2021 ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE PROJECT DEVELOPMENT RECIPIENTS

Respite In the Round retreat in North Carolina. A commissioned sculpture by Serah Lenea


MEET OUR 2021 ARTISTIC ASSISTANCE PROJECT DEVELOPMENT RECIPIENTS!

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Alternate ROOTS is pleased to announce 31 recipients of the Artistic Assistance Project Development grant award! In December 2021, grants were awarded to support ROOTS members with funding to pursue opportunities that will advance their skills, create unique projects, and build community.

Over $75,000 was distributed to individual artists, collectives, and cultural workers in the South. Congratulations to this fantastic array of artists and cultural workers, who are helping to create a better South and a better world!

Two Artistic Assistance funding cycles are offered each year– Professional Development and Project Development. Spring 2022 Artistic Assistance application information will be announced in March 2022.


2021 PROJECT DEVELOPMENT AWARD RECIPIENTS

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  • Aaron M. Richmond-Havel [New Orleans, LA]: a.r. have and Xiamara Chupaflor collaborate with current and retired sex workers of Southeast Louisiana to create votive photographic altars honoring the vital and sacred practice of consensual erotic work. Website
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  • Alicia D.Araya [Hot Springs, NC]: To organize and archive past Azule resident footage, centering on Azule’s role as the arts and community center, thereby creating a treatment/action plan for a film that incorporates these videos.  The first of a five-part creative process, this documentary showcases, through case studies, Azule’s fostering culturally and socially transformative work in Southern Appalachia. Website |Facebook | Instagram
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  • Ami Worthen [Asheville, NC]: Creation of a video docu-series about the Montford neighborhood to capture memories of supportive Black community ties and the subsequent loss of those ties through displacement while looking honestly at white complicity/gain and offering a path towards repair with the community land trust. Website | Instagram | Twitter
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  • Ann-Meredith Wooten [New Orleans, LA]: With our Deep Down Roots family, Down at the crossroads of Peoples & Sage, We’ll invite our community of abolitionist healers, grandmammas, artists, and storytellers to dream some abolitionist freedom dreams together.
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  • April C. Turner [Charolotte, NC]: In Rhythm Keepers, African dance & music culturalists, April C. Turner and George Glenn interview fellow dance & drum performing artists who have dedicated their lives to building community through teaching culture in North Carolina. The principal medium of offering the artists’ stories will be via podcast, however we will also collect a simultaneous video record. Website | Facebook | Instagram
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  • Ashley Haze [Atlanta, GA]: REVERE is a choreopoem and short film by poet Ashlee Haze, through the use of performance, music, and cinematic interludes, Revere tells the story of a woman creating a new world where she is whole, liberated, and valued. Website | Facebook | Instagram
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  • Arianna Ross [Poolesville (Montgomery County), MD]: Digital Solutions that Bridge the Divide harnesses the power of the arts to address the national economic and racial equity crises by developing digital literacy skills. Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
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  • Ashlea M. Sovetts [Greenville, SC]: For the project 10 Recalling-20, the collaborators Ashlea Sovetts and Alexandria Nunweiler will extend the dance work to an evening length performance, tour the work and present their workshop “From Interviews to Dancemaking” at upcoming conferences and festivals. Website | Instagram
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  • Assane Kouyate [Atlanta, GA]: La Culture Mandingue (LCM) honors and celebrates the physical, musical, and oral griot traditions of the Manding and various West African ethnic groups. The project will feature a vibrant interplay of Manding traditions with parallels to Wolof and Serer heritage, and the dynamics of social change, global, and modern culture.
    Facebook | Instagram
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  • Boh Ireland [Memphis, TN]: To pay stipends to Shelectricity girls of color for their participation in a creative program that teaches storytelling, personal development, and professional development to girls ages 14-21. Instagram
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  • Celine Thackston [Nashville, TN]: Funding will support a multi-day Black-centered/led creative residency in Spring and Summer 2022, led by sound artist and improviser JayVe Montgomery, along with improvisation musician Ben LaMar Gay and two members of chatterbird, Maya Stone and Joshua Dent, at sites of racial trauma in Tennessee. Website
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  • Christine Gautreaux [Sautee Nacoochee, GA]: Self-Care for Sustainable Community Care and Activism. A Healing Retreat for Artists-Activists: Balancing Family, Creativity & Community Engagement at the Intersection of Art & Activism. This will be a weekend experience to gather, learn and support one another in multiple healing and artistic modalities towards balance & wholeness in order to sustain the work of uprooting oppression. Website
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  • Clare C. Hagan [Louisville, KY]: The Moth and the Masked Man is an immersive theatrical experience in which the audience are invited in as participants, able to follow the actors through different stations as they act out a story about facing the uncertainty of death and the pain of grief through meaningful connections with others. Website | Facebook
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  • Constance Collier-Mercado [Atlanta, GA]: Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula: An AfroFutures Book Club is a speculative book club focused on Black girls, women, & gender-expansive people that will include guest speakers and interactive engagement across performance, visual art, culture work, and community organizing. Website | Instagram
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  • Deirdre Love [Norfolk, VA]: Healing Circle is in response to COVID19 devastating impact on teens and young adults in our community with the highest rate of death, infection, and unvaccinated in the City of Norfolk.
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  • Don Harrel [Winter Garden, FL]: The proposed project development activity is the further conceptualization, development, and actualization of an Orisirisi African Folklore digital storytelling project consisting of the illustration, digitizing, and animation of stories included in our existing body of work as well, as the creation of new digital stories that enhance our effectiveness and viability in both the face to face and the virtual program delivery spaces. Website | Facebook
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  • Ivy Parsons [Baltimore, MD]: The project includes writing, sound, meditation, movement, water, light, natural healing substances, and an informational website of links on health and smoldering Multiple Myeloma activism.  I hope to bring my healing process into a visual manifestation of my experiences within the installation, a space of loving kindness that others can participate in.
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  • Karl Stephan Hylari St. Louis [Miami, FL]: Gatekeeper: Rites of Passage will be a multimedia performance and art exhibition. Website
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  • Kathleen E. Klein [South Carolina]: I requested support for funds to travel for research on Bluegrass music, which has roots in traditional English, Scottish and Irish ballads and in traditional African American blues and jazz. Facebook | Instagram
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  • Kelly Corcoran [Nashville, TN]: Through the Lullaby Project the Nashville-based contemporary music ensemble Intersection will connect new and expecting mothers with professional artists to create and sing their own personal lullabies for their babies, with the goal of improving child and maternal health and attachment. Website | Facebook | Instagram
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  • Kristen G. Cox [Berea, NC]: Return, Ground and Create: A Collaborative Residency will incubate and fund 3-4 cross-disciplinary cultural organizers who yearn to make, or scheme based on their connection to land, nature, and the more-than-human world. For four weeks, artists will reside at the Respite in the Round, a rural, secluded two-story round treehouse – with barn and land access – situated amidst a rare Occaneechi Saponi alluvial floodplain forest of the North Carolina Piedmont. Website | Instagram
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  • Lynn Linnemeier [Red Springs, NC]: This project requests funding to support a studio rental space in downtown Red Springs, NC, that will serve as a working artist space but will also be a public gathering space where art and ideas can be shared. Website | Facebook
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  • Mikaela Curry [North Carolina]: Create a collection of poems, tentatively titled, When Water Calls You by Your Name featuring collaborative poems written about specific bodies of water, connecting to themes of land, climate, and identity. The collection will be anchored by collaborative poems between the poet and friends, comrades, family, and collaborators who have shared significant experiences around the bodies of water that the poems are about. Website | Facebook | Instagram
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  • Nick Slie [New Orleans, LA]: Invisible Rivers is a project of The Land Memory Bank and Mondo Bizarro that employs the artistic practices of music, theater, and boat-building to respond to our region’s interconnected struggles against coastal land loss, environmental racism, and displacement. We are building boats in rapidly disappearing areas of our coast and hosting art exhibitions, dialogues, and performances on them. Mondo Bizarro Instagram Facebook
    Land Memory Bank Instagram Facebook
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  • Ra Malika Imhotep [New Orleans, LA]: A collaboration between Black queer artists (Ra Malika Imhotep, Muse Dodd, Felicita Felli Maynard) to produce and distribute “carte-de-visite” ephemera objects and a new media piece to support my debut poetry collection, gossypiin (Red Hen Press, April 2022). Website | Instagram | Twitter
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  • Rasha Abdulhadi [Washington D.C.]: For support to finish my first full-length poetry book, purchase a computer and printer, and pay for editorial and community critical response. Twitter
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  • Rhonda K. Oliver [New Orleans, LA]: Released to Nowhere a performance throughout Louisiana to shine the light on the obstacles women face after incarceration. Website | Facebook
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  • Sapphira K. Lam [Jacksonville, AK]: Mystical story, lullaby song, and artistic illustrations designed for and by Caregiver Survivors of domestic, childhood, and gender-based violence to share with their children for intergenerational healing, transformation in the family, community, and ecological care, and social justice. Instagram
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  • Tara Y. Coyt [Atlanta, GA]: Produce “Real Talk Monologues ON FILM,” inspired by the book “Real Talk About LGBTQIAP.” Website
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  • Tiana K. Blair [Dallas, TX]: RAGE is a one-act play that explores the stories of Black US-ian women throughout the history of the United States. Ten women take their place on stage to share their stories of strength, resilience, perseverance, and struggle across the history of the nation. From the 1842 Cherokee Revolt to the Streetcar Boycotts of 1900-1906 and the continuing injustices of our traumatic present, RAGE honors thhe spirit and tenacity of our foremothers and is a dedication to no longer ignore the voices of Black women. Website | Instagram
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  • Tufara Waller Muhammad [Multiple Cities]: This emerging body of work centering Southern Black women strives to help correct dominant narratives and tell unpopular Southern stories of forgotten Musicians. During these planned performances and accompanying workshops, we hope to bring light to Black American Music, Social Movements, and untold stories of The Great Migration, highlighting a period from the early 1900s to the 1950s. Website
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  • Zoe Couacaud [Washington D.C.]: A digital storytelling, art therapy, and personal advocacy program designed to empower foster youth by teaching them that the way you tell your story shapes the way you live your life.
Alternate ROOTS supports the creation and presentation of original art that is rooted in communities of place, tradition or spirit. We are a group of artists and cultural organizers based in the South creating a better world together. As Alternate ROOTS, we call for social and economic justice and are working to dismantle all forms of oppression—everywhere.