FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Ruby Lerner, (212) 598-9900, ext. 229

CREATIVE CAPITAL FOUNDATION AWARDS 2006 GRANTS
Initial grants totaling more than $400,000 are given to artist projects in the performing arts, emerging fields, and, for the first time, innovative literature

NEW YORK, NY (February 8, 2006) – Creative Capital Foundation, the national arts organization that supports individual artists, announces the recipients of its 2006 grants. Sixty-one artists representing 43 projects in the performing arts, emerging fields, and innovative literature received initial awards of $10,000. As the projects develop, the foundation offers additional funds; projects may receive as much as $50,000 each through the tenure of the multi-year grant and at least $1 million has been committed to the 43 projects.This year the foundation added innovative literature as a new category. The funded writers, along with their fellow grantees, can now participate in Creative Capital’s distinctive Artist Services Program. For grantees, this program offers skills-building assistance in areas such as fundraising, networking, marketing, and strategic planning with the goal of advancing both their projects and their careers. So far Creative Capital has devoted more than $3 million to the Artists Services Program, serving nearly 300 artists in its seven-year history.

Selected from among 2,205 applications, the funded projects come from as many as 14 states across the country. About the new class of grantees, Creative Capital President Ruby Lerner said, “We know that with these projects, these talented individuals are given the opportunity to further pursue their goals, which is not only energizing for them, but for their audiences, their communities, other artists, and not incidentally, those of us who get the chance to help facilitate their ideas. We very much look forward to supporting these grantees, helping them grow their projects; encouraging their coming together as a creative community; and helping them to engage a wider public.”

Foundation Update
With these awards, Creative Capital’s roster of artist projects grows to 242. Last year the foundation issued grants in the visual arts and film/video. Many of those grantees attended Creative Capital’s Artist Retreat in August 2005, the kickoff event of the Artist Services Program. Through the grant program and its Professional Development Program (a series of public workshops for artists held across the country), Creative Capital has served more than 1,000 artists. In addition, the foundation’s newly launched State Research Program will examine the feasibility of adapting its comprehensive model of support through partnerships with state-wide arts programs in Arizona and Maine.

About Creative Capital
Founded in January 1999, Creative Capital Foundation is a national nonprofit organization that supports individual artists pursuing innovative approaches to form and content in the visual and performing arts, film/video, emerging fields, and innovative literature. To date, the organization has awarded more than $5 million to 242 artist projects and has provided those artists with a range of advisory and skills-building services.

Since its inception, Creative Capital has developed a unique system of support for artists that is integrated, multi-faceted, and sequential. Drawing from concepts from both the venture capital and nonprofit sectors, the foundation commits to a long-term partnership with its funded artists through the life of the project. In addition, grantees agree to share a small percentage of any net profits generated by their projects with Creative Capital, which applies these funds toward new grants. A complete list of grantees, profiles of funded projects, and up-to-date grant cycle information can be found online at the foundation’s website.

CREATIVE CAPITAL FOUNDATION 2006 GRANTEE PROJECTS

Emerging Fields

Cory Arcangel (Brooklyn, NY) Digital Arts
D.I.Y.W.I.K.I. – An open-source website detailing methods of media intervention and hacking, embodying the ethic of openness and generosity among the closed field of hackers, home hobby programmers and new media artists

Luca Buvoli (New York, NY) Digital Arts
The Non-Adventures of Not-a-Superhero – A series of one-minute animations, applying the strategies, characters, and techniques of television sitcom and action programming to existential dilemmas and situations

REDUX (Los Angeles, CA) Digital Arts
CALLSPACE – A sound-art installation employing six solar-powered cell phones, reclaiming urban spaces not yet incorporated into the global community and examining the relationship of cellular technology to the value of public and private space

Laura Carton (New York, NY) Multidisciplinary
Investor Relations – An art-world intervention and a working investment club, exploring the clandestine pornography holdings of major United States corporations and the context within which political policies are formed

Brody Condon (Douglaston, CA) Digital Arts
The Youth of the Apocalypse – An animated painting and video installation, reinterpreting Flemish painter Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment, combining the visual style of the 15th century religious painting with the computer-animated landscape of video games

Hassan Elahi (New Brunswick, NJ) Digital Arts
Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project – A self-surveillance project, involving a series of installations, performances, and websites using Elahi’s self-surveillance to critique contemporary investigative techniques

MTAA + RSG (Brooklyn, NY) Digital Arts
Want – A six-channel video installation using Internet peer-to-peer networks and actors portraying the obsessive desires of six types of common Internet users

Auriea Harvey (Gent, Belgium) Digital Arts
144 – A 12-part online animation, inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, told without dialogue or text, using image, animation, music, sound, and viewer interaction

Kenjji & Kito Jumanne-Marshall (Detroit, MI) Multidisciplinary
KuroManga Magazine – An independent comic book series, combining American hip-hop superhero characters with Japanese Manga-style anime environments

Amelia Kirby, Donna Porterfield, & Nick Szuberla (Whitesburg, KY) Multidisciplinary
Thousand Kites – A community-based performance, web, and radio project, centering on the United States prison system, and drawing on projects by the groundbreaking collective Appalshop and by Szuberla’s own group Holler to the Hood

Brian Knep (Boston, MA) Digital Arts
Healing Pool – An interactive floor projection, inspired by reflecting pools and historic spaces, offering a transformative experience that is at once multisensory, meditative, and formal

Golan Levin (Pittsburgh, PA) Digital Arts
Observation as Interaction: Eye Contact Systems – A series of large-scale artworks from wall projections to robotic sculptures that play with the idea of surveillance by returning the viewer’s gaze using tracking software and a simulated return glance

Jane Marsching (Roslindale, MA) Digital Arts
About Here and Later: Data Mining the North Pole – A series of digital images and sculptures, exploring both scientific and myth-based impressions of The North Pole, while detailing the collapse of the area due to environmental changes

Sheryl Oring (Brooklyn, NY) Multidisciplinary
I Wish To Say – A performance work, engaging public political dialogue and women’s historical role as listeners, using carbon copies of typed postcards that contain texts dictated by viewers

Jakub Segen, Marek Walczak, & Martin Wattenberg (New York, NY) Digital Arts
No Place – An interactive installation and website, using data, images, and texts from participants and creating virtual structures that act as a shared and ever-expanding vision of Utopia

Paul Vanouse (Buffalo, NY) New Genres
Latent Figure Protocol – A multimedia installation, beginning with taped live science experiments, creating representational visual art works using DNA samples

Stephen Vitiello (Richmond, VA) Audio
Sound Objects/Open Space – A series of sculptural sound installations and a stereo CD, collected from the artist’s neighborhood in Richmond, VA, investigating the way divergent soundscapes affect each other and change the listener’s experience

Allison Wiese (Houston, TX) Multidisciplinary
Didn’t He Ramble (Working Title After the New Orleans Funeral Song) – An architectural urban event, relocating debris and rubble from a demolished structure in Houston’s Midtown district, exploring issues of local geography, real estate development, and the changing urban landscape

Innovative Literature

Jeffrey Allen (Far Rockaway, NY) Prose
Song of the Shank – A novel based on the life of fabled 19th century African American pianist and singer Blind Tom, his lack of vision becoming a metaphor for both the writer’s and reader’s inability to hear him play

Alan Gilbert (Brooklyn, NY) Poetry
new poetry manuscript – A full-length poetry manuscript, inspired by images of the grotesque found everywhere, employing longer poetic forms within a more condensed idiom

Christian Hawkey (Brooklyn, NY) Poetry
VENTRAKL – A book that folds poetry, prose, biography, and imagery into an experimental translation of 19th century German Expressionist George Trakl, exploring Trakl’s relationship to his own time and ours

Cole Swenson (Iowa City, IA) Poetry
Ours: The Gardens of Andre Le Notre – A book blending poetic text with art criticism that provokes questions about the 17th century mindset on property and looks at the shift of baroque gardens in France from private to public property

Performing Arts

Mason Bates & Anne Patterson (Oakland, CA) Experimental Music
Mercury Soul: An Electro-Acoustic Evening – Chamber and electronic music integrated with a projected video installation, accompanied by a DJ playing ambient electronica on turntables and a double bass, and an ensemble playing five of Bates’s chamber works

Lisa Bielawa (New York, NY) Experimental Music
Chance Encounter – A site-specific music work performed by a vocalist and as many as 20 musicians in public places, varying each audience member’s experience depending on the location, and bringing experimental music to common accessible locations

Michael Bryant, Grisha Coleman, Jesse Gilbert, John Oduroe, & Robert Peagler (Pittsburgh, PA) Interdisciplinary
echo::system – A series of site-specific performance installations inspired by natural and human-made habitats, consisting of several “actionstations” which simulate a volcanic island, the ocean floor, and a desert

Rude Mechanicals (Austin, TX) Theater
The Method Gun – A series of vignettes using the techniques of the Rude Mechanicals theatre company and following the life of Stella Burden, the architect of the fictitious Method Gun technique

Radiohole (Brooklyn, NY) Theater
Fluke (The Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep) or Dick Dick Dick – A new theater work by the ensemble Radiohole, paralleling late 19th century spiritualism with the technological advancements of our own era

Danny Hoch (Brooklyn, NY) Music Theater
A Word is Born – A large-scale music theater piece about the birth of hip-hop culture, chronicling the cultural, political, and economic forces at work in New York City’s outer boroughs during the 1970’s

Joan Jeanrenaud & Alessandro Moruzzi (San Francisco, CA) Experimental Music
ARIA – An evening-length music installation, combining Jeanrenaud’s original music with Moruzzi’s set, lighting, and video design, inspired by the decline in the natural environment and the politics that surround the issue

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Oakland, CA) Theater
Scourge – A hip-hop theater work about the history of Haiti, blending Afro-Caribbean Jazz music, folkloric and contemporary movement, and spoken word

Gulgun Kayim (Minneapolis, MN) Interdisciplinary
Self-Portrait – An eight-character site-specific performance installation exploring memory and identity, using the artist’s own Turkish Cypriot history, along with interviews with members of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot Diaspora

Locust (Seattle, WA) Interdisciplinary
Mockumentary – A collaborative performance work integrating dance, music, and video by the ensemble Locust, and exploring acts of self-mythology through fictional documentary videos

Ledoh Ledoh (San Francisco, CA) Theater
Signature Required: Life During Wartime – A series of short butoh-based dances accompanied by an electronic score and projected video images, investigating the encroachment of authority on personal freedom

Mickle Maher (Evanston, IL) Theater
Treasure – A two-character play, mixing text and staging from the 2004 presidential debates with absurdist and minimalist theater techniques to mimic a children’s bedtime story

Sarah Michelson (New York, NY) Dance
Ender – An abstract evening-length dance that incorporates the work of an architect and a sculptor, allusive in meaning and referencing ownership, luxury, and stardom

Bebe Miller (New York, NY) Dance
Necessary Beauty – A series of short, self-contained dance works with visual projections, using athletic theatrical choreography to address elemental metaphors of beauty and truth

David Rousseve (Pasadena, CA) Interdisciplinary
Searching for Angels in a Time of War: Bittersweet 2 – A dance-theater work with storytelling, digital technology, and Portuguese Fado music, using African American history to draw connections between spirituality and technology

Sophiline Shapiro (Long Beach, CA) Dance
The Magic Flute – A re-imagining of Mozart’s opera as a Cambodian classical dance, interpreting Enlightenment-era work in the style of the artist’s native country

Susan Simpson (Los Angeles, CA) Puppetry
Lead Feet and Nothing Upstairs: A History of the Lifelike – A puppet work about the history of simulated bodies, in which characters interact through the use of miniature scrims, moving projectors and mirrors

Tamango Van Cayseele (New York, NY) Dance
Bay Mo Dilo – A dance and music performance, exploring the French Caribbean and the communicative power and political significance of its culture, and the effect of colonizing native cultures on contemporary life

Ricki Vincent (Fort Worth, TX) Puppetry
Discipline – An hour-long puppet show combining Japanese Bunraku and American Burlesque, performing some of the actual routines by Burlesque stars from the early 20th century

Kristina Wong (Los Angeles, CA) Theater
Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – A comedic multimedia solo performance about mental illness among Asian American women, combining monologues, movement, and a host of pop culture references

Nami Yamamoto (New York, NY) Dance
the last word was PAPIREPOSE – An experimental dance about the boundaries between reality and dreams, and conscious and unconscious states, using episodic short pieces of solos, duets, and trios on a bare stage

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Creative Capital Foundation
65 Bleecker Street, 7th floor
New York, NY 10012
http://creative-capital.org
212 598 9900