The Appalachian Puppet Pageant
by: The Cattywampus Puppet Council
Amount granted: $4,000
Placement: Knoxville, TN
The Appalachian Puppet Pageant is an East Tennessee inspired community puppet parade, bringing together members of all ages and backgrounds to celebrate the biodiversity, history, and rich culture of our area. Community members will create puppets as individuals and groups, form bands, and parade as one.
Everyhere City Exchange
by: Kathryn Sclavi and the Everyhere Collective
Amount granted: $4,000
Placement: New York, NY and Philadelphia, PA
Everyhere Logistics
The Everyhere City Exchange is part of a nation-wide project stemmed from Everyhere Logistics, an open source creative platform wherein artists create interactive experiences inside box trucks and showcase them in late night guerilla pop-up exhibitions.
HOME: a living space of difference
by: Julia Metzger-Traber
Amount granted: $7,000
Placement: Berlin, Germany
Everyhere Logistics
Refugee, migrant and German youth, facilitated by Berlin artists, will collectively imagine and collaboratively create an interactive, sculptural Home together on the streets of Berlin. Together they will propose possible answers to the universal and politically urgent question, ‘What is home?’ The physical form of the sculpture will emerge from the content of the youths’ experiences and shared visions; ideas will be gathered and developed in a series of intensive, collaborative creation workshops.
Light Pond
by: Nick Geurts and Ryan Elmendorf
Amount granted: $6,900
Placement: Denver, CO
Light Pond will be a grid of addressable LEDs cast into concrete pavers that will form an interactive plaza. As participants walk across the plaza they affect a changing flow of multicolored light patterns such as ripples on a pond, a plasma globe, cellular automata or vintage video games. As a participant approaches Light Pond, they will see what appears to be a concrete paver surface and they will be drawn to the piece by one of several moving, flowing light patterns. When they walk onto the installation, each paver will sense each footstep and alter the light pattern based on which program is running.
The Lumiphonic Creature Choir
by: Mark Bolotin and Synarcade Audio-Visuals
Amount granted: $8,600
Placement: New York, NY
The Lumiphonic Creature Choir
The Lumiphonic Creature Choir is a interactive installation where audience members will have direct control over the Creatures. Participants will be able to play and remix the gospel voices that will be recorded with the help of the community. The faces and voices of the gospel singers and beat-boxers from the Bronx and around New York City who participate in the project will be projection-mapped onto the giant twelve-headed sculpture. Participants can play and remix these community voices by pressing the large glowing sensors that correspond to each head.
Our Town: Youth-created art made through fire-based processes
by: Free Arts Minnesota
Amount granted: $9,000
Placement: Minneapolis, MN
Free Arts Minnesota
Free Arts will bring three groups of youth from their social service agency partners to the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center, giving each group the opportunity to design a piece of art that they will create through fire-based processes and permanently install at their respective social service agency.
The People’s Paper Co-op
by: Mark Strandquist and The Village of Arts and Humanities
Amount granted: $7,000
Placement: Philadelphia, PA
The Village of Arts and Humanities
Artists, lawyers, and former prisoners will come together to help clear barriers for thousands of Philadelphians. Using a mobile art studio, the People’s Paper Co-op will help residents clear their criminal records, and then work with them to transform their paper records into a giant handmade paper quilt.
Plastic Madonna
by: Peter Smith
Amount granted: $6,500
Placement: The Netherlands
Plastic Madonna
Plastic Madonna will be a huge iconic statue of a mother breastfeeding her baby. It will be constructed of plastic waste picked up by thousands of participants and 3D modeled into a statue to represent the issue of plastic waste entering our food chain. Throughout the duration of its display, there will be volunteers present who will inform participants and schoolchildren about how and why it was made. A waste bin will be placed next to Plastic Madonna where the community can place wayward litter. In this way, visitors will experience the simple yet worthy act which made it possible to create the statue.
Reno Playa Art Park
by: Artech
Amount granted: $4,000
Placement: Reno, NV
Reno Playa Art Park
The Reno Playa Art Park will be created after Burning Man 2016 and will bring six interactive public art projects from the Burning Man event to a vacant lot in downtown Reno for temporary display. The Gateway Project, a coalition of nonprofits, government entities, volunteers, and local businesses, and Artech (a local non-profit makerspace) will install Trasparenza by Andrea Greenlees, Electric Dandelion by Abram Santa Cruz, Star Way by Deborah Davies, Electric Renaissance (A tribute to Cadillac Ranch) by Electric Renaissance LLC, Good Luck Horseshoes by Michael Gray, Imago by Kirsten Berg, and Daydream by Joe C Rock.
Sculptures for the People
by: KM Exhibits LLC and Eric Griswold
Amount granted: $7,000
Placement: Milwaukee, WI
A rolling sculpture-making cart will be created for schools and community groups to create 30 five-foot long anodized aluminum wall-mount sculptures. The anodizing station will be both interactive and instructive. Participants will get to select their pieces of aluminum from bins of shapes which can be textured in different patterns, pressed into various shapes, and decorated by small punches. Each aluminum piece will then be anodized to a deep, pure color. Participants may create simple objects with a medium-durable colorized finish or they can work in groups to create full-scale, outdoor-grade collaborative murals.
Sea Urchin
by: Abram Santa Cruz
Amount granted: $4,000
Placement: Los Angeles, CA
The Sea Urchin will be an 18’ tall, 36’ wide kinetic sculpture made to look like a sea urchin. The “spines” will be composed of wood and LED strips inside aluminum and acrylic tubes and the “skeleton” will be made of interconnected wooden pieces holding the interactive lighting system. The Sea Urchin will be built so participants can enjoy the project from inside as well as from the outside. The audience will not only be viewers, they will be participants as they animate the spines, which will require touch and sound for operation. The Sea Urchin artwork will spread the message of environmentalism and awareness of climate change as living sea urchins are the among the ocean species most affected by global warming.
Sky Stage
by: Heather Clark and The Frederick Arts Council
Amount granted: $7,500
Placement: Frederick, MD
Sky Stage Frederick
The boards on the doors and windows of a damaged historic building will be removed to reveal a temporary open-air theater and garden in the vacant lot behind the facades. Neighbors, city staff, nonprofits, and the police have been included in design refinements and programming. From this, a community-driven programming approach has emerged: the Frederick Arts Council, who will administer a skeletal set of performances and events and will also run an online forum where the public can reserve the space for activities they can orchestrate themselves. The Sky Stage audience will interact with the project by attending its free arts and culture activities including drama, music, children’s story time, art classes, folklore, history, naturalists, and film. Sky Stage’s audience will also interact with the project by creating free activities for the neighborhood. The project builds community by giving local artists and neighbors a place to share their skills.
STAR School Community Amphitheater
by: Kate (Kismet) Sorensen and the STAR School
Amount granted: $5,000
Placement: Navajo Reservation Northeast of Flagstaff, AZ
STAR School Community Amphitheater
Building upon an Anasazi-inspired 2004 BRAF Grants to Artists project, the STAR School, a pre-K to 8th grade Navajo Charter School, will expand their outdoor amphitheater through a community design process and culturally-inspired mosaics made by students. The expanded amphitheater will promote interactivity in its creation and usage over many years. The archetypal shape of the circle forming the amphitheater will embody the community’s sense of togetherness as equal members, and having a gathering place for the entire school community will provide them with the human experience of joining together in a circle. At their weekly Monday Morning Circle, each member of the school community shakes hugs or shakes hands with every other student and staff member. The gatherings often include music or other performances. Even after STAR School students graduate and move on, they will know that their community is gathering at the new amphitheater each week and that they will be included in the school’s remembrances and care.
STooPS 2016
by: Kendra Ross
Amount granted: $4,500
Placement: Brooklyn, NY
STooPS 2016
STooPS is an annual community-building event using art to expand & continue the legacy of outside culture in the historic neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. At STooPS 2016, artists will share work on stoops & storefronts across four performance zones where community members engage with artists, art & each other. Audience members may begin in Bed-Stuy that day as visitors, residents, workers, business owners, or commuters passing through the neighborhood, and leave as art participants and perhaps even art aficionados.
Tulsa Art Car Weekend
by: Living Arts of Tulsa
Amount granted: $5,000
Placement: Tulsa, OK
Tulsa Artcar Weekend 2016
Living Arts’ Tulsa ArtCar Weekend is an annual event that engages people from all over the local Tulsa community and beyond. ArtCar Weekend 2017 will not only create ArtCars, it will also give ArtCar tours to schools and hospitals, and ArtCars will hold Art BoxCar workshops for kids, a Mini Art BoxCar Parade, along with an ArtCar/ArtBike workshop.
Veazie Riverside Community
by: Greg Ondo
Amount granted: $4,000
Placement: Veazie, ME
Veazie Riverside Community will be a series of art events and making workshops to celebrate art, the removal of the Veazie dam, and the completion of the river restoration project. Veazie Riverside Community will bring different local populations together to create an artistically aesthetic social environment around the new riverside park, including the installation of a “Salmon Ladder,” an eight-foot high metal sculpture with flame effects to represent the fishways built around the old dam.
The Wasuremono Tree
by: Andrea Pliner
Amount Granted: $2,000
Placement: Denver, CO
The Wasumono Tree will be an interactive aquaponic sculpture composed of old, forgotten, and lost objects. The reimagining of these forgotten objects into a new machine will immerse participants in a new environment where their manipulations of the piece will affect water, light and sound. The beating heart of this tree will be a system of flowing water from a water tank hidden at the base of the trunk. There will be a hand crank pump for participants to pump water from the big tank at the base to a smaller tank nestled at the top of the tree. The reservoir at the top will let a controlled stream of water flow down an elaborate waterfall system, powering water wheels and noise makers as it descends to the table.