FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 21, 2010

CONTACT Laura Gigounas, 415-479-8778 - laura.gigounas@gmail.com

Creative Work Fund Awards $650,000 to Northern California Artists

17 Exceptional Projects Awarded Grants for Performing and Visual Arts

The Creative Work Fund (CWF) is pleased to announce that it is awarding 17 grants totalling $650,000 to Northern California artists for the creation of new works in the fields of performing and visual arts. Featured artists are collaborating with local nonprofit community organizations on dynamic and creative projects that include dance, music, theater, sculpture, murals, interactive community art-making, and more.

“Watching new trends emerge each year in the grant proposals is fascinating,” said CWF director Frances Phillips, who has been heading the fund since its establishment in 1994. “For instance, this year a number of projects focused on food, healthy eating, and sustainability.” 

For the 2010 grant cycle, CWF reviewed projects in the visual and performing arts, with successful applicants working in highly diverse media such as digital murals, dance theater, a graphic novel, mobile sculpture, photography, orchestral composition, interdisciplinary performance installations, traditional botanical painting, and a theatrical fusion oratorio. 

Since 1994, CWF has contributed $8 million to advance art-making by Northern California artists in a variety of disciplines. Awards range from $10,000 to $40,000. Grants are highly competitive and recommended to CWF by a committee of accomplished panelists.

The 2010 CWF grant recipients hail from the Bay Area’s urban centers, extending out to Hollister and Benicia. Recipient artists are renowned in their disciplines, and have undergone a rigorous and intensely competitive review process.

One Lombard Street, Suite 305, San Francisco, CA  94111 (415) 402-2793, Fax (415) 986-4779    www.creativeworkfund.org

Performing Arts Grants 2010

Abi Basch (San Francisco) collaborating with Climate Theater (San Francisco)

Playwright Abi Basch is collaborating with Climate Theater to create a new, multimedia theater performance inspired by King Lear, set in a kingdom of melting ice and viewed by spectators through peepholes. Basch will work with a team of collaborating Bay Area and international artists, including electro-acoustic composer Paula Matthusen and designer Kimberlee Koym-Murteria, to develop the play through workshops in 2010 and 2011.  LEER will be presented at a.Muse Gallery in San Francisco in June 2011.

Climate Theater is a state-of-the-art boutique theater laboratory in the heart of San Francisco, hailed as a vibrant venue for presenting promising crossover and experimental work. Founded in 1985, Climate is currently headed by Artistic Director Jessica Heidt. Lead artist Abi Basch is a playwright of experimental, historically based, physical theater plays and performance installations. Her works have been produced professionally in the Bay Area and by companies and festivals across the country and internationally. Recently she was appointed as resident artist at Climate Theater.

Jess Curtis (San Francisco) collaborating with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco)

Choreographer Jess Curtis is collaborating with performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) to create a performance-installation, “Dances for Non/Fictional Bodies.” Also collaborating is a troupe of interdisciplinary performers with and without disabilities and Matthias Herrmann, composer and musician. The performers will collaboratively compose and play the musical score live under Herrmann’s direction. Physically and conceptually, the work will deconstruct movement vocabulary and ideals of beauty based in socially imagined perfections of form that rarely exist in actual bodies. The creative collaborators will work closely with YBCA’s Community Engagement Department and California State University East Bay’s Dance for All Bodies and Abilities Program, as well as Gómez-Peña’s La Pocha Nostra, AXIS Dance Company, and the Mayor’s Office on Disability. The collaborators will produce live, improvisational performance installations on an extended timeframe in the Center’s Room for Big Ideas, lobby, or other non-conventional spaces, and they will extend the performance outside the Center in large-scale public installations.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents contemporary art from the Bay Area and around the world that reflects the profound issues and ideas of our time, expands the boundaries of artistic practice, and celebrates the diversity of human experience and expression. After 15 years of making dance in the Bay Area as an independent choreographer, Jess Curtis founded Gravity in 2000 as a research and development vehicle for live performance. Since then, Curtis and Gravity have performed at home and in more than 50 cities in 14 countries. 

Sean Dorsey (San Francisco) collaborating with Queer Cultural Center (San Francisco)

Choreographer and dancer Sean Dorsey is collaborating with Queer Cultural Center to create Notes from the Gender Underground, an interdisciplinary dance theater concert created by Dorsey with an ensemble of four LGBT dancers, three composer/musicians, and a sound designer. Dorsey will develop the concert’s content by engaging the transgender community in a year-long oral history and research process that will uncover transgender stories from the past and present. He conceives of the production as a suite of three dances employing movement, theater, and music that will explore the role of the “underground” in the formation and evolution of transgender identity and community. The premiere will be staged at ODC Theater in February 2012.

Founded in 1993, the Queer Cultural Center (QCC) is a multiracial, multidisciplinary, arts presenter that promotes the development of queer art and culture. At its festivals, produced annually in June, it has presented more than 1,300 artists and developed a large and culturally diverse audience. QCC also provides consulting and incubation services to emerging LGBT arts groups and commissions queer artists to create new works. The nation’s first critically acclaimed transgender choreographer, Sean Dorsey has introduced transgender content and sensibility into modern dance. Over the last eight years, he has developed a form that fuses text-based narratives, modern dance, theater, and music.

Paul Dresher (Berkeley) collaborating with Berkeley Symphony Orchestra (Berkeley)

Composer and musician Paul Dresher is collaborating with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, led by music director Joana Carneiro, on a new 18- to 24-minute work featuring two of Dresher’s large-scale invented instruments. The new work will be created over the course of two years with key orchestra members directly collaborating with Dresher during the composition process. Dresher will meet with the orchestra members one-on-one, in small ensemble workshops, and in both sectional and full rehearsals. They plan to premiere the work at Zellerbach Hall during the symphony’s 2012-2013 season.

Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1969 as the Berkeley Promenade Orchestra, is known for its innovative performances. It presents a four-concert subscription series and a Berkeley Akademie series for small orchestra works and an interactive three-concert Under Construction series featuring works by Bay Area composers in residence. Lead artist Paul Dresher has invested decades of work in building many forms of instruments—both invented and traditional. In the last decade, as part of two unique music theater works, Sound Stage and Schick Machine, two large-scale instruments (the Quadrachord and the Hurdy Grande) emerged. Dresher was certain that they possessed far more purely musical possibilities than he was able to explore in the theatrical context for which they were created. This collaboration with Berkeley Symphony will explore their potential.

Philip Kan Gotanda (Berkeley) collaborating with University of California, Berkeley/Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (Berkeley)

Collaborating with faculty at the University of California, Philip Kan Gotanda will develop a new play, I Dream of Chang and Eng, based on the lives of the original Siamese twins. Gotanda is creating the work through a residency in the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Department at the university. His subjects, Chang and Eng Bunker, were ethnic Chinese, born in Siam in 1811 and taken to America to be exhibited as freaks. They successfully bought out their contracts and toured themselves throughout the Western world, ultimately meeting presidents, prime ministers, kings, and queens before settling down on their own plantation in North Carolina with their wives (sisters in their own right) and starting a family that included 21 children between them. With an intended cast of 15-20 actors, Gotanda’s new work will animate the lives of these pioneer figures while engaging a variety of contemporary issues about race, physical disability, and interracial marriage, among others.

The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies is bringing together researchers, artists, educators, and students from across the campus to support Gotanda’s critical inquiry, while providing its audience a front row seat in the development of a new work. Lead artist Philip Kan Gotanda is an influential theater artist, independent filmmaker, and the recipient of multiple honors and awards.

I Made Moja (Oakland) collaborating with Gamelan Sekar Jaya (Oakland)

Balinese artist I Made Moja is collaborating with Gamelan Sekar Jaya to create The Creatures of Balinese Mythology exploring, in particular, monkeys and frogs, which appear repeatedly in many guises and contexts throughout the mythology, folklore, and iconography of Bali. Existing genres of Balinese music evoke the sounds of monkeys, frogs, other animals, and mythical figures. The finished work will be a series of live performances, including displayed and projected paintings created by Moja especially for this project; dance featuring Moja performing one or more lead roles; live gamelan music, newly composed by master Balinese artists in residence and performed by Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s ensemble of 25 musicians; shadow lighting designed and implemented by Moja; and narration. Master artists Ida Bagus Made Widnyana and dancer/choreographer I Ketut Wirtawanworking will work closely with Moja. The Creatures of Balinese Mythology will be presented at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s Samsung Hall as part of a major 2011 exhibit Bali: Performance, Art, and Ritual.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya has a long track record of major international artistic projects, cross-cultural collaborations, artists’ residencies, international tours, and wide-ranging educational programs in the field of traditional and new Balinese performing arts. Lead artist I Made Moja, who has long worked with ShadowLight Productions, is a painter, skilled shadow caster, puppeteer, and accomplished dancer.

Amara Tabor-Smith (Oakland) collaborating with CounterPULSE (San Francisco)

Choreographer Amara Tabor-Smith and her company, Deep Waters Dance Theater, will collaborate with director Ellen Sebastian Chang, visual artist Lauren Elder, and CounterPULSE to create Our Daily Bread, an interactive dance/video/text/meal collage that celebrates food, illuminates difference in cultural identity, and advocates for well-being in our food traditions and eating practices. The collaborators will delve into folklore and stories surrounding food traditions and how those traditions are affected by industrialized agriculture, fast-food culture, and our global food crisis. The partners’ collaborative process will include monthly food parties or “Eat Ins,” public workshops documented on video, work with local urban farmers, and a blog—all culminating with a performance and installation at CounterPULSE.

Based in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, CounterPULSE presents and supports the development of a breadth of performance, including theater, contemporary and traditional dance, music, live art, literature, and spoken word. Lead artist Amara Tabor-Smith was associate artistic director and company member with The Urban Bush Women for more than a decade. She previously collaborated with Ellen Sebastian Chang and Lauren Elder on The Invisible Lines Project (2001-02), which dealt with gentrification in a north Oakland neighborhood. She formed her own company, Deep Waters Dance Theater, in 2006—dedicated to creating work that is relevant to its community, inspiring dialogue and social change.

Daniel Valdez (Hollister) collaborating with El Teatro Campesino (San Juan Bautista)

Composer Daniel Valdez and El Teatro Campesino will create, workshop, and premiere Canción De San Juan: Oratorio of a Small Town, a theatrical fusion oratorio. Based on ethnographic research and developed over the course of two years, this musical opus will mix instrumental and choral music, spoken narratives, and mixed-media projections to tell the 300-year story of San Juan Bautista, California, a town of 1,500 that has transformed from a Native American village to a Spanish colonial mission establishment, to a Mexican military state capitol, to an American frontier outpost, to an industrial age ghost town, and now, today, to a small, suburban tourist hamlet on the fringes of Silicon Valley. The piece is intended to premiere in 2012 and to be presented annually during “El Día de San Juan,” the saint’s day festival celebrating the founding of the Old Mission in the heart of town.

El Teatro Campesino—the Farmworkers Theater—was founded 44 years ago and has been based in San Juan Bautista since 1971. Dedicated to using arts to generate social change, it has pioneered many theatrical forms and practices based on the cultural traditions of ancient America and colonial Mexico. Daniel Valdez began his career, using music to spread the message of the United Farm Workers through songs and narratives. He’s a professional theater director, actor, playwright, composer, musician, and film producer with more than 35 years of experience in music, theater, and film.

Visual Arts Grants 2010

Victor Cartagena (San Francisco) collaborating with MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (San Jose)

Artist Victor Cartagena is collaborating with MACLA to create “A Body Parted,” an interdisciplinary work—incorporating a performance, installation, and five digital murals that take a multi-layered look at immigration and border crossing. Victor Cartagena is part of a San Francisco-based collective, Secos & Mojados, whose work focuses on the immigrant experience. He will collaborate with the collective’s members to develop a multi-disciplinary performance that will inform his visual and sound installation. With MACLA’s assistance, he also will collect stories from residents of the William/Reed Corridor, the predominately immigrant and low-income downtown San Jose neighborhood in which MACLA is located, to contribute to the piece.

Founded in 1989, MACLA is an inclusive contemporary arts space grounded in the Chicano/Latino experience that incubates new visual, literary, and performance art in order to engage people in civic dialogue and community transformation. Salvadoran-born visual artist Victor Cartagena has been making art in the Bay Area since the late 1980s, shifting in focus from his memories of the violence in El Salvador and his experience of relocating to the United States to a range of issues, including consumer culture, homelessness, material waste, the death penalty, immigration, exile, identity perception and uses of power.

Topher Delaney (San Francisco) collaborating with San Francisco Botanical Garden Society (San Francisco)

Landscape architect Topher Delaney is collaborating with the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society to create “Arcimboldo’s Edible Garden,” intending to engage visitors in generating dialogue on global food sources and the importance of sustainable gardening. The work will be installed in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in the Botanical Garden’s Edible Garden and will be on view for approximately 10 months. The Edible Garden was originally established in 2009 and displays the variety of vegetables that thrive in the region’s cool climate, demonstrating the ease and simplicity of growing some or all of one’s own produce. “Arcimboldo’s Edible Garden,” will enhance The Edible Garden by taking inspiration from the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), an Italian painter best known for imaginative portrait heads formed from realistic depictions of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and other objects. Delaney’s installation will feature assemblages of planting boxes from a variety of recycled and re-used materials that contain edible plants along with tables/work benches for public use and a colorful terrazzo table incorporating maps of the old and new world and colorful forms of fruits and vegetables.

San Francisco’s Botanical Garden opened to the public in 1940 and the Botanical Garden Society was established in 1955. The Society’s mission is to build communities of support for the Botanical Garden and to cultivate the bond between people and plants. Lead artist Topher Delaney has created and completed numerous institutional, commercial, and private installations focusing on the medium of the garden as the structure for the integration of sculptures, functional furniture, paintings, and water features.

Peter Foucault (Oakland) collaborating with SOMArts Cultural Center (San Francisco)

Artists Peter Foucault and Christopher Treggiari are collaborating with SOMArts (South of Market Arts, Resources, Technology, and Services) Cultural Center to develop and present the Mobile Arts Platform (MAP), a 1963 Ford Falcon van and trailer repurposed and transformed into a roaming sculpture and pop-up display space as well as a community art-making vehicle. Exhibits on the MAP, created and curated by the lead artists, will be presented at three city street festivals and two SOMArts events. In addition to featuring work by Peter Foucault, Christopher Treggiari, and other Bay Area artists, the MAP will instigate on-site creation of art with passersby. Through this vehicle,  SOMArts aims to cultivate new audiences for its Main Gallery programming, investigate art and exhibition-making in an era of transience, and deepen the engagement of festival participants by turning them from passive observers to creators.

Lead artist Peter Foucault’s “Drawing Projects” series incorporates site-specific installations that invite the audience to help create large abstract compositions by using their voices or bodies to activate drawing robots. Co-lead artist Chris Treggiari’s work involves the production of large-scale mobile sculptures that are either carried on the body or towed by a vehicle. SOMArts, one of San Francisco’s neighborhood cultural centers, has been expanding its gallery programming under its new curator Justin Hoover. It is working to provide more and novel ways for artists and audiences to connect with one another.

Lisa M. Hamilton (Mill Valley) collaborating with Roots of Change Fund (San Francisco)

Photographer Lisa M. Hamilton will collaborate with Roots of Change Fund on “Real Rural,” a public campaign to tell stories of rural California to the Bay Area’s urban audience through a Website and photo-based placards placed on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains during the 2011 harvest season. “Real Rural” will explore California’s rural communities, who lives and works in them, the obstacles they face, what makes their communities thrive, and how they relate to the state’s urban majority. Combining photography, writing, and oral histories, the project will illustrate the depth and diversity of these rural communities in order to foster a more productive dialogue and increased cooperation in designing a better food system. The partners also are working with academic leaders at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, which supports research, teaching, and reporting about western land and life. The Center’s “Visualizing the Rural West” initiative—well aligned with this project—aims to stimulate a wide-ranging public conversation about the state of the rural West and its prospects for the future.

The Roots of Change Fund is a collaborative of diverse leaders and institutions unified in the pursuit of a sustainable food system in California. Its Changemakers Network includes a dozen foundations, 400 nonprofit business and government leaders, and 26,000 California residents.For more than a decade lead artist Lisa M. Hamilton’s work has focused on issues pertaining to sustainable agriculture and rural communities. She has presented her photography and writing in books, lectures, magazines, galleries, public venues, and online.

Matthew Passmore (San Francisco) collaborating with Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge (Benicia)

Matthew Passmore and Nathan Lynch of REBAR are collaborating with Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge to design and test ceramic “nest modules” for the Rhinoceros Auklet, a threatened seabird that lives on Año Nuevo Island, which is part of a California State Reserve. The project will result in 70 nest modules for the bird habitat on the island and an interpretive display in the Reserve’s visitor’s center. Located 45 miles south of San Francisco in San Mateo County, Año Nuevo is a 25-acre island that serves as a critical breeding habitat for seven seabird and four marine mammal species. The current ecological dynamics of Año Nuevo have substantially degraded the habitat of the native Rhinoceros Auklet, a burrowing seabird. Through this project, a habitat restoration team led by Oikonos, and composed of ecologists, habitat restoration experts, the artists and designers, and government agencies, seeks to create a sustainable Auklet breeding habitat. They are devising cast ceramic nest modules based on the environmental conditions on the island and the particular behavior and needs of the Auklets.

Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge works locally and internationally to increase ecosystem knowledge. It currently is managing habitat restoration projects in California, Antarctica, New Zealand, Chile, and Hawaii. Founded in 2004, REBAR is an interdisciplinary art and design studio based in San Francisco. Its work encompasses visual and conceptual public art, landscape design, urban intervention, and temporary performance installations.

Ricardo Richey (San Francisco) collaborating with Intersection for the Arts (San Francisco)

Mural artist Ricardo Richey is collaborating with Intersection for the Arts to create “First Element,” a multi-tiered project exploring the rich history of street art in San Francisco’s Mission District. The partners will bring together mural, street, political, and graffiti artists to explore the neighborhood’s legacy of Mexican mural painting, surrealism, pop, and conceptualism combined with underground comics, spray can arts, stencils, and graffiti. The project’s presentation will include multiple public art pieces, community collaborations, a six-week gallery exhibition, and an array of interdisciplinary events and workshops. Richey also will work with members of the Hip Hop performance ensemble Felonious on visual and scenic design for an accompanying performance piece.

Established in 1965, and based in San Francisco’s Mission District since the 1980’s,  Intersection for the Arts has a long history of presenting new and experimental work in the fields of literature, theater, music, dance, and the visual arts. Lead artist Ricardo Richey, also known as Apex, is a renowned street art innovator who has explored abstract letter-forms for nearly a decade. He has curated the ongoing graffiti mural projects on Bluxome Alley and completed a number of street art public pieces, including a recent half-block-long mural on Market/Turk/Mason Streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.

Favianna Rodriguez (Oakland) collaborating with ShadowLight Productions (San Francisco)

Favianna Rodriguez is collaborating with ShadowLight Productions and its artistic director, shadow puppet master Larry Reed, and playwright Octavio Solis to transform a successful multidisciplinary shadow theatre production  into a graphic novel, Ghost of the River. The book seeks to humanize immigration issues through presenting five ghost stories, told from varied points of view. Rodriguez will use Solis’s theatrical script as the book’s foundation along with graphics and photographs from the original 2009 stage production. She also will employ new graphic strategies for visual engagement.

Founded in 1972, ShadowLight Productions is one of the very few professional shadow theater companies in the world. It honors the traditional form of shadow theatre while innovating through the use of contemporary methods and interdisciplinary approaches. Lead artist Favianna Rodriguez is an Oakland-based printmaker, new media artist, and activist who collaborates with organizations around the country to use art for social change. She is well known for her vibrant posters and she has lectured widely on the use of art and technology in civic engagement.

Allison Smith (Oakland) collaborating with Southern Exposure (San Francisco)

Allison Smith is recruiting 50 artists to collaborate with her and with Southern Exposure to create “The Cries of San Francisco,” a temporary public art project, series of events, exhibition, and publication that takes as its inspiration early San Francisco street merchants who would hawk their wares with melodic songs and calls. Participating artists will create peddler identities and cries, as well as items to hawk. The key public presentation will take place over the course of one day along Market Street between the Embarcadero and the Civic Center. Participants will reenact life on the street, demonstrating notions of alternative micro-economics—literally carrying your self-made business on your back—along with soapbox speech-making, performance, and sculptural drag. Southern Exposure will serve as the home base where artists will gather, work, and present additional performances and an exhibition.

Southern Exposure is a 36 year-old nonprofit, visual arts organization dedicated to presenting diverse, innovative, contemporary art, arts education, and related programs and events in an accessible environment. It offers artists the opportunity to experiment, exposes them to new audiences, and engages them in meaningful conversation with other artists and the public. Allison Smith’s diverse artistic practice investigates the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment and the role of craft in the construction of national identity.

Claudia Stevens (Aptos) collaborating with University of California at Santa Cruz Arboretum (Santa Cruz)

Lead artist Claudia Stevens will collaborate with the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) Arboretum to create “The Mutsun Project,” using traditional botanical painting to illustrate biotic and cultural knowledge that has been lost through the centuries in California.  The project will highlight how the Mutsun, the native people of the Santa Cruz region, utilized these plants for food, fiber, tools and medicine.

In the art of traditional botanical painting, each flower is painted from a real-life specimen, bringing close attention to the complexity of the plant’s structure.  Stevens’s finished paintings will be presented as a traveling exhibition to four sites along California’s central coast and incorporated into interpretive signs at the University of California Arboretum’s Mutsun Re-learning Gardens.

The project’s collaborative team includes Sara Reid, a Native American ethnobotanist, Chuck Striplen of the local Mutsun Tribal Council, and Brett Hall, the Arboretum Manager and botanist at the UCSC Arboretum. Lead artist Claudia Stevens is a fine artist, specializing in botanical painting, who also does scientific illustration for publication.

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