upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024

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10 Women Artists Awarded Leeway Foundation’s New Art and Change Grants

Philadelphia, PA — Women artists in the Philadelphia area are creating change in their own lives and the lives of others, from Carmen Rojas, a grandmother living in Norris Square who teaches crochet to her neighbors as a way to pass on Puerto Rican cultural traditions to Gwynne B. Sigel, a Philadelphia artist taking on a multi-year project, that will culminate in a theatre piece, to interview the last surviving members of a local old Jewish left community.

The Leeway Foundation's 2005 Art and Change Grants celebrate the power and vision of women artists, granting over $22,000 to 10 artists in the second of four grant cycles for the year. The grantees were selected from a pool of more than 60 applicants by a local review panel of women with extensive art and change experience. The review panel members are: Vashti Dubois, Nijmie Dzurinko, Joan Huckstep and Rana Sindhikara

The Art and Change Grant provides immediate, short-term grants of up to $2,500 to women artists (including transgender women) residing in the five-county Philadelphia region who need financial assistance to take advantage of an opportunity for art and change. From dancers to visual artists to photographers, this grant supports women artists, both emerging and established, working for change in any artistic discipline.

The Artists

Nicole Cousino of Philadelphia
• Documentary | granted $2,450
• Community Partner: Rienne Scott
Nicole will collaborate with spoken word artist, Rienne Scott, to create a 15-minute documentary exploring a local soldier's decision to intentionally have himself shot in the leg rather than return to combat in Iraq. The documentary, When Does a Bullet Save One from the Bomb?, uses spoken word to share this soldier's story, connecting it to the economic draft, conscientious objectors, the increasing casualty rate in Iraq, as well as the level of gun violence happening in Philadelphia.

Julia Elaine Galetti of Philadelphia
• Quilting, Crafting | granted $2,500
• Community Partner: Project H.O.M.E.
Julia will teach quilting at Project H.O.M.E. in efforts to empower fellow residents and others to understand the power of art and its potential in their life, just as it has impacted her, providing inspiration to continue on her path to be independent again. The class will culminate with a potlatch, an event in which community, staff and residents alike bring food and stories, poetry, books to share with each other and celebrate community.

Maori Karmael Holmes of Philadelphia
• Media Arts | granted $2,500
• Community Partner: kaPow Inc!/Hip Hop Speaks
Maori created promotional DVDs and collateral materials for her documentary film Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop, which chronicles the abundance of powerful female voices that Philadelphia has produced as artists, promoters, and writers in the hip-hop and soul community. Scene Not Heard features interviews with some of the originators of modern hip-hop culture such as Lady B, Schoolly D and Rennie Harris, with vanguards chiming in including Bahamadia and Ursula Rucker, and presents current talents such as the Jazzyfatnastees, Ms. Jade, and Lady Alma, and emerging talents such as Versus, Keen of Subliminal Orphans, and Michele Byrd-McPhee of Montazh. Maori's goal was to tell the story of these women and highlight their struggle to succeed in a male-dominated industry in a city that has been left behind in the national conversation. She plans to use the film to travel to conferences and workshops around the world and distribute the DVDs to classrooms, community centers, and other organizations using hip-hop as an educational tool.

Brandi Jeter of Fort Washington
• Theatre | granted $2,496
• Community Partner: British American Drama Academy
Brandi will participate in a month-long intensive Classical Acting program with the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England, a program that women of color are not often invited to participate in, casting her in roles that other participants have rarely seen portrayed by a Black woman. As a teaching artist working with 8- to 12-year-olds, she will be able to bring the skills she learns in Oxford to the classes she teaches at organizations like the Cheltenham Art Center. The program will also impact work on "Shake Down," a play she is working on to make theatre more accessible to young people.

Denise King of Philadelphia
• Live Jazz Music, Performance | granted $1,600
• Community Partner: Firehouse Farmers Market
To support Denise's Friday Night Jazz Series, a live, free music event that she created in her West Philadelphia neighborhood to bring people together and introduce young people in the African American community to this form of music. The series serves as a meeting place for many different types of people, brings a sense of change and growth to the neighborhood, and makes Jazz a thriving and accessible art form.

Maribel Lozada-Arzuaga of Philadelphia
• Puerto Rican Folk Dance | granted $1,480
• Community Partner: Raíces Culturales Latinoamericanas
Maribel will travel to Antigua to participate in the Caribbean Arts Encounter 2005 to meet and share ideas with other artists who are working to maintain their cultural roots by passing their heritage to the next generation through arts and cultural forms. The information and new strategies for sharing art forms will be shared with the young people she works with in Franklinville by teaching the traditional rhythms of Puerto Rico like the Bomba drums, the Cuatro, and Panderos de Plena, in efforts to share the history and the realities of the people of and from Puerto Rico.

Violeta Rivera of Philadelphia
• Visual Art | granted $2,500
• Community Partner: Casa del Carmen Family Center
Violeta will create a series of portraits of the Virgin Mary and other saints that are important to many local Latin American immigrant communities, culminating in an exhibition at the Casa del Carmen Family Center. This exhibition will help bring together people from these immigrant communities, especially those newcomers for whom spirituality and religion provide a strong support and connection to cultural traditions. This will be her first painting exhibition in the US, introducing her as an artist to her community and to Philadelphia's professional artist scene.

Carmen Rojas of Philadelphia
• Fiber Art, Crochet | granted $2,000
• Community Partner: Norris Square Neighborhood Project
Carmen will teach crochet workshops in her Norris Square neighborhood, helping low-income residents learn a traditional art form free of charge. Her workshops, taught in Spanish, will teach these skills to other senior citizens in Grupo Motivo, as well as young people from her neighborhood in efforts to connect them to their Puerto Rican heritage. These classes will help carry on the tradition of crochet in her community.

Gwynne B. Sigel of Philadelphia
• Writing, Oral History | granted $2,500
• Community Partner: First Person Arts
Gwynne will interview members of the Sholom Aleichem Club, one of the last surviving organizations in Philadelphia's old Jewish left community, for a multi-year oral history project to share with a younger progressive Jewish community the lessons learned from the organization's 50-year history. She will focus on various themes, such as the relationship between Jewish ethnicity and political identity and activism. From these interviews, Gwynne will create a theatre piece that interweaves the Club members' personal stories with dramatizations of historical events that share the political context of their stories.

Crystal Jacqueline Torres of Levittown
• Jazz Vocalist, Trumpeter, Composer | granted $2,500
• Community Partner: Camden High School for the Creative Arts
Crystal will attend a seven-day workshop led by Bobby McFerrin at the Omega Institute in New York. Following her study, she will create a six-part workshop to share Jazz vocal technique with other young people at Camden High School for the Creative Arts. Her workshops will focus on the connection between Jazz and popular art forms in communities of color, such as Blues, R&B, Salsa and Hip Hop.

The Review Panel

Vashti Dubois has been an arts activist for over twenty years. She is a writer, director, performance artist and subversive storyteller. She co-founded the off Broadway theater company Mumbo Jumbo in the late eighties. While Vashti continues to produce, direct and perform from Boston to New York and now Philadelphia, she is particularly interested in how all art has the ability to educate, transform, and connect disparate communities. Most recently, Vashti was the director for the Girls Center, an extended day treatment program in North Philadelphia, where she established the arts as a central component of the programming. Students were encouraged to use the arts as a platform for expressing their often unpopular insights and concerns on a range of issues from the juvenile justice system to the war.

Nijmie Dzurinko is an organizer, poet, popular educator, and movement strategist who has lived and worked in Philadelphia for 12 years. Domestically, her work has been focused on building power among youth members of the Philadelphia Student Union who are seeking to make changes in their schools. She is also a founding member of the International Women's Peace Service, a human rights organization that witnesses and intervenes in human rights violations in the Occupied West Bank. Currently she is a Masters candidate in Urban Studies at Temple University. Nijmie has been writing poetry since she was 12 and uses her art to unleash our capacities for change.

Joan Huckstep, a native of Detroit, Michigan. Philadelphia has been her second home since childhood until she relocated after graduating from college. Huckstep has worked professionally as an independent choreographer, dancer, actor, and designer. She has received grants and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (1985-89) and was formerly on their Resident Artist Roster. Huckstep has had professional experience in theatre appearing in numerous productions in Philadelphia and Detroit. She has also been an educator with teaching experience in language arts and social studies from early childhood to undergraduate levels. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Education from Antioch College and a Doctorate of Education in Dance History with a concentration in public history (archival studies and oral history) from Temple University where she was a Future Faculty Fellow. Her research interests concern sociopolitical embodiment in the dance traditions of African and the African Diaspora.

Rana Sindhikara is a photographer and community-based teaching artist. She has used her artistic vision to explore her identity as a woman of mixed heritage. She received the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation's "Artists and Communities" grant and the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership "School District of Philadelphia" pilot grant for her work with COSACOSA's "Memory Mine" project, in collaboration with Homer Jackson and Janet Goldner. She has worked with numerous schools, community centers, and non-profit organizations, including ARTWorks in Different Places, Ford-Macarobin Community Center, the Kenderton School, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Temple University. Her work has been displayed in gallery spaces throughout Philadelphia, as part of the Fringe Festival, and published in local newspapers. She is currently an Artists in Communities Training Fellow and Coordinator of Educational Programming at the Asian Arts Initiative.

The Leeway Foundation Applications and guidelines for the Art and Change Grant are available online (leeway.org) or by calling Leeway (215.545-4078). The remaining 2005 deadlines are: June 20 and October 31.

In addition to the Art and Change Grant, Leeway offers the Transformation Award, a $15,000 award given annually to women artists living in the five-county Philadelphia area who have been creating art and change work for at least five years and have financial need. Please call Leeway or visit our website for more information. The Stage 1 deadline for the award is April 6, 2005.

The Leeway Foundation's mission is to support individual women artists, arts programs and arts organizations, focusing on the Greater Philadelphia region, in order to help them achieve individual and community transformation.

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