grant archive  
Grant Archive

Selected Grants from 1995-2002:
Guns and Roses
Jerilea Zempel
Let Freedom Ring
Krzyztof Wodiczko, Mildred Howard, Jim Hodges, and Barbara Stenman
Table of Voices: Conversations on the Criminal Justice System
Richard Kammler
The Roof is on Fire/No Blood No Foul
Suzanne Lacey
Projections
Shimon Attie
Freedom Sweep––Africa,
Michael Bramwell
The Pedestrian Project
Yvette Helin
Shakespeare’s Storms: King Lear and the Tempest
Lucidity Theater
Working Histories
Presented by Los Angeles Center for Photo Studies
Circulation
REPOhistory
Entering Buttermilk Bottom
REPOhistory
Circus Amok
walk2work
Karen Wilcox
Ramona Country: An Automobile Audio Tour of the Santa Clara River Valley
The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Give and Take in Waikiki
Gaye Chan & Andrea Feeser
Damaged Genes: A Legacy of the Vietnam War
Dinh Q. Lê
Roll Out the Red Carpet
Standard and Poor
Peepshow 28
No Live Girls
Citizen's Square
Tomislav Brajnovic
Eminent Domain
Mel Ziegler and Kate Ericson
Toxic Now
Riverbed Theatre
The Electric Fields of California
Debby and Larry Kline
A Fox Lives Here Too
Steven Siegel
 




Guns and Roses
Jerilea Zempel

In the Cytadela, a large public park in Poznan Poland, Jerilea Zempel and her colleagues cover a Russian military tank with an elaborate crocheted blanket of flower-like forms. The Cytadela has been the site of many military battles throughout Polish history and, to represent their power and influence over the Polish nation, the Russians placed tanks on an open plaza there. Now the tanks are dinosaurs, reminders of life during the communist era. A tank, covered with crocheted pink flowers, the common handiwork of Polish women, is a powerful symbol of the complex threads of history that embody this space.

image
website


Let Freedom Ring
Krzyztof Wodiczko, Mildred Howard, Jim Hodges, and Barbara Stenman

"Let Freedom Ring" was a series of site specific artists' projects, commissioned and presented by Vita Brevis, along Boston's historic Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail. Artists Wodiczko, Howard, Hodges, and Stenman addressed the core themes of freedom and tyranny––personal, physical, political, and philosophical––using sites such as Bunker Hill Monument and The African Meeting House to unearth the multiple interpretations of well-known histories.

website


Table of Voices: Conversations on the Criminal Justice System
Richard Kammler

A long narrow table of lead and gold leaf in the basement of a cellblock on Alcatraz Island. A vertical sheet of safety glass bisects the table, much like a non-contact prison visiting room. Ten seats are on both sides of the table, with a phone in front of each seat. Pick up the phone on one side of the table and hear the voice of a parent of a murdered child telling her story. Pick up the phone on the other side and hear the voice of the perpetrator telling his story. Richard Kammler's "Table of Voices" seeks a common ground, a context for communication and healing to occur, a new way to understand the troubled system of incarcerating people.


The Roof is on Fire/No Blood No Foul
Suzanne Lacey

"The Roof is on Fire"/"No Blood No Foul" included two linked performance events that use the urban settings in Oakland, CA as backdrops for explorations of conflict between youth and police officers. In one performance, the public wandered from car to car under stark lights of a parking lot, listening to heated discussion, provocation, insight and tenderness, witnessing an authentic exchange between youths and Police officers that gives human face to a significant social dilemma. In another performance, youth and police met face to face on the basketball court, transforming the tensions of the street into positive action. Both youth and police suffer from negative public stereotyping and both have misperceptions of the other; these performances confront and challenge these stereotypes.


Projections
Shimon Attie

Shimon Attie presented a series of site-specific installations which explored New York's immigration history, fostering a reflection on today's prevailing attitudes towards immigration. Using historic and contemporary materials, such as archival photographs, maps, letters, and newspaper clippings, Attie aesthetically processed and projected these images onto historically significant sites. The project specifically traced Jewish identity and assimilation in New York, reminding viewers of New York's extraordinary history as a port of freedom for refugees from around the world while shedding light on our shifting attitudes towards new immigrants. Attie describes his work as "peeling back the wallpaper of today and revealing the histories buried underneath." Presented by Creative Time.


Freedom Sweep––Africa,
Michael Bramwell

Using his physical labor as a tool for activating historical awareness, Michael Bramwell sweeps spaces that are loaded with the contradictions of a troubled past. In "Freedom Sweep––Africa", Bramwell will spend ten days sweeping Goree Island. This UNESCO's World Heritage Site off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, was settled by the Portuguese in the 15th century and became an important center of African slave trading. The prisons, where slaves were held while awaiting their shipment to the new world, still remain. The simple and unexpected act of an individual sweeping hints at the sisyphean task of "cleaning up" a tragic past that defies tidiness.

image


The Pedestrian Project
Yvette Helin

"The Pedestrian Project " is an ongoing performance piece in which performers wear entirely black costumes modeled after the "School Zone" traffic sign people symbols. The pedestrian characters are silent and faceless, communicating through choreographed and improvisational works including interactions with existing public sculptures, architecture, people and situations as well as everyday activities, such as shopping, riding the trains, going to work and other mundane pursuits. The pedestrian character is of a certain personality, mostly lacking one. The roteness of its personality adds to the mystery of the pedestrian and creates "an expression of the anonymity we experience as individuals in a large systematic society."

image
website


Shakespeare’s Storms: King Lear and the Tempest
Lucidity Theater

Performed on closed out street in the old section of Philadelphia, this one person performance by Thaddeus Phillips plays with Shakespeare’s texts. A man enters with a steamer trunk filled with the necessities for a voyage: a map, clothes, and even a souvenir. As objects are removed from the suitcase, their meaning is transformed: the man with the trunk becomes Lear; a scarf, a shoe, and a flower in his lapel become his daughters; a pipe becomes his servant; and the trunk opens to create the podium from which Lear (behind a torn map of the world) will announce his retirement and the new divisions of his kingdom. As “Playing” is the most important aspect of this creative process, Lucidity theater aims to break down the divisions among acting, directing, design, and audience in order to make each one part of the creative effort.


Working Histories
Presented by Los Angeles Center for Photo Studies

This public "exhibition" included the work of ten artists who addressed historical and contemporary perceptions and realities of working people in Southern CA during the 20th Century. The spectrum of approaches taken by these artists challenged the vernacular of traditional labor photography. Although issues of labor impact the communities of Los Angeles on political, social, and economic levels they are rarely visually represented in public spaces. Voices and representations of the working forces are still hidden. The work was reproduced into bus shelter posters and installed in areas specified by the artists. Artists included: Adam Avila, Slobadon Dimitrov, Christina Fernandez, May Sun, Leda Ramos, Allan Sekula.


Circulation
REPOhistory

"Circulation" was a temporary public art project that examined the ways in which a seemingly natural thing (blood) is socially articulated. "Circulation" consisted of a series of multi-sited outdoor signs displaying images and texts concerning the circulation of human blood through the city of New York. These signs addressed blood literally as a physical substance that is collected, processed, stored, distributed, and disposed of as well as figuratively in terms of its diverse metaphoric readings for a variety of social/historical, and popular conceptions or beliefs. Reflecting on the many unexamined assumptions about blood such as anxieties about racial purity or national identity or the danger of contaminating oneself by donating blood, the project featured approximately 30 colorfully printed metal street signs located at specific points along one segment of the actual transportation routes used to move blood products from collection centers to city hospitals.

website


Entering Buttermilk Bottom
REPOhistory

"Entering Buttermilk Bottom" was a site-specific public art project about a Black neighborhood adjacent to downtown Atlanta, which was effectively erased as a result of Federally-sponsored urban renewal programs in the early 1960s. The project looked at the evolution, daily life and dismantling of a once-vital neighborhood, with a special emphasis on the period which destroyed it. This project combined personal memories of the area, its texture, topography and built environment, with an analysis of the social, economic and political forces which brought it down.

website


Circus Amok

A New York City based circus-theater company, Circus Amok addresses contemporary issues of social justice to a diversity of neighborhoods throughout the NYC area. Trained in traditional circus skills as well as experimental dance, activist theater, and gender-bending performance art techniques, Circus Amok is creating a new meaning for the term "Circus". As vaulting tumblers, clown doctors, and heavenly hula hoopers take on the subjects of budget cuts, Mayor Guiliani's "Quality of Life" campaign, and police brutality, activist theater becomes a tool to help build a larger activist movement in New York.


walk2work
Karen Wilcox

For several years now, Karen Wilcox has anonymously created "blitzkrieg" art installations on her walk2work. Her tools have been Cheetos, marshmallows, and pine cones; the sites have included cracks in the sidewalks, park benches, and chain link fences; the results have been deceptively simple and humorous transformations of the everyday. Before the installation is blown away or carried off by furry critters, the audiences who co-populate these paths will hopefully look upon the world in a slightly different fashion.


Ramona Country: An Automobile Audio Tour of the Santa Clara River Valley
The Center for Land Use Interpretation

The Center for Land Use Interpretation will produce a 60 minute auto audio tour that notes and describes the points of interest along Route 126, a beautiful and historic thoroughfare linking the California towns of Valencia and Ventura. Lurking just beyond the golden hued orange groves and quaint fruit stands that line the rural highway, exists an array of land uses ranging from crude oil drilling sites, land fills, military installations, Hollywood backdrops, and religious retreats. The Audio Tour tape discusses these sites, offering an alternative view to the traveler, and encouraging a new and arguably "more real" view of the landscape.

website


Give and Take in Waikiki
Gaye Chan & Andrea Feeser

The struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty receives virtually no coverage on the continental U.S., and when many Americans first come to Hawaii, we imagine that we are visiting or settling into just another one of the United States, which happens to be a tropical paradise. "Chip away at the mass-produced, superficial experiences of tourism. We offer a small piece of real Waikiki." So says the small tourist knick-knack called "Historic Waikiki" produced and distributed by Gaye Chan and Andrea Feeser for purchase by tourists ever-eager for a small momento of their trip. The souvenir packages include a little piece of real Waikiki cement and a short text that unveils the effects of seeking pleasure in a place contorted by colonialism and capitalism.


Damaged Genes: A Legacy of the Vietnam War
Dinh Q. Lê

After 20 years of economic embargo and now dependent on the billions of dollars of foreign investment to jump start a troubled economy, the Vietnamese government has capitulated to the wishes of the United States: bury the issue of Agent Orange. However, in the summer of 1998 in the financial district of Ho Chi Minh city, Dinh Lê opened a souvenir shop in attempt to readdress this repressed history. He sold mass produced and handmade objects—but these weren't your ordinary tourist knickknacks. The objects focused on the issue of birth defects relating to the use of Agent Orange during the war. For example, one could buy a hand-knit baby sweater with two hoods or a frilly baby's dress monogrammed with the company name Monsanto.

image


Roll Out the Red Carpet
Standard and Poor

The performance team of David Henry Brown Jr. & Dominick McGill, or "Standard and Poor", play with the issue of celebrity fascination in the public realm. Arriving at a building in their formal attire, they wait patiently with their red carpet, ready to roll it out when the "celebrity" arrives. A crowd gathers, and the excitement builds in anticipation of this unknown celebrity, as building managers become baffled by the whole situation. Of course, there is no celebrity, there is no need for a red carpet, and the confusion captures all involved in the farce.


Peepshow 28
No Live Girls

At The Lusty Lady, the famous adult entertainment establishment in San Francisco and Seattle, the customer enters a dark booth alone, sits down in front of the monitor and activates the videos with quarters or dollar bills. Yet, instead of the usual menu of porn being served up, the customer will be able to select short videos from a diverse group of artists who engage and explore issues of sexuality, voyeurism, eroticism and gender. Is there a better space to view critical work on these subjects than the authentic space of a peep booth?

image


Citizen's Square
Tomislav Brajnovic

The winners of political battles write (and often rewrite) history—and sometimes, it is not just the history that is rewritten. In Zagreb, the Croatian capital, when new political forces sweep into power, there is often an ideological battle over the names of town squares, streets, and monuments. Recognizing the importance of naming and the consequent relationship to power, Brajnovic has decided to equalize all the people of the town by renaming a town square, “Citizen’s Square.” Using an LCD display placed on a building in this square, the names of all the citizens during the year will appear on the display––every few seconds, as another name appears, power becomes symbolically redefined.


Eminent Domain
Mel Ziegler and Kate Ericson

The various names of house paint often convey a particular value system related to the ideal of the American home. By devising a paint chart based on the history of public housing and housing legislation in the United States, the artists have provided a subversive alternative to the conventional “clean” histories and pointed out the many ironic and contradictory perceptions of public and suburban housing issues. The chart includes such color names as “Red Lining” and “Eminent Domain” as well as colors which have been specifically matched to significant historic public housing structures like “Robert Taylor Homes Brick.” On the chart, each color name corresponds to a small paragraph explaining the meaning and significance of that name. The charts will be distributed by True Value Hardware in their 6,000 stores across the country.

image


Toxic Now
Riverbed Theatre

Against the backdrop of Taiwan’s “miraculous” economic and industrial growth, environmental pollution has emerged as one of the nation’s most pressing concerns. In recent years, the government has enacted environmental protection bills, but industrial companies continue to illegally dump their wastes.
To highlight the immediacy of this problem in the daily life of Taipei, two performers wearing full-body chemical protection suits collected and labeled “samples” they gathered throughout the city—water from street puddles, fallen leafs, dead bugs. Before leaving each site, the performers created a small circle of rice flour, ornamented with yu-lan flowers from the mountain ranges in northern Taiwan. The small white, fragrant “sculptures’ are residual traces of the performance action, replacing the toxic with the natural.

image
website


The Electric Fields of California
Debby and Larry Kline

In the wake of California’s energy crisis, these installations of fluorescent light bulbs strategically placed beneath electrical power towers create an undulating light that is both eerie and beautiful. The catch is that the bulbs are illuminated solely by ambient electricity produced by electrical transmission lines. In other words, no plug required—the bulbs draw their energy from the air surrounding the towers. The environmental and biological effects of this ambient electricity have been hotly debated, but not resolved “scientifically”. Amidst the wake of California’s energy crisis, these electrical fields are a provocative reminder of our energy and environmental woes.

image


A Fox Lives Here Too
Steven Siegel

Using 7 tons of newspaper culled from local recycling centers, Siegel designed a 20-foot monument to the ecology of trash. The piece was designed to decompose over time, and local students who helped to construct it also help to study the processes of nature affecting its degradation. Hidden in the woods amongst trees that may soon face the same fate, this juxtaposition of trash, natural flora and aesthetic form underscores the dissonance between a disposable society, economic progress, and the ephemeral quality of life.

image


grant criteria how to apply   archive our philosophy home