBS
BALTIMORE
to write and arrange new compositions for The Inner Harbor Suite: Revisited, an audio tribute to Baltimore featuring saxophones, strings, group improvisation and ensemble performance.
KEL MILLIONIE
BALTIMORE
to create an aerial theater production, Fight or Flight, that examines this human condition through the use of aerial movement, invented structures, intense choreography, soundscapes, sampled music and video projections.
PAT MONTLEY
LUTHERVILLE
to expand a one-act script into a full length play – Pope Joan II – which tells the story of an American nun who becomes pope and tries to transform the church into a liberal democracy.
KWAME OPARE
BALTIMORE
to choreograph, develop and produce the theatrical dance performance Triumph of Disruption, working in conjunction with and featuring students from a local arts secondary school.
MATTHEW PORTERFIELD
BALTIMORE
to support the development of Sollers Point, a feature film about one Baltimore man’s return to society after a period of incarceration.
GLENN RICCI
BALTIMORE
to produce The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe, an immersive, interactive theater experience that focuses on the women in Poe's life and their influence on his fiction.
OLIVIA ROBINSON
BALTIMORE
to support the creation of Near and Far Enemies, a media installation of large-scale electronic textile circuits that describes the relationship between racism, wealth and science.
DAVID SMOOKE
BALTIMORE
to compose A Baby Bigger Grows Than Up Was, an ensemble piece for a baritone singer, bass clarinet, trumpet and trombone that uses an alphabetical tale by the Baltimore writer Michael Kimball as inspiration.