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Creative Capital Foundation Awards 2006 Grants

February 8, 2006

Initial grants totaling more than $400,000 are given to artist projects in the performing arts, emerging fields, and, for the first time, innovative literature

NEW YORK, NY (February 8, 2006) – Creative Capital Foundation, the national arts organization that supports individual artists, announces the recipients of its 2006 grants. Sixty-one artists representing 43 projects in the performing arts, emerging fields, and innovative literature received initial awards of $10,000. As the projects develop, the foundation offers additional funds; projects may receive as much as $50,000 each through the tenure of the multi-year grant and at least $1 million has been committed to the 43 projects.This year the foundation added innovative literature as a new category. The funded writers, along with their fellow grantees, can now participate in Creative Capital’s distinctive Artist Services Program. For grantees, this program offers skills-building assistance in areas such as fundraising, networking, marketing, and strategic planning with the goal of advancing both their projects and their careers. So far Creative Capital has devoted more than $3 million to the Artists Services Program, serving nearly 300 artists in its seven-year history.

Selected from among 2,205 applications, the funded projects come from as many as 14 states across the country. About the new class of grantees, Creative Capital President Ruby Lerner said, “We know that with these projects, these talented individuals are given the opportunity to further pursue their goals, which is not only energizing for them, but for their audiences, their communities, other artists, and not incidentally, those of us who get the chance to help facilitate their ideas. We very much look forward to supporting these grantees, helping them grow their projects; encouraging their coming together as a creative community; and helping them to engage a wider public.”

Foundation Update

With these awards, Creative Capital’s roster of artist projects grows to 242. Last year the foundation issued grants in the visual arts and film/video. Many of those grantees attended Creative Capital’s Artist Retreat in August 2005, the kickoff event of the Artist Services Program. Through the grant program and its Professional Development Program (a series of public workshops for artists held across the country), Creative Capital has served more than 1,000 artists. In addition, the foundation’s newly launched State Research Program will examine the feasibility of adapting its comprehensive model of support through partnerships with state-wide arts programs in Arizona and Maine.

About Creative Capital

Founded in January 1999, Creative Capital Foundation is a national nonprofit organization that supports individual artists pursuing innovative approaches to form and content in the visual and performing arts, film/video, emerging fields, and innovative literature. To date, the organization has awarded more than $5 million to 242 artist projects and has provided those artists with a range of advisory and skills-building services.

Since its inception, Creative Capital has developed a unique system of support for artists that is integrated, multi-faceted, and sequential. Drawing from concepts from both the venture capital and nonprofit sectors, the foundation commits to a long-term partnership with its funded artists through the life of the project. In addition, grantees agree to share a small percentage of any net profits generated by their projects with Creative Capital, which applies these funds toward new grants. A complete list of grantees, profiles of funded projects, and up-to-date grant cycle information can be found online at the foundation’s website.

CREATIVE CAPITAL FOUNDATION 2006 GRANTEE PROJECTS

Emerging Fields



Cory Arcangel (Brooklyn, NY)
Digital Arts

D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. – An open-source website detailing methods of media intervention and hacking, embodying the ethic of openness and generosity among the closed field of hackers, home hobby programmers and new media artists


Luca Buvoli (New York, NY)
Digital Arts

_The Non-Adventures of Not-a-Superhero_ – A series of one-minute animations, applying the strategies, characters, and techniques of television sitcom and action programming to existential dilemmas and situations



REDUX (Los Angeles, CA)
Digital Arts

CALLSPACE – A sound-art installation employing six solar-powered cell phones, reclaiming urban spaces not yet incorporated into the global community and examining the relationship of cellular technology to the value of public and private space



Laura Carton (New York, NY)
Multidisciplinary 

Investor Relations – An art-world intervention and a working investment club, exploring the clandestine pornography holdings of major United States corporations and the context within which political policies are formed



Brody Condon (Douglaston, CA)
Digital Arts

The Youth of the Apocalypse – An animated painting and video installation, reinterpreting Flemish painter Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment, combining the visual style of the 15th century religious painting with the computer-animated landscape of video games



Hassan Elahi (New Brunswick, NJ)
Digital Arts

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project – A self-surveillance project, involving a series of installations, performances, and websites using Elahi’s self-surveillance to critique contemporary investigative techniques



MTAA + RSG (Brooklyn, NY)
Digital Arts

Want – A six-channel video installation using Internet peer-to-peer networks and actors portraying the obsessive desires of six types of common Internet users



Auriea Harvey (Gent, Belgium)
Digital Arts

144 – A 12-part online animation, inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, told without dialogue or text, using image, animation, music, sound, and viewer interaction



Kenjji & Kito Jumanne-Marshall (Detroit, MI)
Multidisciplinary

KuroManga Magazine – An independent comic book series, combining American hip-hop superhero characters with Japanese Manga-style anime environments



Amelia Kirby, Donna Porterfield, & Nick Szuberla (Whitesburg, KY)
Multidisciplinary

Thousand Kites – A community-based performance, web, and radio project, centering on the United States prison system, and drawing on projects by the groundbreaking collective Appalshop and by Szuberla’s own group Holler to the Hood



Brian Knep (Boston, MA)
Digital Arts

Healing Pool – An interactive floor projection, inspired by reflecting pools and historic spaces, offering a transformative experience that is at once multisensory, meditative, and formal



Golan Levin (Pittsburgh, PA)
Digital Arts

Observation as Interaction: Eye Contact Systems – A series of large-scale artworks from wall projections to robotic sculptures that play with the idea of surveillance by returning the viewer’s gaze using tracking software and a simulated return glance



Jane Marsching (Roslindale, MA)
Digital Arts

About Here and Later: Data Mining the North Pole – A series of digital images and sculptures, exploring both scientific and myth-based impressions of The North Pole, while detailing the collapse of the area due to environmental changes



Sheryl Oring (Brooklyn, NY)
Multidisciplinary

I Wish To Say – A performance work, engaging public political dialogue and women’s historical role as listeners, using carbon copies of typed postcards that contain texts dictated by viewers



Jakub Segen, Marek Walczak, & Martin Wattenberg (New York, NY)
Digital Arts

No Place – An interactive installation and website, using data, images, and texts from participants and creating virtual structures that act as a shared and ever-expanding vision of Utopia



Paul Vanouse (Buffalo, NY)
New Genres

Latent Figure Protocol – A multimedia installation, beginning with taped live science experiments, creating representational visual art works using DNA samples



Stephen Vitiello (Richmond, VA)
Audio

Sound Objects/Open Space – A series of sculptural sound installations and a stereo CD, collected from the artist’s neighborhood in Richmond, VA, investigating the way divergent soundscapes affect each other and change the listener’s experience



Allison Wiese (Houston, TX)
Multidisciplinary

_Didn’t He Ramble_ (Working Title After the New Orleans Funeral Song) – An architectural urban event, relocating debris and rubble from a demolished structure in Houston’s Midtown district, exploring issues of local geography, real estate development, and the changing urban landscape

Innovative Literature 



Jeffrey Allen (Far Rockaway, NY)
Prose

_Song of the Shank_ – A novel based on the life of fabled 19th century African American pianist and singer Blind Tom, his lack of vision becoming a metaphor for both the writer’s and reader’s inability to hear him play



Alan Gilbert (Brooklyn, NY)
Poetry

new poetry manuscript – A full-length poetry manuscript, inspired by images of the grotesque found everywhere, employing longer poetic forms within a more condensed idiom



Christian Hawkey (Brooklyn, NY)
Poetry

VENTRAKL – A book that folds poetry, prose, biography, and imagery into an experimental translation of 19th century German Expressionist George Trakl, exploring Trakl’s relationship to his own time and ours



Cole Swenson (Iowa City, IA)
Poetry

Ours: The Gardens of Andre Le Notre – A book blending poetic text with art criticism that provokes questions about the 17th century mindset on property and looks at the shift of baroque gardens in France from private to public property



Performing Arts 



Mason Bates & Anne Patterson (Oakland, CA)
Experimental Music

Mercury Soul: An Electro-Acoustic Evening – Chamber and electronic music integrated with a projected video installation, accompanied by a DJ playing ambient electronica on turntables and a double bass, and an ensemble playing five of Bates’s chamber works



Lisa Bielawa (New York, NY)
Experimental Music

Chance Encounter – A site-specific music work performed by a vocalist and as many as 20 musicians in public places, varying each audience member’s experience depending on the location, and bringing experimental music to common accessible locations



Michael Bryant, Grisha Coleman, Jesse Gilbert, John Oduroe, & Robert Peagler (Pittsburgh, PA)
Interdisciplinary

echo::system – A series of site-specific performance installations inspired by natural and human-made habitats, consisting of several “actionstations” which simulate a volcanic island, the ocean floor, and a desert



Rude Mechanicals (Austin, TX)
Theater

The Method Gun – A series of vignettes using the techniques of the Rude Mechanicals theatre company and following the life of Stella Burden, the architect of the fictitious Method Gun technique



Radiohole (Brooklyn, NY)
Theater

_Fluke_ (The Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep) or Dick Dick Dick – A new theater work by the ensemble Radiohole, paralleling late 19th century spiritualism with the technological advancements of our own era



Danny Hoch (Brooklyn, NY)
Music Theater

_A Word is Born_ – A large-scale music theater piece about the birth of hip-hop culture, chronicling the cultural, political, and economic forces at work in New York City’s outer boroughs during the 1970’s



Joan Jeanrenaud & Alessandro Moruzzi (San Francisco, CA)
Experimental Music

ARIA – An evening-length music installation, combining Jeanrenaud’s original music with Moruzzi’s set, lighting, and video design, inspired by the decline in the natural environment and the politics that surround the issue



Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Oakland, CA)
Theater

Scourge – A hip-hop theater work about the history of Haiti, blending Afro-Caribbean Jazz music, folkloric and contemporary movement, and spoken word



Gulgun Kayim (Minneapolis, MN)
Interdisciplinary

_Self-Portrait_ – An eight-character site-specific performance installation exploring memory and identity, using the artist’s own Turkish Cypriot history, along with interviews with members of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot Diaspora



Locust (Seattle, WA)
Interdisciplinary

Mockumentary – A collaborative performance work integrating dance, music, and video by the ensemble Locust, and exploring acts of self-mythology through fictional documentary videos



Ledoh (San Francisco, CA)
Theater
Signature Required: Life During Wartime – A series of short butoh-based dances accompanied by an electronic score and projected video images, investigating the encroachment of authority on personal freedom



Mickle Maher (Evanston, IL) Theater
Treasure – A two-character play, mixing text and staging from the 2004 presidential debates with absurdist and minimalist theater techniques to mimic a children’s bedtime story



Sarah Michelson (New York, NY)
Dance

Ender – An abstract evening-length dance that incorporates the work of an architect and a sculptor, allusive in meaning and referencing ownership, luxury, and stardom



Bebe Miller (New York, NY)
Dance

Necessary Beauty – A series of short, self-contained dance works with visual projections, using athletic theatrical choreography to address elemental metaphors of beauty and truth


David Rousseve (Pasadena, CA)
Interdisciplinary

Searching for Angels in a Time of War: Bittersweet 2 – A dance-theater work with storytelling, digital technology, and Portuguese Fado music, using African American history to draw connections between spirituality and technology



Sophiline Shapiro (Long Beach, CA)
Dance

The Magic Flute – A re-imagining of Mozart’s opera as a Cambodian classical dance, interpreting Enlightenment-era work in the style of the artist’s native country



Susan Simpson (Los Angeles, CA)
Puppetry

Lead Feet and Nothing Upstairs: A History of the Lifelike – A puppet work about the history of simulated bodies, in which characters interact through the use of miniature scrims, moving projectors and mirrors



Tamango Van Cayseele (New York, NY)
Dance

Bay Mo Dilo – A dance and music performance, exploring the French Caribbean and the communicative power and political significance of its culture, and the effect of colonizing native cultures on contemporary life



Ricki Vincent (Fort Worth, TX)
Puppetry
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Discipline – An hour-long puppet show combining Japanese Bunraku and American Burlesque, performing some of the actual routines by Burlesque stars from the early 20th century



Kristina Wong (Los Angeles, CA)
Theater

Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – A comedic multimedia solo performance about mental illness among Asian American women, combining monologues, movement, and a host of pop culture references



Nami Yamamoto (New York, NY)
Dance

the last word was PAPIREPOSE – An experimental dance about the boundaries between reality and dreams, and conscious and unconscious states, using episodic short pieces of solos, duets, and trios on a bare stage



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