Recipient: Brownbody
Award: $70,000
Aim: Drawing parallels between the Reconstruction era and today’s social justice movements with a new production that combines figure skating, Afro-modern dance, live vocals and Ida B. Wells’ speeches.
Recipient: Deborah Elias Danza Española
Award: $5,000
Aim: Bringing festivity to the east and west sides through a traveling flash mob of flamenco singers and dancers creating Christmas and spring processions.
Recipient: Flying Foot Forum
Award: $30,000
Aim: Bringing the community together with Dancing Through the Streets, a roving, summer adventure where the audience travels to performances at six Lowertown locations, culminating in a group song and dance party.
Recipient: Kala Vandanam Dance Company
Award: $20,000
Aim: Elevating young, high-potential Bharatanatyam dancers through opportunities to participate in an original, professional ensemble production titled “Ritu: The Seasons”.
Recipient: In Progress
Award: $20,000
Aim: Bringing Hmong voices to the silver screen through Qhia Dab Neeg, a two-day Hmong film festival at Metropolitan State University.
Recipient: Metropolitan State University Screenwriting Program
Award: $30,000
Aim: Serving film artists and building community by creating Film Space, a state-of-the art digital cinema theater on the campus of Metropolitan State University.
Recipient: SoulTouch Productions
Award: $50,000
Aim: Engaging young black males in the arts through a fellows program that teaches photography, music, visual arts, filmmaking and writing in the tradition of the legendary media-maker, artist and humanitarian Gordon Parks.
Recipient: Twin Cities Film Fest
Award: $30,000
Aim: Expanding the geographic footprint of the film festival through year-round events and screenings of nationally recognized independent films in new St. Paul venues.
Recipient: Arcata Press/St. Paul Almanac
Award: $45,000
Aim: Bringing dynamic art into neighborhoods by combining the work of local poets and visual artists on posters in trains and buses.
Recipient: Coffee House Press
Award: $5,000
Aim: Fostering community conversations on race and the arts in St. Paul through the production and distribution of coffee cup sleeves featuring the words of St. Paul writers of color.
Recipient: Cracked Walnut
Award: $25,000
Aim: Creating community in different spaces throughout St. Paul by staging more than 50 spoken literature events with local writers and music ensembles.
Recipient: Naomi Cohn
Award: $10,000
Aim: Building community and increasing the well-being of older adults by engaging a professional writer to conduct high-quality arts activities with seniors in St. Paul’s Creative Enterprise Zone.
Recipient: Sarah Peters
Award: $10,000
Aim: Bringing one-of-a-kind, artist-made books to people paddling on Lake Phalen through a custom floating library.
Recipient: Erik Barsness
Award: $25,000
Aim: Stretching ideas of what music can be by creating a set of percussion instruments from ice and using them to play new compositions during the 2017 Winter Carnival.
Recipient: Greg Herriges
Award: $5,000
Aim: Engaging the public in music-making by placing handmade, crank-operated music boxes that play original compositions in public spaces.
Recipient: Mary Ellen Childs
Award: $25,000
Aim: Finding the musicality in baseball through a virtuosic, percussion performance that is influenced by real-life baseball signals and plays from St. Paul Saints coaches and players.
Recipient: One Voice Mixed Chorus
Award: $60,000
Aim: Presenting a gender-bending production of the “Pirates of Penzance,” staged outdoors on St. Paul’s Raspberry Island.
Recipient: The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Award: $50,000
Aim: Combining the talents of a 100-member community-sourced flute chorus and MacArthur Fellow and world-class flutist Claire Chase in a special performance of Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Cutting the Circle of Sounds”
Recipient: Alberto Justiniano
Award: $45,000
Aim: Building trust between St. Paul’s immigrant communities by remaking Shakepeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” from the perspective of the Latino Garcias versus the Hmong Vang family.
Recipient: Full Circle Theater Company
Award: $5,000
Aim: Exploring, through a new production, how theater has changed the lives of diverse St. Paul artists and how, in turn, these artists have shaped the theater community.
Recipient: Heather (Desdamona) Ross
Award: $20,000
Aim: Celebrating the spoken word by bringing together the voices of students with those of professional artists and poets in a series of readings and workshops.
Recipient: Hmong Museum
Award: $20,000
Aim: Preserving the art of Hmong storytelling by hosting a series of public events that share a range of love, ghost, orphan and refugee camp stories.
Recipient: Robert Karimi
Award: $50,000
Aim: Exploring how culture shapes the fear of water with a pool-based performance piece that engages the community to talk about the disproportionate numbers of people of color who cannot swim.
Recipient: Katie Ka Vang
Award: $16,000
Aim: Opening a dialogue around cancer and other serious illnesses through a piece by playwright Katie Ka Vang, based on her experiences with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Recipient: Mobile Comedy Suitcase
Award: $6,000
Aim: Creating space for human connection, art-making and joy with a mobile, suitcase-like container that turns into a stage where people can create and share jokes.
Recipient: The Theater of Public Policy
Award: $60,000
Aim: Turning the entire city into a performance space through delivery of improvisational performance telegrams to offices, parks and homes.
Recipient: Electric Machete Studios
Award: $50,000
Aim: Highlighting the voices of Latinos in St. Paul’s West Side neighborhood by creating an arts hub with studios for music production, visual arts, performance and more.
Recipient: Healing Place Collaborative
Award: $35,000
Aim: Preserving Dakota culture with an artist-created sculptural table that incorporates Dakota place names and cultural information and serves as a focus for discussion and art presentations at public events.
Recipient: Karl Unnasch
Award: $50,000
Aim: Enlivening the Creative Enterprise Zone by transforming a water tower into a beacon wrapped in a backlit, contemporary stained-glass mural.
Recipient: Million Artist Movement
Award: $25,000
Aim: Exploring racial justice, trauma, and healing with a series of art-making events that culminate in a community-driven exhibition.
Recipient: Public Art Saint Paul
Award: $115,000
Aim: Engaging St. Paul residents with the plight of bees through a multidisciplinary, public art project that involves creating bee habitat environments and placing tiny bronze bees in nearby neighborhoods.
Recipient: Public Domain Productions
Award: $25,000
Aim: Creating a community spectacle in the Hamline Midway and Frogtown neighborhoods with a nighttime lantern parade that illuminates the streets with larger-than-life mythical creatures created by local puppet artists and groups.
Recipient: The Drawing Project
Award: $10,000
Aim: Engaging a global community through the act of drawing with virtual art collaborations that will be curated in local exhibitions.
Recipient: Walker West Music Academy
Award: $50,000
Aim: Transforming the look of Selby Avenue through a large-scale permanent art installation by artist and community activist Ta-coumba Aiken for the exterior of the Academy’s new 6,000-square-foot music center.
Recipient: Asian Economic Development Association
Award: $50,000
Aim: Transforming the five-block Little Mekong district with an expanded, two-weekend night market that elevates the work of artists.
Recipient: Center for Hmong Arts and Talent (CHAT)
Award: $30,000
Aim: Strengthening a platform for Hmong artists of all disciplines by expanding the center’s Hmong Arts and Music Festival, which draws thousands to its annual showcase.
Recipient: Dangerous Productions
Award: $10,000
Aim: Enlivening Frogtown through a yearlong series of street-level pop-up performances and adventurous educational opportunities.
Recipient: Dayton’s Bluff Community Council
Award: $25,000
Aim: Creating powerful, provocative art that reflects the community’s dialogues around racism and catalyzes change in viewpoints and perceptions in the area.
Recipient: Northern Lights.mn
Award: $100,000
Aim: Promoting the Green Line as a creative extension of the community by using the light rail line as the backbone of the 2017 edition of Northern Spark, an all-night, multi-venue arts festival.
Recipient: Springboard for the Arts
Award: $30,000
Aim: Bringing together and supporting African-American artists who live and work in Rondo with local businesses and organizations to create small art projects that foster an authentic narrative for the neighborhood.