KANSAS CITY, MO, SEPTEMBER 9, 2024: Charlotte Street and the Spencer Museum of Art are thrilled to announce the 10 recipients of the 2024 Rocket Grants awards, a re-granting program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The awardees were selected from a highly competitive pool of 77 applications. For this cycle, the jury consisted of four artists and non-profit leaders: John Engelbrecht (Executive Director, Public Space One, Iowa City, IA); Kendell Harbin (artist and organizer, Kansas City, MO); Katherine Simóne Reynolds (artist and curator, St. Louis, MO); and Jancita Warrington (Executive Director of Native American Affairs for the state of Kansas, Lawrence, KS).
The 10 recipients of the 2024 Rocket Grants will receive project-based grants of $6,000 for a total of $60,000 in funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The selected projects address a wide range of socially-engaged issues, such as food access and environmental justice, topics of immigration through a Spanish-language play, and LGBTQIA identity in the Midwest from an autobiographical lens.
The 2024 Rocket Grants projects include:
COMMUNITY DABKE | Fally Afani Ruzik
The free Community Dabke lifts up Palestinian voices collectively in a joyful dance event to take place at the Lawrence Public Library’s lawn. This program will include a presentation on Palestinian culture, learning movement of the dabke circle dance, and a shared meal.
HIP HOP IN THE GARDEN | Kadesh Flow
“Hip Hop in the Garden” is a series of all-ages accessible celebrations of empowerment that center hip-hop performance and will be supplemented by discussion and education. These events will occur in community garden spaces, allowing the artistic power of the performances to exist in conjunction with food equity and nutrition security efforts in Kansas City.
IT WAS A HELL OF A MIX-UP | Brian Hawkins
“It Was a Hell of a Mix-up” is a short animation that will weave together non-fiction stories gleaned from hundreds of oral history interviews recorded in Missouri French by sociolinguist Rosemary Hyde from 1977 to 1983. This animation project will help people to reconnect with important parts of their heritage and enable us to proudly share these valuable stories with the world.
I NEED A MOMENT OF SOLITUDE | Aisha Imani Sanaa
“I Need A Moment of Solitude: Parents Exploring and Cultivating Wellness” aims to explore art-making as a stress reliever and provide alone time for parents who suffer from or wish to prevent mental and emotional burnout. Taking place at the Hillcrest Community Center in Topeka, KS, these sessions provide an opportunity for parents to practice self-care while their children spend time in a supervised artmaking space.
GLITTER!BUNNY | April Marie Mai and Hollie Blakeney
Glitter!Bunny is a card game that invites players into a vibrant world where communication happens beyond words. Created by Autistic artist April Marie Mai, this game is specifically designed to be inclusive of Autistic players and accessible to everyone. As part of this project, a public game-based event will be held at Strang Park in Overland Park, KS and will be designed for the Autistic community.
1309 | Mazzy Mann
1309 is a theatrical production by Kansas City-based performance artist and playwright Mazzy Mann. An immersive two-act work of stage, sound, and multimedia elements, 1309 is an autobiographical portal into the home of an average Midwestern family grappling with the pressures of suburban working-class society.
EL ARBOL DE AGUADATE | Sofiana Olivera-Abalán
El Arbol de Aguadate / The Avocado Tree is a play that will be presented to underserved Spanish-speaking communities in the Kansas City and Lawrence and Topeka areas. The plan is four performances, two in each location. In this play, the audience sees and hears a story that is seldom told, a universal story of survival. The play humanizes migrants and harnesses the beginnings of empathy.
ONE MIC STAND TV | Alex Harris, River Mckenzie, One Mic Stand KC
One Mic Stand TV is an episodic program featuring various artists, entrepreneurs and makers from the Kansas City area, and will be accessible on YouTube. Viewers will be presented with an intimate look into the creative processes of painting, cooking, filmmaking, audio engineering, and other topics via 30-minute episodes.
BOSQUE BEATS | Alejandro Sabillón
Bosque Beats is a groundbreaking forest festival where trees and other flora take center stage as DJs, reimagining our relationship with nature. By employing advanced AI, Bosque Beats transforms a wooded area near Kansas City into an immersive experience for the senses. This project is a testament to the interconnectedness of living species and a celebration of the intelligence that pulses within even the most unassuming corners of our world.
ADAPTIVE RE-IMAGININGS | Julia Vering
Adaptive Re-Imaginings documents artist Julia Vering’s creative performance work with older adults, people with dementia and residents of long-term care facilities. The documentary project aims to capture Vering’s novel way of engaging a diverse population of long-term care residents and facilities through humor, imagination, and multisensory elements.
Audiences are invited to celebrate this year’s recipients at the Rocket Grant Awards Ceremony, which will take place on Saturday, September 28, 2024, from 6:00-8:00 PM. Hosted at Charlotte Street (3333 Wyoming St, Kansas City, MO 64111), the awards ceremony is an opportunity for audiences to learn more about each project and connect with individual artists in the region. This event is FREE and open to the public.
To schedule an interview or submit other press inquiries, contact Amanda Middaugh, Marketing + Development Director, at [email protected].
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $2.5 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
ABOUT THE SPENCER MUSEUM OF ART
The Spencer Museum of Art, located on the University of Kansas Lawrence campus, explores the intersection of art, ideas, and experiences. With a diverse collection of more than 48,000 works, the Spencer is the only museum in Kansas with contemporary and historic artwork in all mediums from cultures across six continents. The Spencer Museum facilitates arts engagement and research through exhibitions, artist commissions and residencies, conferences, performances, lectures, children’s art activities, and arts and culture festivals. Admission to the Spencer Museum of Art is free. Learn more at spencerart.ku.edu.
ABOUT THE ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR VISUAL ARTS
In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the Foundation has given over $260 million in cash grants to more than 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.
View press release as PDF HERE.
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