Media Release

Kansas City, MO & Lawrence, KS, May 23, 2011 – The selection panel for this year’s Rocket Grants chose ten multidisciplinary projects to receive funding.

The scope of the awards includes several projects that artists have designed to support the growth and development of the regional arts community - through creating new artists’ exhibition spaces and programming, providing curatorial, manufacturing and marketing opportunities for other artists, and initiating a conversation about the rewards and challenges of life as an artist in and around Kansas City. A number of other projects engage a broad community audience through such diverse topics and practices as space science, electro-acoustical music, gender construction, participatory projections onto public buildings, and the life and death of chickens. Several projects involve events or performances, and audiences and participants range from senior citizens to drag queens. For the first time,Rocket Grants will fund a documentary and a related website, associated with a project that connects people to sites of local political resistance.

Applications were received from throughout the 80-mile eligibility zone, and involved at least 120 artists – either as individuals or as members of collaborative groups. Grant recipients in 2010 were not eligible to reapply in 2011. The final selections involve 20 artists, in six individual projects and four collaborations:

• DANIEL EICHENBAUM*, BOB RIDDLE, CHERYL MELFI, RICHARD JOHNSON, REBECCA ASHE: DARK MATTER PRESENTS “ASCENT”

  A community-built balloon will carry high-resolution cameras to the edge of space, connecting local artists and scientists in the process. The resulting images will generate an hour-long performance featuring live electro-acoustic music and narration at Union Station's Gottlieb Planetarium.

• ASMA KAZMI: PLAYING GENDER

  This is a transdisciplinary art project celebrating the precarious fabrication of gender artifice and exaggeration. It will consist of documentary footage and reconstructed audio/visual material gathered from research in India among the hijra community, live performances, workshops, and programmed discussions on issues of gender construction, sexuality and ritual.

• CAITLIN HORSMAN: RESISTANT HISTORY

  This project aims to reframe political reform as a local activity by collecting stories of progressive change in the Kansas City area and making them available via the web to educators, citizens and artists. Resistant History will map sites of change in the history of our region through the creation of a group of films, a collection of documentation, and a series of downloadable neighborhood “tours” that engage the viewer in the urban environment.

• NICOLE MAUSER*, CORY IMIG, AMY KLIGMAN, MISHA KLIGMAN & CALEB TAYLOR:PLUG PROJECTS

  This is an artist-run curatorial collaboration designed to nurture critical dialogue, expand the scope of art being shown in the area, and cross-pollinate regional and national artists in Kansas City. It involves a new collective exhibition space, a “critique night” series, experimental curatorial practices and an online presence.

• JUDITH LEVY: NV IN KC

  Levy will work with videographers, actors, non-actors, artists and musicians in Lawrence and Kansas City to create a faux documentary that examines difficult subject matter with wit and humanity. This project will consist of an initial 20- to 30-minute video episode, followed by five additional 15-minute episodes, featuring a story that humorously explores envy as a motivating force in a regional arts community.

• ELIZABETH LOVETT* & YAIR KESHET: DISCRETE CURIOSITIES

  The artists will build a mathematically derived display system that will act as a postmodern Cabinet of Wonders. This display will travel to public spaces around Kansas City, and will juxtapose the work of regional (and a few national) artists together with that of scientists and other researchers. Each exhibit will be curated based on three thematic groupings, or “sets”.

• DANIEL PARKS: COMMUNITY PROJECTION WEEK

  The presentation of this project will occur over the course of one week. Each night, Parks will facilitate the creation of a unique projection art piece on the outside of a different community center or secondary school across the Kansas City Metro. These events will involve local residents in helping to create material and performances to celebrate their local community.

• ERIC DOBBINS* & KELLY CLARK: FIELD TRIP PUBLISHING

  This project aims to inspire eight emerging Kansas City area artists to consider experimenting with new art making practices, collaboration, and marketing. It will engage new art audiences by producing affordable art multiples and maintaining a dynamic, active online presence, and will initiate active distribution in a way that will bolster the region's art market and provide further financial support to local artists.

• AMBER HANSEN: THE STORY OF CHICKENS: A REVOLUTION

  This project features a nomadic chicken coop, designed to be both functional and beautiful and to be inhabited by five heritage chickens. It will reconnect the community with its food cycle when the birds that people have tended are killed and eaten at a communal meal.

• JULIA VERING: YOU LIVE HERE TOO

  This will be a multimedia performance utilizing video, stop-motion animation, an original score, and local senior citizens as actors and oral historians. The project examines the ways in which we construct identities and meaning through storytelling, congregated living and age-segregated recreation. Blurring truth and fiction through an absurd framework, participants will be given the opportunity to both become someone else, in the way that drama allows, and also reveal their true character through the sharing of personal histories.

All the projects applied for, and received, the full $4,000 award.

The jurors for this year’s selection panel were a diverse group of artists and arts professionals that included both national and local representation:

Shana Berger: Interdisciplinary artist with a focus on innovative community and public art, writer, curator and Executive Director of the Coleman Center for the Arts in York, Alabama

Ulysses Jenkins: Award winning experimental video and performance artist with a background in mural painting and collaboration with musicians, professor at UC Irvine in both the Studio Art and African American Studies Program

Peggy Noland: Interdisciplinary artist, clothing designer, instructor at the Kansas City Art Institute, downtown business owner, and recipient of a 2010 Rocket Grants Award as part of a collaborative team

Marguerite Perret: Interdisciplinary installation artist with an interest in land use, conservation, women’s health and other social concerns, professor of Art and Design at Washburn University, Topeka

Raechell Smith: Writer, curator, Director of the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, and a member of the Rocket Grants steering committee

Panelists first reviewed applications online through the CaFE (Call for Entry) system at www.callforentry.org after the deadline closed on April 1, and selected their top choices to carry forward to an on-site meeting in Kansas City in May. The quality of the applications was high, and there were more excellent proposals than could be funded.

Rocket Grants award up to $4,000 to individuals and groups of artists for high quality, innovative and public-oriented artwork that happens outside of typical galleries, museums and arts districts. Artists are encouraged to address the community at large, to strengthen the arts community, or to choose a smaller, targeted audience. Rocket Grants also support proposals by artists or groups who are interested in expanding studio practice in new ways, and developing new audiences.

This is the second year of the awards, in which a total of $40,000 will be distributed to artists living within an 80-mile radius of metropolitan Kansas City. Completed and in-progress projects from the first year of funding can been seen atrocketgrants.wordpress.com. The Rocket Grants program has recently been guaranteed at least another two-year cycle of funding by the Warhol Foundation.

The program is funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and is implemented by a partnership between the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas.

 Funded Projects, supplementary information (140 KB)