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Category Archives: Call for Artists

“National Service Can Be a Key Means of Addressing the BIPOC Wealth Gap”

August 11, 2021 by Call for Artists
Submitted by admin on August 9, 2021

On June 21, 2021, AmeriCorps –the federal agency which provides support through funding and people power to more than 2,000 organizations across America and connects over 70,000 Americans each year to opportunities to engage in volunteer service to meet community needs – announced how it will use its $1 billion allocation in American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to address ongoing challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ARP funds were provided by Congress as one of several COVID-19 relief packages enacted over the past 18 months.

The AmeriCorps ARP funds will accomplish three critical goals: increasing service member slots; making national service more accessible by offering an increase in living allowances; and providing financial help to existing national service programs that were most severely impacted by the pandemic. The use of these funds will meet two critical goals, meaningfully responding to the BIPOC wealth gap and ensuring that service is more accessible to low-income individuals.

In particular, $644.9 million will be allocated to AmeriCorps State and National to increase the living allowance of Corps members, provide financial assistance to current grantees, and introduce a place-based planning grant opportunity to community-based organizations that are strategically aligned to local government priorities. AmeriCorps VISTA will receive $80 million in funding to increase the number of VISTA members serving, expand the summer associate program and increase the living allowance of VISTA members. AmeriCorps Seniors will receive $30 million in funding to focus on supporting COVID-19 vaccination efforts and provide existing grantees with the opportunity to obtain additional resources to supplement and expand their current services. In addition, $148 million will go towards Segal AmeriCorps Education Awards to help service members who complete their term of service to pay for postsecondary education or repay student loans.

GIA believes national service can be a key means of addressing the BIPOC wealth gap, through increasing college access by providing financial support for postsecondary education, and building the work skills of service members. In fact, positive outcomes associated with serving are even stronger among Black corps members, and corps members from marginalized groups. Furthermore, the increase in living stipend for Corps members will make national service more accessible to low-income individuals and those from underrepresented communities, which can help to provide onramps into the arts and cultural industries.

National service can also provide communities and organizations, including arts and cultural organizations, a powerful force to tackle their biggest challenges at this time of great need amidst recovery from the pandemic. GIA encourages organizations to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the historic ARP investment in AmeriCorps. More information can be found at https://americorps.gov/partner or through contacting AmeriCorps region offices.

Sydney Fringe Festival shuts down for a second year

August 08, 2021 by Call for Artists

As is sadly still the reality for gatherings and performances currently, the ongoing pandemic is still seeing massive, last-minute shutdowns to planned events. It is not altogether surprising but is still disheartening to see the way the virus can affect a return to form for artists. While countless Fringe festivals the world over just celebrated being back after a postponed year, some branches—such as the Sydney Fringe Festival—have unfortunately had to close their stages down for yet another year.

 

CEO of Sydney Fringe Festival Kerri Glasscock announced this past week that the festival has had to the Australian government’s extended lockdown with a full cancellation of the Fringe. “In 2020 when the world stopped our sector was forced to face a reckoning unlike anything we were prepared for,” she states in her address. “The unity, strength, passion, dedication and the stubborn resilience of our independent artists is truly inspiring. In spite of the hardships we are still here, and despite the futility of our environment artist[s] are still making work, exceptional work. Sydney Fringe had hoped to share that work with you in September.”

 

The Sydney Fringe is one of the largest Fringe festivals in the world, and with 370 productions having been planned for this year, it is a massive blow to the theatre communities of Australia and abroad. Last year saw the massively popular festival streaming shows for audiences at home, but with the current measures of the widespread delta-variant keeping most of the artists involved from both rehearsal spaces and in-person gatherings, there doesn’t seem to be feasible avenues for this. 

 

Time and location are so volatile and shifting in our current context for what is able to be produced. It was a little more than a month ago on the opposite coast of Australia that the Adelaide Fringe Festival was closing a massively successful endeavour. At the very least it highlights the necessity of nations to maintain rigour in dealing with the still very much real pandemic.

 

Although it is certainly a great loss that the Sydney Fringe Festival must hold off for yet another year, there is still clearly a hope and strength in this pillar of independent theatre. They currently are running an image series stating “WE’LL FRINGE AGAIN” and are reaching out to the city for donations to help ensure the support and survival of this paragon of Fringe. With a little luck, the organization will see itself in the spotlight once again under better circumstances.

“Where Shift Happens: A Narrative and Cultural Power Mini-School”: ICYMI

August 03, 2021 by Call for Artists
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on August 3, 2021

The “Fix Team” at Grist, an independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future, brought together Anjali Nath Upadhyay, a philosopher and political scientist at Liberation Spring, and facilitator Gibrán Rivera in what Rivera described as an experiment called “Where Shift Happens: A Narrative and Cultural Power Mini-School.”

Catch the conversation here.

State Arts Agency Legislative Appropriations Preview, Fiscal Year 2022: New research

August 02, 2021 by Call for Artists
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on August 2, 2021

National Assembly of State Arts Agencies released a new report that “provides a forecast of state government funding for the arts in fiscal year 2022.”

Due to the COVID19 pandemic, according to the report, “several states are changing their budget processes, whether that be passing a single-year instead of a biennial budget or making substantial adjustments in the second year of a biennial budget.”

Read here.

“Discover Somatic Practices to Embody Racial Justice in Your Work”: Workshop alert

August 02, 2021 by Call for Artists
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on August 2, 2021

“Discover Somatic Practices to Embody Racial Justice in Your Work,” a free workshop with Dara Silverman & Brooke Stepp offered by Strozzi Institute, seeks to tackle “how to transform patterns that reinforce unhealthy power structures — in your life, in your practice, and in the world” and to “explore new practices for embodying your chosen values of liberation, justice, and healing.”

Details here.

Program Sound FM- a radio station show for storytellers

August 01, 2021 by Call for Artists

Radio is becoming a more and more archaic means of consumption every passing year. With the vast majority of music listeners not even having private collections, opting instead for streaming services, most people shuffle a playlist and call it a day. But even if the majority of people only hear the radio when walking around a store, its historical and ongoing significance should not be understated or forgotten. And Toronto artist Bahia Watson has paid homage to the power of radio shows and its connection to storytelling through her recent project Program Sound FM.

 

Program Sound FM, described as a radio station show, went live July 25th and ran for twelve hours straight. Lead and hosted by Bahia Watson—who some may recognize from her work on Star Trek: Discovery—the full day of programming featured dozens of artists across a vast spectrum of backgrounds. Originally devised by Watson at the start of the pandemic as a means to give theatre creators an avenue for creation, she teamed up with Outside The March Theatre to secure funding and a team and the project was developed over the course of this past year.

 

Combining music, sound design, talk pieces, and performances, eclecticism radiated from the collected works. Jennah Foster-Catlack’s ‘Covid Tings’ gave snapshots of real and variant lives lived over this past year’s struggle; Colin Doyle and Liza Paul’s ‘Friendshit’ shared candid wisdom of connection with a college-talk-radio style; Roula Said’s ‘About 40 Days’ was an intimate, engrossing piece of storytelling. Much of the music was Canadian and BIPOC focussed-one of the many ways the station was championing progressive values-including Toronto’s Kokophonix and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s cover of Willie Dunn’s iconic ‘I Pity The Country’. It was a quilted tapestry, to say the very least. 

 

With such stark variation of microphone quality and sonic textures from project to project—and even within individual segments—what could come off as unpleasantly disjointed in some contexts feels like a charming and suitable patchwork of sounds and identities from across the country. Program Sound floats somewhere in the space between a pirate radio station and Fringe show, and it is nothing if not endearing.

 

The bumpers and overall design of Program Sound FM’s own audio are some of the gems of the structure. Designed by TiKA, a Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist and founder of non-profit organization StereoVisual, it is immediately catchy and captivating and truly elevated the twelve-hour run by giving a particular sonic fingerprint to the shape of the channel.

 

But without a doubt, the identity of Program Sound FM and its very heartbeat go to creator Bahia Watson. Watson is an outstandingly charismatic host for the forum she has created, bounding between high-energy moments to a relaxing candour. Her passionate delivery hits so many comforting notes as a host and the care that has gone from her into this inventive project is exceedingly clear. Not only is Program Sound FM looking to exist as an avenue for storytellers to share, but it is clear that the connectivity of our national community is a prime goal as well. In referencing the tragic treatment of the homeless encampments in Toronto over the past month, Watson made a stark and truthful comment on the state of the city’s priorities:

 

“We can fund police attacking poor people. Or we can fund the arts, and be like this.”

 

Shows like Program Sound FM are as beautiful as they are fleeting. Perhaps even more so than theatre or a live concert, a unique broadcast experience is so individual and so ephemeral. Bahia Watson found a way to capture those glorious aspects of storytelling and weave them together with the contexts of radio in a way that harkens back to a time long past, while still feeling so of the moment. Here’s hoping there are plans to pop up in the static again soon.

Member Spotlight: Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange

August 01, 2021 by Call for Artists
Submitted by Carmen Graciela Díaz on August 1, 2021

For the month of August, GIA’s photo banner features work supported by Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange.

This is the text Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE) submitted for this Spotlight:

At CACHE, we work with creatives, communities, and organizations to empower a more inspiring, inclusive, and equitable Northwest Arkansas. Our online creative variety show OZCast, one of 26 projects we’ve led or collaborated on in 2020 and 2021, was a great microcosm of that mission. It ran for 15 episodes that featured almost 100 artists from across the region, paying them to create new work, and in a few cases license pre-existing content that we thought begged for a broader audience.

In the process of putting the show together, our team also helped our artists and creatives with professional, technical, and creative development – everything from new video production skills to fair contract negotiation to collaborative mash-ups with peers they didn’t know before. And of course when you assist artists with a few new simple tools in their toolbox, they take those and run in all kinds of creative directions you can never predict, which is where the real beauty and joy comes into play.

This was especially important during the great pandemic pivot of mid-to-late 2020, when we were all looking for ways to stay sane, remain connected, and lift each other up in our communities with our shared creative works. But we also always aimed for OZCast to remain relevant not just in the URL universe, but when we all began to resurface IRL, too. So it still serves as a calling card our amazing Northwest Arkansas artists can be proud of, for their own work and their entire community’s. Because of them, it built that real sense of togetherness that’s manifested into all of their — and CACHE’s — other new projects in 2021 and beyond.

Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange joined Grantmakers in the Arts in 2020.

You can also visit Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange’s photo gallery on GIA’s Photo Credits page.

Image: Evan Alvarado / Kasey Hodges creates digital art and is interviewed for an Artist Conversation for Season 1 of OZCast, an online creative variety show by CACHE.

RFP Alert: LA County Arts and Culture Needs Assessment

July 26, 2021 by Call for Artists
Submitted by Nadia Elokdah on July 26, 2021

The LA County Department of Arts and Culture (Arts and Culture) is issuing this Request for Proposals to businesses, organizations, and individuals that are interested in and qualified to provide an Arts and Culture Needs Assessment for Los Angeles County. An early implementation action of the Countywide Cultural Policy, the Needs Assessment will help Arts and Culture understand the potential impact of the policy and inform long-term planning for arts and culture in the region.

“The Countywide Cultural Policy provides direction and guidelines for how Los Angeles County and its departments will ensure that every resident of LA County has meaningful access to arts and culture. The intent of the policy is to foster an organizational culture that values and celebrates arts, culture, and creativity; strengthens cultural equity and inclusion; and integrates arts and culture in LA County strategies to achieve the highest potential of communities and constituents across all aspects of civic life.” states Arts and Culture.

The purpose of the project is to identify gaps and areas of need for County-funded arts and culture programs and services, to increase the accessibility of arts and culture for the diverse communities of Los Angeles County, and to inform future County investments in arts and culture to ensure these investments increase equity, inclusion, and access in alignment with the vision of the Cultural Policy.

Proposals are due July 28, 2021. Learn more here.

Image: Chris Boardoo from Pixabay