A Blade of Grass is pleased to announce the 2014 recipients of Project Grants for Organizations!
Organizations ARTs East New York, The Foundry Theatre, and Not An Alternative were selected to receive Project Grants for Organizations, one-time grants to New York City-based public charities in the amount of $20,000 each, in support of socially engaged art projects that bring participants into dialogue with artists, embrace audiences beyond the art community, and aim to promote social change. Organizations applied via a citywide open call and were selected by an independent committee made up of an ABOG representative, an artist, a community organizer, a curator and an arts nonprofit director.
Over its three-year existence, A Blade of Grass has grown increasingly focused on work that actively engages communities, expresses clear and ambitious project aims, and serves as an innovative conduit for social change. The selected projects present inspiring, vivid and poetic applications of socially engaged art, and offer models for understanding this inherently conceptual, process-based work.
About the Organizational Grantees
ARTS EAST NEW YORK seeks to build a sustainable ecosystem where arts, business, and social engagement can revitalize East New York, a community in Brooklyn faced with disproportionate socioeconomic need. Their Project Grant will support the [re]New Lots Market & Artist Incubator project, a mobile model for neighborhood renewal that leverages socially engaged artists, supports local entrepreneurs, and activates vacant lots. Ten artists will be offered below-market rental studio space and free professional development assistance in exchange for their contribution of creative services to AENY community beautification initiatives including: Mural Mile, an effort to energize a dark and desolate stretch under the elevated 3 Train Line, and Mi Tierra, a place-making project engaging East New York residents in creatively claiming underutilized land.
THE FOUNDRY THEATRE was established in 1994 to assemble a community of artists with revolutionary ideas for the theatre and the world in which it is situated. Their productions have since been honored with 12 OBIE Awards and 7 Drama Desk nominations. They will use their Project Grant to continue this legacy by supporting the community engaged creation of a new play that investigates contemporary policing and imprisonment practices in the criminal justice system, Marcus Gardley’s The Box. The Project Grant will additionally support two programs accompanying the production: a dialogue series headlined by author and historian Robin DG Kelley and an Audience Ambassadors program that will directly support the participation of over a dozen partnering communities.
NOT AN ALTERNATIVE (NAA) is a nine year-old hybrid arts collective and artist-run non-profit organization that works in both a curatorial and production capacity, leveraging the tools of architecture, exhibit design, branding, and public relations in an effort to affect popular understanding of events, symbols, and history. NAA will use their Project Grant to realize a creative activism project that aims to educate the public about the social and political forces that affect nature but are often left out of natural history exhibits.
For more information on the Organizational Grantees, click HERE.
Thank you First Field!
The ABOG Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art is made possible by the generous First Field contributions of our board members and friends, and by the leading support of our esteemed Groundbreakers, Agnes Gund, Eva Haller, Shelley Frost Rubin, and Linda Schejola.