Artistic Assistance 2019 Project Development Recipients

Liza Garza, facilitating the “Cultivating Joy” workshop at ROOTS Week 2019. Photo: Melisa Cardona.

 

Alternate ROOTS is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2019 round of Artistic Assistance Project Development.

In December, grants were awarded to seventeen individual artists and cultural workers in the South to create unique projects, enhance their skills, and build community, for a total of $74,250 in support.

Congratulations to this fantastic array of artists and cultural workers, who are helping to create a better South, and a better world!

 

Artistic Assistance 2019 Project Development Recipients 

 

  • Desiree Evans [Austin, TX]: To support the curation of a multi-media oral history project that documents the stories of environmental justice organizing and movement work of three communities in rural Louisiana.

 

  • Wende Ballew [Atlanta, GA]: To support the development of visual arts classes and experiences for both an education-in-prison and re-entry program that supports people under carceral control in Georgia.

 

  • Shannon Woolley [Louisville, KY]: To support the collaboration with a local playwright to workshop and produce a stage play with music that explores and uplifts various responses of grief from a diverse group of people.

 

  • Thaddeus Davis [Columbia, SC]: To support the production of an interdisciplinary dance installation that activates the latent and silenced histories of black experience and embodiment in antebellum plantation homes across the U.S. South.

 

  • Rachel Lee [New Orleans, LA]: To support a New Orleans based Queer Youth Theater ensemble in the co-creation of multi-disciplinary performance work.

 

  • Julie B Johnson [Decatur, GA]: To support the engagement of a Community Research Partner, a Documentarian/Videographer, and to develop choreography and public programming for a site-specific project that examines incarceration and convict labor in Atlanta.

 

  • Kim Pevia [Red Springs, NC]:  To support the piloting of an artists-led movement for liberation during a four-day retreat with 21 invited artists and cultural organizers in Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia.

 

  • Paula Larke [Stone Mountain, GA]: To support the development of a story about Moses Purifoy, who began a school for African American children in Southwest Alabama.

 

  • Liza Garza [Atlanta, GA]: To support the creation of a bi-monthly intentional healing workshop series focused on the reclamation, celebration, and preservation of joy for Women of Color who identify as artists, visionaries, creatives, and culture workers.

 

  • Shannon Turner [Atlanta, GA]: To support the development of a storytelling program and public performance with an Atlanta-based nonprofit partner organization that serves homeless and precariously housed older youth.

 

  • Nathalie Nia Faulk [New Orleans, LA]: To support an interview initiative that centers Black LGBTQ Pageantry and adjacent communities in the South by collecting and creatively interpreting the oral histories of Trans, Non-Binary, Two-Spirit, and Gender Non-Conforming folks.

 

  • Deidre Gantt [New Orleans, LA]: To support the creation and staging of a suite of plays about 19th century African Americans taken from their families and communities in the Upper South and sold to slaveholders in the Lower South.

 

  • Regie Cabico [Washington, DC]: To support three free poetry workshops and open mics designed for Queer and Trans people of color who are novice poets and performers.

 

  • Fabiola Torralba [San Antonio, TX]: To support a programming series that centers the African Diaspora and features artists, historians, and cultural workers that explore interconnections between Indigenous, Latinx, and Black communities.

 

  • Emily Marks [Memphis, TN]: To support the creation and staging of an intergenerational, mobile performance, honoring spaces in the Soulsville USA neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee.

 

  • Triza Cox [Florence, SC]: To support the production of an original theatre piece that uses a Brechtian dramatic style to explore the manifestation and impact of the inequities of racism in the psychic development of a student of color.

 

  • Joanna Russo [New Orleans, LA]: To support a one-day cultural organizing salon and live performance series designed to encourage brave dialogue about what participants know about their ancestors and what to do with that knowledge.

 

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.