Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
381 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10003-7022
T +1 212 228 5283
www.rauschenbergfoundation.org
16 emerging arts organizations across the country receive unrestricted operating capital in start-up phase to ensure they can continue pushing boundaries
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RRF) has chosen 16 boundary-pushing arts organizations to receive its second round of SEED grants—unrestricted operating capital that allows recipients in their start-up stage to build the capacity and programming that ensure growth and longevity.
The Foundation concentrates its SEED grants in culturally rich but underfunded regions, allowing grantees to collaborate and build relationships that will propel availability and access to art in their areas. The Foundation selected grantees through an anonymous nomination process in partnership with local cultural leaders, so the award—10,000 USD/year for three years—came as a surprise. Following are this year’s SEED Grantees, listed by region:
Boise, Idaho:
Off Center Dance
Off Center Dance is a modern dance company dedicated to bringing modern dance to Boise and the state of Idaho. Since its inception in 2008, the company has created more than ten new works and performed in Boise, Twin Falls, and McCall, Idaho.
Story Story Night
Story Story Night was founded in 2010 as a live storytelling program that provides a forum for the Boise community to come together to share real experiences, live on stage and without notes.
Visual Arts Collective
Visual Arts Collective creates opportunities to explore, engage, and interact with artists by providing subsidized space to artists and organizations working in visual and performance art, film, music and theater.
Buffalo, New York:
Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo
City of Night, an annual, multi-disciplinary celebration of art, history, culture and sustainability has become the signature event of Emerging Leaders in the Arts Buffalo, a dynamic group of emerging artists, arts professionals and mentors, who network, support and promote one another.
Signal Culture
Signal Culture focuses on experimental media art in collaborative ways. They encourage the creation of new work, building of community, and connection to history in the field of experimental media art by providing artists, researchers, and innovators with residencies, resources, and exhibition opportunities.
Sugar City
Sugar City exists to organize alternative community, arts and cultural events in the Buffalo area. Sugar City creates art and builds community based on participatory culture and a do-it-together attitude. Events and initiatives include music, films, poetry readings, a zine library, meeting space, local craft corner, art gallery, workshops, and workspaces.
Cleveland, Ohio:
convergence-continuum
convergence-continuum is a Cleveland-based theatre company dedicated to expanding the imagination and challenging the conventional notions of what theatre is. Since its founding in 2000, convergence-continuum has staged almost 50 productions.
Ensemble Theatre
Ensemble Theatre serves greater Cleveland and the Midwest region by reintroducing the classics, examining them with new eyes, and supporting the development of new works for the American theater. The theater is committed to non-traditional casting and to providing culturally diverse programming that speaks to issues of contemporary life.
FiveOne Experimental Orchestra
FiveOne Experimental Orchestra is a Cleveland-based music collective of sixteen composers and performers with a ‘no-boundaries’ approach to music. FiveOne’s vision is to create a diverse stream of musical works and to bring an intriguing meld of genres, styles, and artistic disciplines to usual and unusual spaces.
MorrisonDance
MorrisonDance inspires and cultivates public awareness of the art of dance through performances and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Performers are trained in a variety of techniques ranging from modern dance to physical theater, from ballet to yoga, and everything in between. MorrisonDance also explores new marriages between art and science through partnerships with BrainMaster and NASA.
Kansas City, Missouri:
Black House Collective
The Black House Collective (BHIC) endeavors to help musicians work together toward the creation of original music. The workshops serve as a laboratory in which talented performers conduct experiments.
The Fishtank
The Fishtank develops works from concept to concert by providing a low-risk, low-cost environment that nurtures the development of new work and inspires theatrical entrepreneurship. Programs include The Fishtank Residency, open to generative performing artists focused on developing concepts for production, and The Fishtank Performance Studio.
FOKL
FOKL is a do-it-yourself music and art venue where most shows and performances are free to the public. Among its programs, FOKL annually hosts KC Psychfest, a three-day gathering of 30 or so experimental local acts.
Front/Space
Front/Space is an artist-run space for “living, working, and sharing” original programming on an ongoing basis. The space provides an important, accessible venue for promising emerging artists to produce and present experimental, non-commercially driven work including installations, live performances, happenings, and zines.
Phoenix, Arizona:
Black Poet Ventures
Black Poet Ventures is a multimedia performance arts and entertainment company dedicated to promoting, supporting and enhancing the oral tradition artistry of poetry and spoken word movements in the African Diaspora. Their vision is to become an innovative, stable and comprehensive vehicle for inspiring and developing social change and cultural enrichment within the literary arts industry.
Cattle Track Arts and Preservation
Cattle Track Arts and Preservation is a desert-based community of artists who live and work together. From jam sessions to blade-smithing to ceramics, there is a wide range of ways in which the community works together and independently.
The SEED grants reach small- to mid-sized arts organizations at their earliest operational stages, before such organizations may have the structure to execute other fundraising activities. The grants allow organizations to shore up capacity so that they can focus their efforts toward expanding and enriching the local cultural landscape.
“Young institutions have a whole host of hurdles to clear simply to begin the process of raising money,” said Christy MacLear, Executive Director of the Rauschenberg Foundation. “We hope to reach promising start-ups earlier than that, both to acknowledge their initial accomplishments and to ensure their longevity.”
About the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation fosters the legacy of the artist’s life, work and philosophy that art can change the world. The Foundation supports initiatives at the intersection of arts + issues that embody the fearlessness, innovation, and multidisciplinary approach that Bob exemplified in both his art and philanthropic endeavors. In 2012, the Foundation has broadened its philanthropic efforts from seven legacy grantees to 95 across the U.S.; converted Bob’s home in Florida into a dynamic artist residency; served hundreds of artists impacted by Hurricane Sandy; and donated over 100 works of art to leading museums and cultural centers around the world. This fall, the Foundation is sponsoring Marfa Dialogues/New York, a two-month cross-disciplinary program focused on climate change, an issue of deep importance to Bob.
Media contact
Heidi Overbeck, BerlinRosen Public Affairs
T +1 646 200 5325 / heidi.overbeck [at] berlinrosen.com
*Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, Untitled [feet and foliage], ca. 1950. Monoprint: exposed blueprint paper, 58 1/4 x 41 inches. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Carolyn Brown and Earle Brown. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York.
