Alternate ROOTS is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2018 round of Artistic Assistance Project Development. Grants were awarded to fourteen individual artists and cultural workers in the South to enhance their skills, create unique projects, and build community, for a total of $46,530 in support. These recipients were selected in December 2018. Congratulations to this fantastic array of artists and cultural workers, who are helping to create a better South, and a better world!
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Joseph Bazelais, Nashville, TN: To facilitate Ether, a series of engagement activities that involve creative placemaking in discussions about the impact of Hip Hop in our community. Each program will feature a community canvas, a community forum, and a community cypher to show the elements of Hip Hop can be weaponized as a tool to uproot oppression.
Cortina Caldwell, Black Mountain, NC: To produce the Artist Anthology, a storytelling tool ultimately aiming to reshape the narrative that black and brown people aren’t creative, and that artists can’t live well or influence change.
Kelly Corcoran, Nashville, TN: To commission and premiere a new work by Atlanta-based composer TJ Cole that explores the concept of the gender spectrum. The work will be presented by Intersection and Nashville in Harmony.
free feral, New Orleans/Mississippi Delta: This is a 5-7 chapter audio investigation into the responsibility of inheritance and how that interacts specifically with blackness in our current cultural climate.
Dina Goldman, Germantown, MD: To host a series of community meetings in the style of story circles and produce a short documentary film to present at Amplify US.
Kerry Lee, Norcross, GA: To support the creation and presentation of Ribbon Dance of Empowerment: Growing Up Chinese American in the South as a part of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company’s full-evening production on October 19-20, 2019 at the Infinite Energy Theater in Duluth, GA.
Lisa Mount, Clarkesville, GA: To produce The Wayward Week, a space for the creation and presentation of original art rooted in overlapping communities of place, tradition and spirit – at Sautee Nacoochee Center.
Katina Parker, Durham, NC: Tribute is a broadcast-quality, high-definition video tribute to Dr. Chuck Davis, masterful African dance choreographer and humanitarian. The film consists of interviews with noteworthy dance scholars from around the world, gifted North Carolina-based artists, youth who studied with him, and everyday citizens who found a creative home in Baba Chuck.
Caroline Quiroga, Killeen, TX: To continue the production and marketing of 24 episodes of 3Cuentos; a bilingual literary podcast. All stories come from across the rich tradition of Latin America.
kb saine, Buckhannon, WV: To hire professional choreographers and old-time musicians from diverse backgrounds to aid in developing appalachian blackface, a new play that deals with race, class, and history in West Virginia.
Laura Schandelmeier, Washington, DC: To support the development and production of Naked King, a dance/theater work which seeks to expose white supremist structures in order to transform them.
Nick Slie, New Orleans, LA: Mondo Bizarro’s Placekeeping Training Immersion is a place to think physically, connect with a diverse group of citizens, colleagues, and collaborators, and together interrogate the question: how do I become the change I want to see while keeping my body at the forefront of my practice?
Joseph Tolbert, Knoxville, TN: No Longer Silent is a night of film that will present the films of Black queer, gay, and same gender loving filmmakers to commemorate the life and artistic legacy of Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs on the 30th anniversary of his groundbreaking and controversial film Tongues Untied.
José Torres-Tama, New Orleans, LA: To produce a public performance intervention that looks at a legacy of anti-immigrant legislation and laws strategically developed to dehumanize people of color in a country that seduces its citizenry to embrace forgetting.