It looked dicey there for a minute. The folks over at the Cadre biannual grant for visual artists--Deirdre Visser and Code Z affiliate Carla Williams--even extended the deadline for applications in order to make sure word had gotten around about the new grant.
In the end nearly $4000 was granted to 6 visual artists in amounts ranging from $144 to $1066. Deirdre told us last fall that the whole point of the grant program was to establish a self-sustaining ecology of artists who both contribute to and benefit from the fund. Visser and Williams have been collecting small donations from around the art community (most donations were in the amount of $10), the idea being that both the giving and the granting would become an ongoing, sustainable practice that doesn't depend on some Mr. Bigbucks tucked away somewhere in Massachusetts.
In this first round of granting, we're particularly interested in Ifetayo Abdus-Salam who will use her grant to help fund a video that will integrate some 20 existing interviews with women and scholars in an "in-depth examination of the stereotypes of Black women in American society." We find this consonant with the work of Deborah Roberts and Floyd Atkins, which we're currently noting in Chicago, and of course Cristal Chanelle Truscott whose work on similar themes we recently heard about from PRH in Houston.
Among the grantees we also find Jessica Ingram who is continuing a photography project focused on sites of racial conflict and violence in the American south. Other grantees include Andy Fraser, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jessamyn Lovell, and Collaborators Guide, an art collective in London and Tokyo that will stage a participatory fundraising project whose proceeds will be redonated to Cadre. See that? Self-sustaining. They meant what they said.
