Baltimore Indians awarded $10,000
“Baltimore Indians” (working title) will be an online exhibition of archival photos featuring members of Baltimore’s American Indian community in its heyday, curated and captioned by three present-day members of the community — Tiffany Chavis, Stanton Lewis, and Ashley Minner (all Lumbee). A gallery page to host this exhibition will be added to the recently released baltimorereservation.com site, which has thus far focused on the built environment. Additionally, several more locations significant to the historic community will be documented and added to baltimorereservation.com and the Guide to Indigenous Baltimore phone app. The exhibition and updated public resources will be released in October 2022, for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
The Grit Fund is supporting the curatorial work of three members of Baltimore’s American Indian community — Tiffany Chavis, Stanton Lewis, and Ashley Minner (all Lumbee) — who will produce an online photo exhibition featuring members of the community in its heyday, an essay about the exhibition to be written by artist and curator Dare Turner (Yurok), the documentation of additional physical sites in the historic community by photographer Sean Scheidt, and web design by Katie Lively, who will add this important new content to baltimorereservation.com.
Invisible Folx awarded $8,000
Invisible Folx by Kenneth Something, Jabari Lyles, Kairo Miles and Ephraim Nehemiah is a cultural exploration interrogating the lived experiences of people who identify as both Black and non-binary. Curated by a collective of artists and activists Invisible Folx will use various artistic mediums to highlight the narratives of those who exist in this intersection. A particular focus will be placed on illuminating the faces, identities and experiences of those Black non-binary folx living in Baltimore, Maryland. Members of the collective will host a series of in-person cultural experiences intended to collect the stories, build community and provide an opportunity for Baltimore to see the members of our community too often invisible in an effort to generate an intergenerational narrative.
The Grit Fund supports the production and community engagement of several public facing events, that provide Baltimore citizens an opportunity to interact with the artistic expressions in the form of theater, poetry, visual art and storytelling from the cities Black non-binary perspective. This support will contribute to both virtual and in-person displays that maximize accessibility and pubic involvement
Puppets, Masks, and Crankies: Shifting the Story awarded $7,000
Puppetry, Masks and Crankies: Shifting the Story, is a collaboration between Sheila Gaskins, Tara Cariaso, and Maura Dwyer. We aim to expose new intergenerational audiences to traditional art forms through teaching artist workshops, panel presentations, and collaborative performances. Keeping in mind the impact the pandemic has had on learning and mental health, we will create a liberated space for storytelling and art-making that accommodates various learning styles, while fostering compassionate critical dialogue with our peer artist communities to reconnect and reimagine how these artforms take shape in our region.
The Grit is funding cultural organizing with traditional visual storytelling practices to further the conversation across our niche fields and consider how and who is telling their story. This funding will cover workshop and performance materials, facilitator fees, guest artist stipends, space rentals, and marketing to help us reach a broad and new audience. By rooting this event in education, discourse, and visual art, the ideas are made tangible, accessible, and intergenerational. Workshops will focus on one discipline (Crankies, Masks, or Puppetry) and be broken down into history and critical dialogue sessions, or a hands-on maker session with all supplies provided. At the end of the workshop series, we’ll present a culminating performance that highlights each artform with guest contemporary artists showing work that reflects the outcome of our conversations.
PalatePALETTE awarded $7,000
PalatePALETTE by Krystal C. Mack, Matt Freire, Sharea Harris, Erin Nutsugah, and Émile Joseph Weeks is an ongoing digital & print project examining Baltimore’s varied food relationships at the intersection of art and design. PalatePALETTE’s goal is to explore the untold food narratives of Baltimore while investigating the overlooked and unexpected correlations between food, politics, place, and object. Issue II of PalatePALETTE will explore social media’s influence on the livelihoods of food workers, food businesses, and Baltimore City’s food culture as a whole. The intended outcome is to create an artifact rooted in social gastronomy that will allow PalatePALETTE readers to understand the role of influence, social capital, and the internet in designing our food future.
The Grit Fund supports the collaborative creation, design, and publishing of Issue II of PalatePALETTE. The grant will also support the production of the PalatePALETTE Radio podcast, and two public discussions touching on issues such as food access and regional cuisine.
Community Weaving Studio awarded $7,000
Ọmọlará Williams McCallister and Najee Haynes Follins are building a community weaving studio space in Baltimore. This will be a place where people–regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability or prior knowledge or skills–will be welcomed into the wonderful world of weaving. Our weaving studio will provide free, subsidized, and sliding scale weaving co-teaching spaces and loom time to anyone who wants to learn. The work of the weaving studio will build upon and complement the existing foundation provided by our host space Blue light Junction.
The Grit Fund supports rent for the physical space that the Weaving Studio will be housed in. The Grit fund also support the labor that goes into organizing and running the space.
Funktopia Nation awarded $6,000
By Petula Caesar, Jonathan Gilmore, Stevanie Williams, Jermeka Warren, Ben Pierce, Myles Gilmore, Phil Thomas, Mary Ellen Mink, Stephanie Edwards aka “Safiyatou,” Tamika Peters, and Chris Ashworth.
Funktopia Nation is two multi-media creativity intensives happening in July and September 2022, presented by a collective of Baltimore-based creatives led by Jonathan Gilmore. Activities will take place at The Voxel Theater, and will include a gallery exhibit spotlighting BIPOC visual artists, and interactive workshops for adults and young people participating in the Youth Resiliency Workshop in Cherry Hill. Both intensives will culminate with a theatrical concert on the final night. As a curatorial collective led by Gilmore, Funktopia Nation interrogates the presentation of BIPOC art primarily framed in trauma. While Funktopia Nation recognizes that BIPOC artists’ history of trauma often informs their work, we do not want it to be the only lens, or the lens that gets the most attention. Funktopia Nation is committed to ensuring that the lens of trauma and long-standing tropes that find their way into BIPOC creativity do not negatively impact the artistic genius that lives in these creatives. Funktopia Nation creates and holds space for art that expresses triumph and revolutionary joy in visual artistic expression and in performance art.
The Grit Fund is providing partial financial support for the work of this collaborative to display revolutionary joy in visual and performance art by BIPOC creatives.
What The Water Gave Me/Things My Mother Taught Me awarded $5,000
What the Water Gave Me/Things My Mother Taught Me is an experimental dance film/documentary platforming Black and brown liberation practices in the body. The film, a collaboration between choreographer and performance artist Alexis Araminta Renee and filmmakers Nia Hampton and Kirby Griffin is a visual archive of Alexis’ choreographic research rooted in Black and brown histories and placemaking in Baltimore and the Chesapeake region with an emphasis on migrations, mourning, folklore and ancestral knowledge and traditions.
HellBond: Dancing with the Spirits awarded $5,000
HellBond: Dancing with the Spirits by Jia Le Ling and Michael Young is a two-pronged endeavor—performance and workshops—to sincerely engage Baltimoreans about the culture, artistic forms, and constantly-evolving Asian identity. With the East and Southeast Asian notion of Hell as a transitory and non-pejorative space for uplifting good and bad souls, the performance shows how traditions offer spiritual reparation, healing for the Asian community, and alternate ways of embodying metamorphosis. As dancers and musicians from an eclectic range of traditional and modern Asian artistry perform live, audiences pass through an exhibition space that takes visual reference from the East Asian Hell space. The workshops conducted by the performers offer a brief history of their craft and explain the difficulties of preserving, modernizing, and practicing traditional art in contemporary society. At the end of the exhibition, there will be a film screening of the performance and an artist talk by the curators.
The Grit Fund supports the curation and programming of the performance on opening night, the staff required to run the entire show, all production of the Hell-inspired exhibition space, and the graphic design and communication work for the entire show.
Latin(X)equis | Baltimore awarded $5,000
Latin(X)equis | Baltimore is a virtual exhibition and interview series documenting, exhibiting, and celebrating Baltimore’s Latinx Artist Community. Latinx artists (artists of Latin American descent living and working in the US) have long been an omitted group across historical archives, museum collections, and gallery representation. With Latin(X)equis | Baltimore we hope to contribute to the disruption of this stifling trend. We will highlight 8 prominent Baltimore based artists, critics, and curators as we address the rich diversity of identities and aesthetics found within the Latinx artist umbrella.
Latin(X)equis | Baltimore is a program of La Valentina Podcast, a podcast and exhibition platform that celebrates queer Latinx artists and their accomplices in the art worlds. The program is led by Hoesy Corona and Stephanie Mercedes and is produced by Zeos Greene.
The Grit Fund supports in-depth audio/visual interviews with Baltimore based Latinx artists that are designed to document the ideas, inspirations, approaches, and artistic insights of each creative. The grant will make it possible to pay for artist honorariums, and will partially fund a virtual or in-person exhibition/gathering event.
Pellis::Terra awarded $5,000
Pellis::Terra (by Jonna McKone, Se Jong Cho, and Elena DeBold) is an art collective developing interactive exhibitions and publications that explore the ways art can create a new language and consciousness through the expression and engagement of multiple timescales (human, generational, and geological) and spatial scales (individual bodily, community, and landscapes). On this multidisciplinary foundation, we aim to create exhibitions, dialogue and increase awareness of environmental and social issues through community engagement and artistic production that imagines a more reciprocal relationship with nature.
Grit Fund will be used to support an environmental art and science collaborative that will create a collective, a group exhibition, and lay the groundwork for a publication. Our first group show will include environmental/social scientists and the visual and sonic work of a core group of collaborators and artists. Through the effort, we will begin forming an environmental art-science coalition, and meaningful engagement with community members around climate change.
The Jury
A. Moon (she/they)
is an experimental film and video maker whose work has screened nationally and internationally. She has been the recipient of awards from the Princess Grace Foundation and numerous film festivals. In recent years, she has also been a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow, a fellow with the Center for Asian American Media, a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award winner (x3), a Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance Rubys grantee for media (x2), and a Sondheim Prize Semi-Finalist (x3).
Amy Reid (she/they) – Grit Fund 2019 recipient
is a Baltimore-based queer electronic musician, producer, sound and visual artist striving to transform spaces sonically, socially, and visually. Since 2010, she has toured nationally and internationally in her band Chiffon and solo in the UK, France and Portugal and has shared the stage with critically acclaimed artists. Ranging from DIY foundations to Museums, she has performed at The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, The Walters Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Kennedy Center, and at the Red Bull Amaphiko Festival held in Baltimore, MD 2018.
In addition to her music practice, she founded Baltimore’s GRL PWR Collective in 2014 whose mission is to create platforms for women and LGBTQ identifying people, elevating visibility for under-represented artists and talent.
Ayla Jai (they/them)
is an artist native to Baltimore City. Their love of creative expression has led them to publish poetic works, appear on stage and screen, and lead educational workshops for local youth. They have worked in event coordination, community engagement and communications acting as a support to numerous nonprofits throughout Baltimore, andcontinue that work as a juror with The Grit Fund.
Rachel Bone (she/her) – Grit Fund 2019 recipient
is an artist, writer and arts organizer in Baltimore City. In her 18 years in Baltimore, she has grown a socially conscious apparel line, co-founded an arts collective, nurtured an active art practice, written about art, craft, and entrepreneurship in the Mid-Atlantic region, taught print and digital arts at Towson University, and co-founded a thriving international animation festival featuring live music and performances. She is an enthusiastic advocate for artists and creative entrepreneurs in Baltimore, and currently works at an arts non-profit supporting arts programming in schools. Rachel is a 2019 recipient of the Grit Fund award for the Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival.
Talbolt Johnson (he/him)
is an alchemist, dancer, dreamer, and advocate for dance since 2005. He pursued a career in art only to discover movement for over a decade in the Baltimore area and the east coast. Johnson explores the functions of the human body, imagination, mythos, and space in unison. His work attempts to contemplate and comment on the intersection between expression and identity. He is a street dancer, writer, and musician of life.