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2008 Grant Recipients
The Black Rock Arts Foundation is proud to announce our 2008 Grant Recipients. The grantees are:
| Artica Nita Turnage and Hap Phillips St. Louis, MO $4000 Artica is an outdoor multi-media art festival, parade and workshops series developed to provide the people of the St. Louis metropolitan area with the opportunity to come together as a community through creative self-expression. The event will take place in the early fall along the Mississippi riverfront as part of an effort to revitalize an area that has been polluted, neglected and abandoned for far too long. Although the audience is primarily the citizens of the St. Louis metropolitan area, the whole world is invited to attend and participate as creators during the festival. Artica’s development will be as fluid as the river it celebrates, and its scope will depend greatly upon the emotional involvement of the community. The festival grounds will be filled with site-specific installation art created by professional artists from the St. Louis metropolitan area. The emphasis will be on interactive participatory art that takes its inspiration from the river, its surrounding environment or its history. An overlapping schedule of events including music, dance theater, poetry, video, film and performance art will encourage the audience to move around and experience Artica from different perspectives. The interactive nature of the event will encourage the audience to create their own art and become performers themselves. www.artica.org |
| City of Dreams Mini Golf Core team members: Eli Kent, Anna Hecker, Bex Ames, Meg West, David Rodd, Audrey Boguchwal, Ben Jones, Kirsten Tarr, Jennifer Upchurch, David Koren Brooklyn, NY $6000  City of Dreams Mini Golf is a nine-hole mini golf course that will be installed on New York City's Governors Island (www.govisland.com). It will be free and open to the public throughout the summer season. Each hole will be conceived, constructed and installed by a different artist or group of artists, all variations on the theme "City of Dreams." The course will be open to the public from June 27, 2008 to October 5, 2008. City of Dreams Mini Golf is a project of FIGMENT 2008, held in partnership with the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC). FIGMENT is a 3-day participatory arts event on Governors Island in New York Harbor on June 27-29 (www.figmentnyc.org). FIGMENT is a project of Action Arts League, and is produced by a coalition of volunteers in partnership with The Pure Project. www.figmentnyc.org/minigolf |
| EMERGENCE Johan Kritzinger, Joyce Manalo, Kate Raudenbush, Anne McDonald, Audrey Boguchawal and David Koren New York, NY $6000 
Emergence is a summer exhibition of experimental, participatory arts that is characterized by transformation, and involving more than 30 artists/art collectives working in a variety of media. Using the theme, “Creative Pioneers in Uncharted Territory,” exhibitors at Emergence have used the context, history, and recent steps towards revitalization, or “emergence,” of Governors Island as the source of inspiration and departure for the artists’ creation of participatory art. The installation will change over the course of the summer as a result of the interactive elements and the engagement of visiting participants. The public is invited to visit Emergence on Saturdays and Sundays 11 am to 6 pm through July 26, 2008. Admission and ferry transportation to the island is free. The artists and art collectives who make Emergence possible include the following individuals and groups: Anne Arden McDonald, artcodex, Asha Ganpat, Avant Car Guard (South Africa), Chris Jordan, Casper Electronics, Christian Nerf - Barend de Wet & Douglas Gimberg (South Africa), Damon Hamm, Erik Fabian, Eugenia Yu, Friendly Falcons & Their Friend the Snake, G-77, Jason Van Anden & Nat Hawks, John Krill, John Walter, Michael Alan, Monica Müller, Peripheral Media Projects, Pornj Diamond Cell, Sarah Phillips, Saviour Scraps, Tara Parsons, Tim & Martin Dockery, Triangle Project (Denmark, Istanbul), and Urban Homesteading Project. Emergence is a project of FIGMENT 2008. FIGMENT is a project of Action Arts League, and is produced by a coalition of volunteers in partnership with The Pure Project.
Online Catalog: www.emergenceshow.org www.thepureproject.com Click here to see a short video about Emergence |
| The Giving Tree Robin Banks Los Angeles, CA $8000  The Giving Tree Project is an interactive, part wind-powered, part human-powered sculpture of a 30 foot tree. It is designed to generate it's own power by harnessing the movement of tree branches and leaves in the wind, a currently untapped source of mechanical wind energy. Participants will also be able to generate more energy in an interactive playground, by swinging on swings attached to the tree. As power is generated twofold, The Giving Tree comes alive with lights, pumping water and sound, and shows the circulatory system of the tree's xylem and phloem system within. Globally the aim of this project is to promote the prevention of de-forestation in places where illegal lumbering is a way of survival by teaching that trees can be a valuable asset of wind energy to us if just left standing, powering rural farms and villages off the grid. http://archaiccustoms.com See the debut of The Giving Tree at The Do Lab's Lucent L'Amour event, February 14, 2009 in downtown Los Angeles, Ca. http://lucentlamour.thedolab.com |
| Ocean Beach Fire Pits Rebecca Anders, Yasmin Mawaz-Khan and Charles Gadeken San Francisco, CA $3000  The experience of building a fire at the ocean’s edge is as old as human time, and a much-beloved ritual on the San Francisco coastline. Ocean Beach Fire Pits are locally made sculptural fire pits made from cast concrete and designed to succeed in the harsh and extreme beach environment. Taking the form of Sea Stars and Fire Blooms these beautifully crafted, unique objects provide a valuable and accessible site of public interaction and connection. Already a success among the San Francisco community, the intentional welcoming aspect of the fire pits draw people together and encourage engagement between a diverse cross-section of beach visitors and the surrounding landscape. www.fireblooms.com |
| Primal Source Usman Haque London, England $6000  Primal Source is a one-night performance designed as a massive animated projection on an ephemeral screen made of sprayed water. The mirage-like installation, which will feature as part of "The Glow" festival in Santa Monica, Ca, July 19th, 2008, will be located on the beach near the Santa Monica Pier. Discreetly hidden microphones will pick up sounds from the crowd so that participants will generate realtime colorful animated light patterns and shapes on the water screen before them that react to the sound of the words, music and noises produced collectively by both individuals and groups. Their voices will give birth to primal creatures that emanate from the mirage becoming more and more ebullient, with colors flying in and out, and reflecting the ever-changing sounds. View video of the finished project, here. www.haque.co.uk |
Sanlun Yishu Lee Somers and Elisabeth Pellathy Beijing, China $6000  三san (three) 轮lun (wheel) 车che (vehicle) – a versatile, cheap and compact tricycle made from modified motorcycles or bicycles. Small yet mighty, the workhorse of Beijing moves everything from lumber to passengers. Often employed as a low-budget local taxi. 三san (three) 轮lun (wheel) 艺术yishu (art) – a mobile gallery, a custom-made sanlun che housing an exhibition of print, drawing, sound, and video selected specifically for this context. The primary function is to facilitate personal interaction with art for an audience outside the scope of the traditional gallery. Shifting art viewing from a passive to active interface with the community, Sanlun Yishu overlays an art-experience with daily transportation. Artists from around the globe will create works themed on urban life for the mobile gallery. Passengers will become participants, asked to reflect on their identity in our urban world. Instead of paying a fare, participants take a work of art with them and make a creative contribution of their own. This transaction is the basis of a conversation between artists and passengers, examining urban life from multiple perspectives, forging unlikely connections across the globe. sanlunyishu.org |