Announcing the 2014 winners of the South Florida Knight Arts Challenge
Photo: bluapple Poetry Network by the Jason Taylor Foundation. Credit: Michael Hopkins / Gerlinde Photography. Related Link
“Making art general in South Florida: the 2014 Knight Arts Challenge winners” by Jessica Hodder on Knight Blog
“47 ideas win $2.29 million in South Florida Knight Arts Challenge” – press release (12/01/2014)
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Each year since 2008, Knight Foundation has asked South Florida, “What’s your best idea for the arts?” Looking back on the growth of the arts in our community these past seven years is astounding. Last year, we celebrated the opening of the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, YoungArts’ new home in the Bacardi Building, and exciting new leadership at Miami City Ballet. We have seen scrappy, guerilla-style projects grow into important grassroots anchors of our arts community. And we have seen artists from South Florida and beyond flock to the streets to create the tapestry of our city. Knight can’t take credit for this cultural renaissance, but we are pleased with the small part we play to help seed creative ideas across the community.
To date, Knight has received more than 8,000 ideas from across the tri-county area for the challenge, nearly 1,200 this year alone. Over the past 12 months, we have enjoyed experiencing past Arts Challenge winners – The Swamp at the Miami Book Fair, GableStage’s “Antony & Cleopatra,” and Teo Castellanos’ one-man play “Third Trinity” to name a few. Today, we’re excited to announce this year’s challenge winners, 47 projects that will share in $2.29 million. Our panel of local readers carefully reviewed each submission and finalist proposal and developed a group of recommended winners, which our board approved. Now, we can share that list with you.
Running the Arts Challenge gives us an opportunity to look across ideas and see what themes are emerging for arts in our city. For the first time in the history of the Arts Challenge, literature ruled. You’ll also see several ideas that include public involvement in some way – a theme that we’re seeing in other communities as well. Finally, as with previous years, we’re seeing the arts delve deeper and deeper into communities, with ideas winning in Key West, Doral, Hialeah, Opa-locka, and many other neighborhoods.
The full list of winners is below.
Tonight, we also recognize Ruth Shack with an award honoring her years of dedicated service to our arts community. Ruth designated her $50,000 award to The Miami Foundation, which will distribute the funds to arts organizations throughout the community via a competitive process.
This year, we ran the third People’s Choice Award, a text-to-vote portion of the Knight Arts Challenge where YOU get to decide the winners. Our six nominees rallied nearly 7,000 votes, and we’re happy to share that the Key West Art and Historical Society will take home the $20,000 cash prize!
Congratulations to them and a big thank you to all who sent in their vote.
Don’t forget, the Knight Arts Challenge will open for applications again in early 2015. If you haven’t already, please sign up for our mailing list for updates and most importantly, START DREAMING.
Tatiana Hernandez is Knight Foundation’s arts program officer.2014 South Florida Knight Arts Challenge Winners
Recipient: Amanda Keeley
Award: $50,000
To foster dialogue surrounding the visual arts, EXILE Books will migrate throughout Miami raising awareness about artists’ books, or publications conceived of as works of art in and of themselves. EXILE evolves at each location, presenting a thematic selection of titles paired with performances, workshops, and events. Created by visual artist Amanda Keeley, EXILE offers a range of publications including self-published limited edition books, small press monographs, journals, zines, rare titles and ephemera. This hybrid art installation and retail store seeks to raise awareness about artists’ publications and catalyze debate around contemporary, independent publishing.
Recipient: Andrew Yeomanson (DJ Le Spam)
Award: $35,000
To preserve the art of analog recording, City of Progress studio, which allows local musicians the chance to record on vintage equipment, will upgrade its facility. Established in 2003, City of Progress provides classic analog recording equipment and vintage instruments at low cost to Miami’s musicians and artists. The studio also provides analog-to-digital transfer and preservation services to artists and labels whose body of work exists in formats no longer supported by most studios. By providing high-quality recordings, the studio hopes to create a growing catalog of recordings that reflect Miami’s dynamic music community.
Recipient: Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE)
Award: $60,000
To bring a bit of the Everglades into the city, Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) will create billboards emblazoned with large-scale images and literary works reflecting the South Florida outdoors created by its artists in residence. Timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service in 2016, the “wild billboards” will be strategically placed throughout South Florida’s urban core, so that the view of a billboard and its surroundings make a complete statement. Artworks such as Susan Silas’ striking images of extinct birds and Adam Nadel’s aerial photography of the stark boundaries between urban and wilderness areas will encourage viewers to reconsider these sites, and serve as a reminder that the River of Grass preceded our cities and continues to “flow” just to the west.
Recipient: BFI (Bas Fisher Invitational)
Award: $150,000
To raise the profile of Miami artists, the Bas Fisher Invitational will take its “Weird Miami” shows and bus tours to exhibition spaces around the world in a global gallery swap. A previous Knight Arts Challenge winner, “Weird Miami” exhibitions and bus tours turn locals into tourists as they discover new artists and unnoticed places around the city. With new funding, Bas Fisher Invitational will take “Weird Miami” to Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and other cities.
Recipient: Bookleggers
Amount: $30,000
To bring literature to more Miamians, Bookleggers will expand its community mobile library, which provides books for free, for trade or by donation. The library currently holds events each month at venues such as public parks, art galleries, museums, bars and schools. With upwards of 300 people attending each Bookleggers event, the library has exchanged thousands of books with people across Miami-Dade County. Knight Foundation funding will help Bookleggers continue its community outreach, in addition to providing a free/low-cost used book market for Miami’s literary community.
Recipient: Books & Books
Award: $80,000
To bring great literature into more homes, Books & Books will expand its online streaming of author events featuring noted writers from a variety of genres. For more than 30 years, Books & Books has presented authors live for nightly talks and book signings at its three South Florida locations and offsite at partnering venues. LIVE at Books & Books allows people everywhere to watch author events online, call the store, order books, have them signed by the authors and shipped to their homes. They can also participate in the conversations by submitting their questions to be read aloud during author Q&A sessions. All events are archived online, extending the life––and reach––of the events.
Recipient: Buskerfest Miami!
Award: $10,000
To enhance civic life, Buskerfest Miami will produce a music festival and a performance series called Ear to the Ground. The projects will feature local artists performing in public parks, transit hubs and community plazas that often go unnoticed and underutilized. Both the festival and the Ear to the Ground series will encourage participation at all levels by the local artistic community and attendees through unique programming and game-like features. These events enliven public spaces while providing local artists a chance to perform and to connect face-to-face with their audience.
Recipient: Cannonball
Award: $150,000
To support the growing number of innovative, artist-driven projects in Miami, Cannonball will expand WaveMaker Grants, its microgrant program for unconventional artistic projects. The program seeks to recognize and validate experimental, artist-centric activities that resist marketplace demands. The targeted projects are noncommercial, stimulate critical thinking and dialogue and expose the public to innovative artistic practices. Knight Foundation funding will increase the amount awarded to artists in this program, which is in partnership with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Recipient: Centro Cultural Español de Cooperación Iberoamericana
Award: $50,000
To provide an intimate and innovative cultural experience, Centro Cultural Español de Cooperación Iberoamericana will expand its Microtheater program, which produces short plays for small audiences in repurposed shipping containers. First launched in Madrid, Microtheater debuted in Miami with Knight Arts Challenge funding in 2012, and continues to build an audience while providing local artists a platform for their work in its downtown venue. The Microtheater program offers seven plays at a time around one theme, performed in seven separate containers, supporting local creativity while facilitating cultural exchange.
Recipient: City of Doral
Award: $60,000
To enhance artistic offerings in West Dade, the City of Doral will bring new programming to Downtown Doral Park. Because a majority of the region’s performing and visual arts centers are an average of 25 miles away, the city is partnering with major arts organizations to present outdoor dance and musical performances, as well as visual arts exhibitions to bring the arts more deeply into nearby neighborhoods.
Recipient: Community Arts and Culture
Amount: $40,000
To celebrate world music, the Afro Roots World Music Festival will expand to three days and take place in a variety of neighborhoods around Miami-Dade County. The festival celebrates the evolution of African culture in Miami, highlighting the works of both local musicians and international acts. Satellite events will include artist lectures and a show-and-tell-style presentation for children. By taking place in different areas, the event gives tourists and locals an opportunity to explore Miami neighborhoods, such as Little Haiti and North Beach.
Recipient: Elizabeth Cerejido
Award: $60,000
To create an artistic dialogue, this project will launch an exchange initiative between Cuban and Cuban-American artists through a series of programs and exhibitions in Miami and Havana. The goal is to provide an opportunity for dialogue and exchange and discussion of issues that include artistic practices, cultural identity and the art market as they relate to the realities of living and creating in distinct social contexts. Subsequently, an exhibition project in both cities will highlight collaborative works that result from these exchanges. Academic institutional partners include the University of Miami’s Cuban Theater Digital Archive, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Miami Observatory on Communication and Creative Industries in addition to Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute.
Recipient: FATVillage Arts District
Award: $80,000
To promote cutting-edge contemporary art in Fort Lauderdale, FATVillage Projects Contemporary Art Space will expand its reach, opening to the public on a daily basis. The space exhibits challenging work that falls outside the realm of commercial galleries, providing opportunities for artists working with experimental, immersive, and nontraditional media to create and install new works on site. With Knight Foundation funding, the space, which is now only open for its monthly art walks, will open daily to the public and offer more programming.
Recipient: Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts (FETA)
Award: $15,000
To highlight new music in the Americas, the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts (FETA) will present a music series with cutting-edge sound art and music works from all 35 countries in the Americas. Over the course of two years, this project will feature at least two works from each nation in 12 dedicated concerts, and develop an exchange program. In addition, special events will be organized for select Miami-Dade County public schools. The series seeks to expand Miami’s music scene and raise awareness about the diversity of experimental electronic music in the Americas.
Recipient: HICCUP
Award: $15,000
To support experimental art in Hialeah, HICCUP (Hialeah Contemporary Culture Project), an art/design collective, will present a series of interventions throughout the greater Hialeah community. The group will produce a bimonthly publication that focuses on Hialeah’ s popular culture, a Hialeah souvenir that reflects the city and its manufacturing base (which often produces souvenirs for other locales), and public art/design interventions that encourage fellow residents to interact.
Recipient: HistoryMiami
Award: $150,000
To tell Miami stories through images, HistoryMiami will create a photography center at the museum focused on curating exhibitions and engaging the community in documenting life in South Florida. The museum already houses more than 1 million historical images, including Miami Herald and Miami News collections and 30 years of ethnographic documentation of the region’s cultural heritage. The center will collect photography from the public, capture images through its own documentation projects, offer photography programs, and more. With these activities, the center will capture, safeguard, and share the images that illuminate the Miami experience.
Recipient: IFE-ILE
Award: $15,000
To strengthen Afro-Cuban culture in Miami, IFE-ILE will expand the offerings of its four-day festival, which features a fusion of contemporary and traditional Afro-Cuban dance. The event also includes a symposium, street fair and workshops. The 2015 festival also will host the premiere of “Entre Cielo y Tierra,” choreographed by the group’s founder Neri Torres and reflecting the experiences and contributions of Cubans who arrived in the United States during the Mariel boatlift.
Recipient: inkub8
Award: $30,000
To provide artists a place to create, inkub8––which is dedicated to the creation of new, performance-based work––will create a lab space at its Wynwood studio. The space will have three components: a choreography lab where artists can share ideas and methods, a workspace where dancers can learn a variety of performance techniques, and a feedback forum in which artists can show works in different stages of development, followed by conversation. Inkub8 hopes to provide a space for artistic voices and give choreographers a forum for researching and developing new work outside the context of a formal project.
Recipient: Jason Taylor Foundation
Award: $50,000
To bring the “Super Bowl of poetry” to Broward County, the Jason Taylor Foundation will launch a friendly spoken-word poetry competition between local schools. Since founding the bluapple Poetry Network with actor and poet Omari Hardwick in 2012, the foundation has helped more than 40 Broward County schools activate this program, with more than 500 participants inspiring their communities with poetry. Knight Foundation funding will help launch Louder Than a Bomb Florida by bringing school-based poetry teams together for year-round in-class and after-school instruction culminating in an 11-day festival in April 2015.
Recipient: Key West Art & Historical Society
Award: $15,000
To bring Key West together, the Key West Art & Historical Society will create a kinetic sculpture parade, where artists, bike riders and the community co-create a wacky display of art on wheels. These sculptures are typically custom-built, human-powered works of art that attract creative enthusiasts. After the parade, the machines will be on display, accompanied by a day of music and free activities. Organizers hope the event will promote bike culture, environmental causes and inspire artists of all ages to participate.
Recipient: Letter 16 Press Award: $20,000
To recapture South Florida’s rich history, Letter 16 Press will digitize the work of some of Miami’s most talented photographers from the ’70s and ’80s and publish it in a book series. This arresting imagery provides a rare window into a surreal, and often-chaotic period of Miami’s culture — yet much of it remains trapped on 35 mm film negatives, hidden away in boxes, and largely unknown to today’s audiences. With Knight Foundation funding, Letter 16 Press will carefully digitize these negatives and collect the strongest work in a series of beautifully produced books, introducing the photos to fresh eyes in South Florida and beyond.
Recipient: Little Haiti Cultural Center
Award: $50,000
To preserve Haitian rara, a form of festival music used in street processions, the Little Haiti Cultural Complex, in partnership with the Caribbean American Visual Cultural Preservation, will create a youth rara institute where teens can learn to play and make traditional instruments. The music centers on a set of cylindrical bamboo trumpets, but also features instruments made from recycled metals, drums, maracas and metal bells. Songs are always performed in Haitian Creole and typically celebrate the African ancestry of the Afro-Haitian people. The center’s program of workshops and classes will culminate with the Haitian Heritage Festival in May 2015.
Recipient: Live in Color Dance Collective
Award: $20,000
To strengthen South Florida’s distinct brand of urban funk dance, Live in Color Dance Collective will train and mentor young artists through the full production process of a piece, from auditions, to rehearsals and performance. The participants will not only benefit from instruction but will also have the chance to learn from visiting urban dancers based in Detroit and New York. Collaborations with other urban artists will showcase South Florida culture and strengthen the knowledge that the urban language is an art form that tells the true story of people and place.
Recipient: Mexican American Council
Award: $60,000
To celebrate Mexican culture, the Mexican American Council will create a mariachi academy for the children of farmworkers in South Dade. Working in partnership with local schools, the Mexican consulate and South Dade’s business community, the council will recruit children enrolled in the Migrant Education Program, and bring highly qualified instructors directly to the labor camps to teach them about the music, how to play the instruments and instill a love for the arts.
Recipient: Miami Center for Architecture & Design (MCAD)
Award: $15,000
To inspire new ideas, Miami Center for Architecture & Design (MCAD) will bring together artists and architects for discussions around the trend of incorporating art into new buildings. Panelists will discuss a range of issues, including what drives inspiration, what makes great public art and how architects and artists can best collaborate. Taking advantage of Miami’s arts scene and unique architecture, MCAD will bring together local and global architects and artists who have successfully collaborated on projects.
Recipient: MDC Live Arts
Award: $50,000
To share the stories of modern-day veterans, MDC Live Arts will present Basetrack Live, a multimedia performance based on the real words of veterans and their families. Taking place in the South Miami Dade Cultural Arts Center, the performance will use photos and video from photojournalists working in Afghanistan. With an original live score and script based on testimonials by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the show tells the stories of those stationed abroad and their families as they struggle to cope with separation and the uncertainties of war. MDC Live Arts will bring these experiences to the forefront locally through a season-long initiative designed to build bridges between Miami’s veteran and civilian populations and focus attention on the issues facing veterans post-deployment.
Recipient: Miami Music Project
Award: $75,000
To enhance music instruction at Miami’s only El Sistema-modeled orchestral program, Miami Music Project will implement a new Teaching Artists Training Program for professional artists. In 2015, Miami Music Project will engage 30 teaching artists to provide free instruments and music instruction to over 400 Miami children in Little Haiti, Liberty City, Little Havana and Doral locations. These musicians follow a unique curriculum customized to the heralded El Sistema, a new model for social change and a visionary global movement that transforms the lives of children through music, which requires specialized training focused on leadership and social skills development. This training will provide comprehensive and meaningful coaching experiences and practical tools to professional musicians, empowering them to become 21st century artist educators.
Recipient: Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs
Award: $75,000
To commemorate the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center’s 40th anniversary, Miami-Dade County will present events where prominent artist alums share their talents with today’s students. The center is the nucleus of arts learning, training and access for Greater Miami’s African-American community. To mark its four decades, the center will present “Sankofa: Looking Back, Going Forward,” a yearlong series of events, performances, master classes and workshops celebrating those who have grown up in the inner city and contributed to the creativity of its young people.
Recipient: Museum of Fashion
Award: $25,000
To celebrate the art of fashion, curator Keni Valenti will strengthen a new museum collection that highlights vintage couture. Over the years, Valenti has amassed a collection of 15,000 articles of clothing, accessories, jewelry and more, from the 1920s to the present. With Knight Foundation funding, he will continue to preserve, collect, study and present these pieces at the Museum of Fashion in Wynwood, and partner with other institutions like HistoryMiami on exhibitions.
Recipient: Norton Herrick Center for Motion Picture Studies
Award: $15,000
To preserve the experience of viewing vintage films, the Cosford Cinema will expand its Cosford Classics series, which showcases films presented on 35 mm celluloid. To enhance the screenings, the Norton Herrick Center for Motion Picture Studies will invite guest curators, including local film experts and internationally known scholars and filmmakers, to speak on each film, its cultural significance and the importance of film preservation in modern culture.
Recipient: Nu Deco Ensemble
Award: $75,000
To provide innovative concert experiences, Nu-Deco ensemble will offer a hybrid of music genres and multimedia performances while focusing on works by living composers and music from the last century. Nu Deco Ensemble is a virtuosic and flexible chamber ensemble focused on commissioning composers, performing an array of genres and engaging and educating the broader community about live, classically inspired performances. Founded in 2013 by rising conductor Jacomo Bairos and in-demand composer Sam Hyken, Nu Deco Ensemble presents eclectic styles of music, art and media works in both traditional and alternative venues.
Recipient: Jai-Alai Books
Award: $40,000
To create an aesthetic voice for Miami, Jai-Alai Books will be a small press subsidiary of O, Miami, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to expanding and advancing literary culture in Greater Miami. The literary landscape of Miami is anchored by institutions like Books & Books, Miami Book Fair International, and university-level creative writing programs. The missing piece is publishing. By linking some the world’s best authors, trends, and works to Miami-Dade County, Jai-Alai Books seeks to deepen Miami’s connection to the literary world at-large as well as to its own literary life. Organizers expect to publish three to five titles a year in a variety of genres, each one geared for a general audience and created with the belief that everyone contributes to literary culture. As the city’s only literary publishing house, Jai-Alai’s emphasis will be on projects that capture works that are essentially Miami.
Recipient: Oliver Sanchez
Award: $15,000
To support Miami’s grassroots arts scene, Knight Foundation funding will help strengthen Swampspace, a gallery that presents innovative visual arts and performance productions focused on artistic values. Founded in 2008 by Miami artist Oliver Sanchez, the Design District-based Swampspace helps emerging, established and overlooked artists present their work free of commercial constraints. Funding will help Swampspace build on this foundation and expand its student internship program, administer artist fees and execute other programming.
Recipient: Olympia Theater at Gusman Center
Award: $50,000
To infuse downtown Miami with the arts, the Olympia Theater will expand its monthly jazz performance series in the lobby of the Olympia Theater. Started in 2013 and curated by the Miami Jazz and Film Society, the “In the Lobby Lounge: Jazz” series has grown to host more than 200 patrons a month in a cabaret-type setting, with free admission and local ensembles performing. In 2015, the Olympia will produce a weekly lobby event that includes jazz in addition to other genres of music, poetry, storytelling and performance art.
Recipient: Opa-locka Community Development Corporation
Award: $100,000
To re-envision Opa-locka as a destination for art, the local community development corporation will engage the community in co-creating a large-scale public artwork. Noted artist and landscape architect Walter Hood has been commissioned to overhaul one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Ali Baba Avenue, and the surrounding public realm as an artistic corridor. Hood, the community development corporation, and a Leadership Miami team called Miami Rise will work with residents to transform the avenue – currently wide, barren and unappealing to pedestrians and drivers – with painted interventions. The group hopes that the avenue will become a visual marker to signal that change is happening in Opa-locka, inspiring local residents and businesses and attracting visitors.
Recipient: Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science
Award: $15,000
To bring art and science enthusiasts together, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science will host a performance event series, Science Art Cinema, that mixes 20th century science and science fiction films with performances and multimedia presentations. Science Art Cinema presents 16mm motion pictures and newly commissioned films, and enhances them with live music or theater, guest speakers and multimedia presentations, curated by Kevin Arrow, Frost Science art and collection manager, Barron Sherer, media archivist, and Jorge Perez-Gallego, Frost science astronomer and exhibition developer. The series will culminate in a call for newly created and locally made films, in addition to a book, to which the community will be asked to contribute.
Recipient: Pioneer Winter / Pioneer Winter Collective
Award: $20,000
To provide opportunities for local choreographers, the Pioneer Winter Collective’s Grass Stains project will commission site-specific works throughout Miami that are free and open to the public. The participating choreographers will choose from a set of curated, nontraditional locations that will heighten the level of site-specific work in Miami. Grass Stains will help these choreographers hone their skills in site-specific performance, as well as provide them with the opportunity to be mentored by noted Guggenheim Fellow and Bessie Award-winning choreographer and director Stephan Koplowitz. Grass Stains seeks to help professionals push the boundaries of their practice, make their work accessible to a wider audience, and create work that is socially and culturally relevant to their community.
Recipient: Ranjana Warier
Award: $35,000
To celebrate Miami’s many cultures, dancer Ranjana Warier will collaborate with prominent Miami poet Adrian Castro for a project that sets traditional Indian dance to the rhythms of Castro’s Afro-Caribbean verse. Together they will portray how two seemingly disparate cultures are both about human beings’ needs to express themselves and to tell stories. This project culminates with performances in Miami-Dade and Broward counties during April, National Poetry Month.
Recipient: Sound and Vision
Award: $10,000
To foster innovation in the arts, the collaborative Sound and Vision brings together musicians, filmmakers, performers, dancers and visual artists for weekly meetings to share work and concepts, perform material and challenge artistic boundaries through technology. Through the meetings, the group produces events that marry technology and performance to expand the impact of their performances.
Recipient: Stiltsville Trust
Award: $25,000
To inspire artists, the Stiltsville Trust will create an artist-in-residence program inside the seven remaining historic homes that stand in Biscayne Bay. The program will consist of two types of residencies. A studio artist program for professional artists in the visual, performing and the literary arts and architecture fields who wish to create works that contribute to the public understanding of Stiltsville, Biscayne Bay and Biscayne National Park and a shorter, non-studio artist program that will give preference to local artists. Participants will be asked to donate a work to the trust and the park’s collection. Organizers hope the program brings attention to Stiltsville and Biscayne National Park, one of the few national parks in an urban area that is almost entirely under water.
Recipient: The Children’s Voice Chorus
Award: $25,000
To enrich the lives of children in South Miami-Dade’s migrant farming communities, the Children’s Voice Chorus will provide transportation to its program in Palmetto Bay. The children will be able to participate for free in the after-school choral music education program. Over three years, the chorus hopes to add 50 children to its program roster.
Recipient: The Screening Room
Award: $25,000
To bring high-quality video installations and film screenings to more South Floridians, Knight will support programming at The Screening Room in Wynwood. A new media exhibition and project space dedicated to the moving image, The Screening Room seeks to bring the Miami community together through new works by film and video artists. Each exhibition is accompanied by an Art Talk to contextualize the work and to create an exchange of ideas between artists and filmmakers.
Recipient: Third Horizon Media
Award: $50,000
To raise the profile of Caribbean artists in Miami, Third Horizon Film, Art and Music Festival will present cutting-edge artists in the diaspora who challenge popular notions of what it is to be Caribbean. The festival seeks to go beyond traditional and folk art already available in Miami to present art at the edges, aiming to establish Miami as the capital of the Caribbean avant-garde. The four-day event will include a film festival, a musical block party and visual art exhibitions.
Recipient: Trinity Episcopal Cathedral
Award: $30,000
To provide a space for up-and-coming musical talent, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral will open up its downtown sanctuary for a concert series. Each concert will feature two to four groups of a similar genre. The series is an opportunity to reintroduce Trinity Cathedral, a 1,000-person performance space with stellar acoustics, to the Miami music scene and to provide up-and-coming acts access to a venue in a city otherwise lacking in affordable performance space.
Recipient: University of Florida, College of Fine Arts, School of Music
Award: $75,000
The University of Florida seeks to expand the reach of the Brazilian Music Institute with a move to Broward County to the heart of the state’s Brazilian-American community. There, the institute will present Brazilian artists with a weeklong showcase of Brazilian music with internationally recognized guest performers. The institute will also offer master classes to the community, outreach programs in local schools and public performances.
Recipient: Village of Pinecrest, Pinecrest Gardens
Award: $75,000
To enable Miami-Dade County students to learn from jazz greats, Pinecrest Gardens will expand its popular South Motors Jazz Series to include a new mentor program. In 2015, the series will mark its fifth anniversary by bringing in internationally celebrated artists. These greats will stay on at the Banyan Bowl for a second day to jam with a core group of high school students participating in the jazz magnet program at New World School of the Arts.
Recipient: Virginia Key GrassRoots Festival of Music, Art and Dance
Award: $75,000
To bring South Florida together through music, Knight Foundation funding will support the Virginia Key GrassRoots Festival of Music, Art & Dance, a four-day event that seeks to nourish minds, bodies and souls. The event will feature South Florida musicians and visual artists, a dance tent with workshops, a stage dedicated to the best of world music and a sustainability fair featuring green businesses and organizations. On site, participants can take a salsa dance class, help build community structures for the Historic Virginia Key Beach Park, learn carpentry skills, experience yoga and tai chi, and dance to the sounds of South Florida’s best musicians as well as world class international artists.
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