The Creative Capital Award – Who Helps Us Decide?

Amie Siegel - Heavy Metal

A multi-element moving image work exploring the intertwined histories of nuclear reactors, uranium minds and Native American land.

Anna Sew Hoy - Psychic Body Grotto

A sculptural installation of bronze "grottos" enlarged from spontaneous gestures in clay.

Gala Porras-Kim - The Mute Object and Ancient Stories of Today

Examines the link between an undesciphered script found on Mesoamerican artifacts and the development of a standardized dictionary for the Zapotec language in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Lorraine O'Grady - MBN - 30 Years Later

The artist's performance persona, Mlle Bourgoise Noire, transforms into a new avatar who protests a money-driven art world to restore the cultural purpose it has lost.

Danielle Dean - Trainers, Part 2

A multi-channel video work, performed and reworked by community members in the Alief neighborhood in Houston, that uses language from Nike commercials and political speeches to investigate how advertising shapes subjects.

Heather Cassils - The Reliance of the 20%: Monument Project

A series of bronze monuments, cast from the artist's attacks on 2000-pound clay blocks and placed at sites where acts of violence towards gender nonconforming people have occurred.

Carolina Caycedo - Be Dammed

An interdisciplinary project investigating the effects that large dams have on natural and social landscapes in several American bio-regions.

A.K. Burns - Negative Space

A multi-channel video installation that presents a surreal narrative of bodies in transition and their relationship to nature, technology, territories and resources.

Travis Wilkerson - Blood Relations

A documentary murder mystery examining the complexities of a racially-charged crime in the filmmaker's own family history.

Dan Schneidkraut - Vore King

A detailed character study of R.P. Whalen, world famous horror host, trash movie guru, carnival sideshow barker, and America's premier purveyor of vorarephilia fetish pornography.

Jon Rubin - The Sitcom

An experimental, transnational sitcom set and shot both in Tehran and Los Angeles, repositioning the conflict and cultural misrepresentation that characterize U.S./Iranian political relations into the absurdist sphere of a domestic comedy.

Jennifer Reeder - As With Knives and Skin

A deadpan glimpse into the lives of both teenagers and adults during the aftermath of a young girl's disappearance in a rural, racially diverse town in Ohio

Carlo Ontal - Kitoko Ya Kolela

A performance piece, series of photo and painting exhibitions, and film drawing on a photojournalist's experience in the Congo.

Jillian Mayer & Lucas Leyva - #PostModem

A multi-platform narrative culminating in a satirical sci-fi pop musical about a girl who frees futuristic Miami from corporate powers with the help of viral videos.

Lily & Honglei - Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization of China

A multimedia installation that utilizes animation and emerging technologies to visualize the metamorphosis created by urbanization in China.

Velez, Ivan - The Ballad of Wham Kabam!

A series of five interconnected comic books that use the tropes and style of the classic superhero genre to tell the story of America's multicultural history.

Wu Tsang - Duilian

A film project exploring the legacy of historical Chinese poet and revolutionary Qui Jin (1857-1907) through a "queer lens," considering Western and non-Western LGBTQ identity constructions.

Katrin Sigurdardottir - Supra Terram

A large-scale installation in which a cave-like structure intersects a building on two levels and redefines the architecture of the building with its volume.

Carrie Schneider - The Readers

An installation of 50 film-based portraits of influential women authors, activists, critics, artists and poets immersed in the act of reading.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz - Verano de Mujeres

A feminist ethno-fiction based on the visionary world-view and sensorial experiences of a group of women in R'o Piedras, Puerto Rico.

Jeanine Oleson - A human(e) orchestra

An ever-changing "orchestra" that uses a range of noises, from conventional music to speech acts, to produce compositions around agreed-upon issues or audiences in need of "music."

Brittany Nelson - Alternative Process

A series of large-scale digital prints examining the materials of alternative process photography through the artist's experimentations with raw photo-chemical materials.

Narcissister - Organ Player

A feature-length experimental art film based on, and elaborating on, the artists' acclaimed performance of the same name.

Jon Kessler - The Time Was Now

An immersive sculpture and video installation dealing with the inevitable march of time.

Titus Kaphar - Jerome Project

An interdisciplinary investigation into the criminal justice system through the lens of the common and traditionally African-American name, Jerome.

Eric Gottesman - The Oromaye Project

A series that takes assassinated Ethiopian novelist Baalu Girma's Oromaye as the point of departure for a transnational participatory public photography project.

Mariam Ghani - What we left unfinished

A collaboration with Afghan filmmakers to examine unfinished state-sponsored films during the years of Afghan Communism (1978-1991) as records of fleeting iterations of the Afghan state, and imagine new narratives from the fragments.

Maria Gaspar - Out of Field

A series of outdoor visual and sonic installations on the West Side of Chicago that bring experiences and narratives from Cook County Jail out into the neighborhood that surrounds the detention facility.

Abigail DeVille - The Bronx: History of Now

A series of 100 site-specific sculptural installations constructed from found objects, fragments of histories and community narratives to tell the story of the present moment in the Bronx.

Mike Crane - UHF42

A 90-minute television program filmed entirely within the confines of an independent television station in the West Bank.

Lee Anne Schmitt - So That I May Come Back

A non-traditional documentary based on the case of Mary Bell, who was 11 years old when she was convicted of killing two small boys in England.

Ry Russo-Young - The Family Movie

A narrative feature film based on the true story of the artist's known sperm donor suing her lesbian mothers for visitation and paternity rights when she was nine years old.

Shawn Peters - The Art of Dying Young

A series of short films that "re-memorialize" young men who were previously memorialized with death murals in Brooklyn; the films, which incorporate augmented reality technology, are intended to be accessed and viewed on smart phones at the site of the memorial ritual.

Lorelei Pepi - Vigil

An interactive installation that uses facial tracking technology to encourage viewers to engage with and stand vigil for animated representations of "the Other."

Pat O'Neill - Drift, Wait, Obey

A multi-screen video installation that presents imagery drawn from life and radically restructured using digital technologies.

Nathan Lotfy - Fire

A feature film following fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in the days leading up to his symbolic act of self-immolation, which sparked the Tunisian revolution and the subsequent Arab Spring.

Jeff Malmberg & Chris Shellen - Teatro

A documentary about villagers in a small Italian farming town who preserve their heritage and confront their community issues by turning their lives into a play.

Shola Lynch - Harriet: Live Free or Die Trying

A narrative film about an unlikely but true action heroine Harriet Tubman

Andy Kropa - Hacking Alzheimers

A wearable system that aims to improve the quality of life for people affected by Alzheimer's disease and dementia by using perpetually-recording cameras as an aid to memory.

Klip Collective - Vacant America

A series of videos projections on vacant structures that draw on submitted stories and imagery to uncover physical residues and memories of each forgotten space.

Maryam Keshavarz - The Last Harem

A feature film set in 19th-century Persia that follows a rebellious cross-dressing musician and her romance with the boy-king Nasir.

Lauren Kelley - Holiday Way

A stop-motion animated video series based on fictional narratives set on or around major holidays.

Christopher Harris - Speaking In Tongues

An experimental, hand-processed 16mm film inspired by Ishmael Reed's novel "Mumbo Jumbo."

Cherien Dabis - No End in Sight

An immersive cinematic experience that follows the story of a young Muslim woman taking part in the Egyptian revolution.

Martha Colburn - Western Wilds

A stop-motion film based on popular stories about the American West written by German author Karl May in the 1890s.

Michael Almereyda - The Happy Man's Shirt

A series of linked short films adapted from Medieval Italian folktales, remained in contemporary settings.

Today, we announced the 2015 Creative Capital Artists in Moving Image and Visual Arts. We could not be more excited about the 46 new funded projects—an incredibly diverse group hailing from 13 states plus Puerto Rico and Canada. We’ve arrived at this day thanks in huge part to the work of our valued colleagues who help us select each group of Creative Capital Artists. While we worked with more than 100 consultants during the ten-month process, two consultants advised us during the entire award round, reviewing submissions at every stage. I asked Mike Plante (Programmer at the Sundance Film Festival and our Program Consultant for Moving Image) and Dean Daderko (Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and our Program Consultant for Visual Arts) a few questions about what it was like to work with Creative Capital on the process.

Lisa Dent: What motivated you to work with Creative Capital as a Program Consultant for this award round?

Mike Plante: Everyone wants to help artists and filmmakers make a project but it’s difficult to know how to actually do it. Creative Capital has made the blueprint. It’s rare to give filmmakers and artists money with few strings attached, but that is exactly what CC does. To be part of a process that finds amazing artists across the country, discuss their ideas and the path they are on – and to then give them not only financial help but real-world advice about balancing work and life. It’s really a dream project.

Dean Daderko: My motivation is pretty simple: I know of no other funding body that is as forward-thinking, as deeply generous, or as profoundly invested in being responsive to artists’ practices as Creative Capital. They fund the projects other organizations wouldn’t even consider! The end game here isn’t a substantial check—their commitment begins well before artists reach this stage, and continues throughout the life of the project, and beyond! Creative Capital understands fundamentally that by working with artists as partners—and by providing not just money, but thought, time and rich reserves of resources and connections—that they can positively and productively shape the future. Their unconventional and deeply responsible approach gives artists an incredible amount of agency, and they’re invited to bring their creative approaches to innovating and developing a game plan that’s uniquely responsive to the goals and concerns of their projects. The success they’ve had with this artist-centric strategy speaks for itself: so many artists will tell you what a dream it is to work with Creative Capital. Of course it doesn’t hurt that the staff are some of the friendliest, most helpful, and well-connected people around either! Ruby Lerner is my hero!

Lisa: You worked with staff throughout the three-stage application process.  What were some of the trends that you noticed in the applications?  Were there ideas, issues or forms that stood out?

Mike: What I like about the application process is learning about new names. Not that I know everything that’s happening on the coasts, either, but its exciting to see so much creative work coming from smaller cities. You always see thoughtful projects on the big social issues and timely subject matter, but getting someone’s personal take on it, especially when they are directly affected, is great to find. We might think we understand viewpoints on the ground in a remote part of the country, but you have to actually hear from the scene there directly. There is also great experimentation crossing forms and styles such as documentaries that challenge viewers and find new ways to explore and experience a subject. Fiction and avant-garde projects that use known-forms in genre (avant-garde film has a LOT of established genres) but push what’s possible in story and style that will hopefully go beyond audience’s expectations.

Dean: I reviewed more than 1000 applications, and the indelible impression I got is that if you want the most trenchant and progressive responses to cultural and sociopolitical issues, artists are the people to ask. Many of the proposals I read—whether they were funded or not—brought inspired ideas to the table by questioning or reinventing institutionalized structures that have become static and bureaucratic. The viable alternatives artists are inventing are increasingly nimble, fluid and responsive to the needs of their participants. We saw many proposals for schools and study programs, and others that brought fresh and thought-provoking approaches to the fields of urban planning (Carolina Caycedo), linguistic translation (Gala Porras-Kim), broadcasting (Mike Crane and Mariam Ghani), and documentary filmmaking (A.K. Burns, Danielle Dean, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Wu Tsang). Just as many artists are finding ways to innovate traditional practices; their approaches to making public sculpture (Heather Cassils, Abigail DeVille and Anna Sew Hoy), analogue photographs (Brittany Nelson), paintings (Titus Kaphar), comic books (Ivan Velez), opera (Janine Olesen) and portraiture (Carrie Schneider) felt vital and refreshing.

Lisa: What excites you about the projects that received the 2015 Creative Capital Award?

Mike: It’s a great mix of individuals. I feel that we found original voices with ideas that are about to “break out” like Shawn Peters, Jillian Mayer & Lucas Leyva, and Dan Schneidkraut. We are also supporting some filmmakers that have carved out a strong body of work but are now embarking on a new journey, like Pat O’Neill, Michael Almereyda and Jennifer Reeder. Even some of the names I’m familiar with over decades of going to festivals are still surprisingly under the radar. A friend loves animation, but they don’t know Martha Colburn? She’s been in tons of festivals for over a decade now. You are into political documentaries? You gotta see what Travis Wilkerson makes. It’s exciting to help connect filmmakers with the audience they should be getting.

Dean: It’s great to see that the 23 Visual Arts projects that received funding represent a group of artists of diverse ages, genders and ethnicities who come from all over the United States, including the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. These folks are visionaries, and it’s exciting to think that the infusion of support they’re receiving from Creative Capital will help them to catalyze projects they’ve been dreaming of creating! Their projects span a broad range of approaches, from ceramics and cast bronze, to video, installation and environmentally-sensitive works. These are artists that lots of people will be talking about and feeling inspired by! I think I can speak for my co-chairs on the Visual Arts committee when I say that I feel very honored to have had a part in offering these artists a chance to realize these dream projects.

Lisa: Have any tips for applicants in 2015?

Mike: Really question what about your project is non-traditional. Does it involve a quirky character? Push harder. Is it because there are long takes? Look deeper. Push yourself to make something you didn’t think you could ever make.

Dean: First and foremost, WORK HARD! Spend time thinking about how to document your work to its best advantage on its own terms—communicating your ideas and getting feedback from people outside of your discipline is a great way to understand options for how to contextualize your work in images or video. Think big, and then think bigger. Challenge yourself: shoot for the stars when you apply!

You can read more about the 2015 Creative Capital Artists on our website here. And save the date for our next open application: we’ll be accepting Letters of Inquiry for Emerging Fields, Literature and Performing Arts projects February 2 – March 2.

Dean Daderko photo credit: Matthew Rowe, Houston