New 2020 Grant Awards

We are happy to announce the grants awarded from our recent call for proposals – for projects led by or primarily serving Black artists and practitioners within the Penn community.

Of the many wonderful proposals we received, we were able to fund eight projects, which represent a diverse collection of practices – including publications, art installations, community workshops, and performance – and are led by a range of community members, including Penn staff, alumni, students, fellows and artists.

Please join us in congratulating everyone involved, and please read more about the eight supported projects below. We will also be posting information about these projects and practitioners to our website, in the weeks and months to come. We look forward to sharing these updates with you!

We also want to thank all the applicants who applied. It was an extremely competitive pool of proposals and we were only able to fund a limited portion of the projects. Additionally, we recognize that there may be others who were not able to apply within our application timeline. We want to assure you that we will be providing similar funding opportunities this fall, as part of our new grant cycle for 2020/2021, and will share information about this as soon as possible.

We are committed to the long-term work needed to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism in our work, and to support BIPOC artists and amplify their voices. We welcome your input and suggestions as we continue these efforts.

Sincerely,

Chloe, John, Tamara
The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation

Funded Projects

• Alex Smith, Staff Member: The Afterverse
  A new publishing venture that will combine art, comics and writing around short super-hero and sci-fi stories centered on Black LGBT characters.

• Black Cultural Studies Collective, Graduate Student Group: The Gathering Workshop Series
  Centering artistic and embodied practices, this free workshop series is an opportunity for Black community members to build creative space for radical imagination, to share strategies for processing ongoing racial and gender injustice, and to strengthen a sense of local connectivity that can support Black collaboration, healing, and self-sufficiency.

• Farrah Rahaman, PhD Student, and Tshay Williams, Alum: Witness
  A public art portrait series attending to racial violence and injustice in our cityscape by wheat pasting 30 portraits of Black Philadelphians, photographed by Black Philadelphia-based artists, in various public and community spaces across the city with the motif “Our Victory is Inevitable, Our Glory is Undeniable”.

• Fields Harrington, Alum: Transmission as Resistance: Redox Drip
  Redox Drip aims to revive neglected legacies of Black inventions and challenge modernist narratives of scientific advancement through a sound performance built on manipulated electromagnetic fields.

• Gillian Maris Jones, PhD Student: Recipes for the Revolution: Meals Our Ancestors Made Possible
  The development of a Spirit-led cookbook to share life lessons and tools for care, survival, and resistance.

• Maya Arthur, Post-Bac Fellow; Alum: Sickle
  A multi-media personal artistic archive on chronic illness, Blackness, implicit bias, and medical isolation.

• Ricardo A. Bracho, Artist in Residence: The Sis Uprising
  An online performance, screening and discussion of the work of Arien Wilkerson, a Philadelphia-based gender fluid Black queer choreographer, performer, and installation artist.

• Rosa Leff, Alum: All at Once
  This project will show that not only can Black people be all things, but a single Black woman can be a dozen things all at once, documented through a series of life-size papercut self-portraits that capture the artist in their many roles.

Additional information on these projects will be added to the Grants section of our website in the coming weeks.