Tag Archives: artist services

Creative Capital Featured in the Wall Street Journal!

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lenticular wall from complex movements performance
Lentiucular Wall, from performance by 2013 grantee Complex Movements. Photo by Vanessa Miller.

We are thrilled to announce that Creative Capital is featured in today’s Wall Street Journal! The fantastic article, “Where Good Ideas Go to Live,” written by Steve Dollar, highlights a few our amazing 2013 grantees and offers insight into what makes our approach to working with artists so unique. If you’re a subscriber, you can read the full text on the WSJ’s website), and we’ve included an excerpt below:

When the downtown nonprofit Creative Capital announced on Thursday the recipients of its 2013 grants—$4.1 million to be divided among 46 projects in sums of up to $50,000, plus advisory services—the list highlighted many proposals that defy convention.

“You Are It”, by Williamsburg choreographer Arturo Vidich and machinist Daniel Wendlek, proposes a performance, inspired by the schoolyard game Tag, for 3,000 dancers and a human-powered hybrid electric airplane, staged on an abandoned runaway in Long Island.

St. Louis, Mo., artist Juan William Chávez’s “Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary” aims to transform the wooded site of a former housing project into a space for community beekeeping. Continue reading →

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Meet Our New Director of Grants & Services, Lisa Dent

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In September, we said goodbye to Kemi Ilesanmi, who has served as Creative Capital’s Director of Grants & Services since 2004. We cannot thank Kemi enough for her eight years with the organization, and wish her all the best in her next adventure as the Executive Director of The Laundromat Project! At the same time, we are so excited to welcome our new Director of Grants & Services, Lisa Dent. Lisa brings a strong background in the arts through her experience in gallery and museum work, most recently as the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Columbus Museum of Art, where she organized exhibitions including Currents: Latifa Echakhch, Supply & Demand and Stephanie Syjuco: Pattern Migration. Dent was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and subsequently held curatorial staff positions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was later director of the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York and worked as a freelance art critic and scenic designer. From 2004-08, Dent owned and managed Lisa Dent Gallery in San Francisco, where she presented the work of emerging and mid-career international artists. She has taught courses in art history and design at Cooper Union, University of California, Davis, Columbus College of Art and Design, and The Ohio State University. Dent received her BFA from Howard University, her MFA from New York University, and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in curatorial studies. We hope you’ll join us in welcoming Lisa to the Creative Capital family!

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PearlDamour: A Case Study of How Creative Capital Supports Artists

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PearlDamour, How to Build a Forest performance installation at The Kitchen in New York, 2011

PearlDamour, the Obie-award winning collaborative team of Katie Pearl and Lisa D’Amour, creates performance projects both inside and outside traditional theater spaces. This week, they are presenting their performative installation, How To Build A Forest, at Duke University’s Paige Auditorium (October 19-21). This truly unique project, created in collaboration with visual artist and costume designer Shawn Hall, is a durational interdisciplinary work—part visual art installation and part theater performance—in which an elaborate forest is built and dismantled over an eight-hour period. The work was inspired by the loss of 100 trees at D’Amour’s family home in Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina, and subsequently informed by the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

PearlDamour received their Creative Capital grant in Performing Arts for How to Build A Forest in 2009, and the life of their project provides a wonderful case study in how Creative Capital supports artists pursuing ambitious projects with a combination of financial and advisory support.

APPLICATION PROCESS

As with all our grantees, PearlDamour was selected through our open-call, three-phrase application process. Nearly 100 arts professionals from across the country serve as readers, evaluators and panelists who review the applications and help to determine the projects that are awarded Creative Capital grants.

Remarkably, Creative Capital’s grantmaking process created an  opportunity for PearlDamour to develop their project before they even received a grant. Continue reading →

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More Than Money Can Buy: What Do Artists Need to Succeed? (Part Two)

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Kemi Ilesanmi, Creative Capital’s Director of Grants & Services, introduces a consultant at the 2012 Grantee Orientation in New York

When we think about what artists need, money is often at the top of the list. Money for artists is crucial—but there are other means of support that can make a huge difference to artists. Resources, opportunities and professional guidance may be less flashy than a big check, but they are incredibly valuable services and tools that build artists’ capacity to realize specific projects and reach long-term goals.

After our first 10 years of helping artists achieve success on their own terms, we went back into the “laboratory” to determine key resources we should add to our Artist Services. As a direct result of our recent evaluation and survey (described in Part One of my post “More Than Money Can Buy“), Creative Capital has developed an exciting suite of expanded services for our grantees! Continue reading →

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More Than Money Can Buy: What Do Artists Need to Succeed? (Part One)

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Ruby Lerner and Sean Elwood in stakeholder meeting with grantee Cory Arcangel (2006 Emerging Fields)

You may think of Creative Capital as an organization that gives grants to artists, but that’s only one part of the picture. We do award grants for artists’ projects, and we are thrilled to be able to provide artists with financial support! On the other hand, money alone doesn’t guarantee success. We’ve learned the importance of services and resources for artists, such as professional advice, contacts, networking and coaching.

Creative Capital’s approach pairs funding with advisory services and other non-monetary support for our grantees, including consultations with our Artist Services staff, access to our network of arts consultants, Artist Retreats, phone-in clinics and promotional activities. Continue reading →

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Artists and Organizations, Experimenting Together

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Ruby Lerner, Erika Blumenfeld, Mark Shepard and Pamela Z at IdeaFestival. Photo by Bill Wine, Louisville Voice-Tribune.

Welcome to The Lab, Creative Capital’s new blog exploring the creative process! Since artists and arts organizations thrive on experimentation, our blog will delve into the work-in-progress of the artists we support and share the evolution of Creative Capital as a laboratory for artist services.

Part of my job as President of Creative Capital is to spread the word about what we have learned from working with groundbreaking artists over the past 12 years and to share ideas about how we can enable the creative process to flourish.

In September, I had the pleasure of presenting at IdeaFestival in Louisville with an inspiring group of Creative Capital artists: Erika Blumenfeld, Shih-Chieh Huang, Richard Pell, Mark Shepard and Pamela Z. Continue reading →

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