Award ceremony and reception: October 16, 2014, 6–9pm
Propeller Fund
2233 South Throop Street
Mana Contemporary, Room 420
Chicago, Illinois 60608
Propeller Fund proudly announces the 15 grant recipients for 2014. Selected from a pool of over 100 candidates, these small, self-organized, and radical projects are vital to Propeller’s mission of promoting diversity and small-scale interventions in Chicago’s visual art world. Propeller Fund offers 50,000 USD annually (five grants at 6,000 USD and ten grants at 2,000 USD) to artists producing a wide range of public culture.
2014 Awardees:
ACRE TV is an artist-made live-streaming television network featuring live and canned videos, performances, durational works and experimental broadcasts.
DINCA Vision Quest is a three-day festival celebrating the most innovative contemporary moving image and media art culture from artists worldwide, with salient interest in supporting artworks made using unconventional processes and emerging technologies.
North Branch Projects will create a series of mobile pedestal units placed in high-traffic areas in Albany Park that will house handmade books used to document dialogue and reveal the thoughts and concerns of neighbors.
INSIDEWITHIN is a constantly updating web archive devoted to physically exploring and digitally exposing the creative spaces and processes of Chicago’s emerging and established artists.
Honey Pot Performance’s Juke Cry Hand Clap: A People’s History of House & Chicago Social Culture combines performance, publication, public programs, an archival exhibition, and an online mapping site pertaining to historical sites of musical entrepreneurship and social dance culture across the 20th century, marking the ’70s–’80s during which disco and house became dominant modes of social culture.
The Ladydrawers Comics Collective—a group of women, men, trans people, and non-binary gender folk who work together on comics and other cultural products that question the role of gender and race in media and society—will produce The Ladydrawers Book, a print collection of their comics journalism series connecting the international garment trade to the international sex trade.
Made-Up with Danny Volk is a short TV show where artists are interviewed in their studios while they do the host’s make-up. The show explores the creative process of artists, and is designed to be a promotional platform.
Out of Site Chicago curates cutting-edge unexpected encounters in public space, facilitating unique surprises for people as they come home from work and supporting contemporary performance artists to create new work that engages directly with the public.
The Patternbase Gallery will establish a physical presence to expand the reach of this textile and resource and provide a place to build relationships through workshops and interaction with local textile designers and fiber artists.
Riding the Zone, Phase 4 is a series of public events exploring Chicago’s trade corridors and foreign trade zones. This public research will consist of workshops, events, discussions and experimental field trips or “learning walks,” collectively searching for clues to the workings of power and resistance, to hidden pasts and alternate futures.
An apartment residency for making artist books, SPARE provides selected artists with the opportunity to print on a Risograph stencil printer and bind by hand to produce an editioned artist book along with food, lodging, and an introduction to Chicago’s art community.
Street Corner Harmony memorializes community, identity and self-respect built from boys and men in a community singing together. Writing and singing workshops, led by performer Marvin Tate, will result in a program of songs and public performances about their lives and experiences.
The Transgender Oral History Project is a community-driven effort to collect and share a diverse range of stories by promoting grassroots media projects, documenting trans people’s experiences, maintaining a digital archive, and teaching media production skills.
Terrain Exhibitions will produce the 2nd Terrain Biennial, bringing artist projects to the front yards of multiple homes in Oak Park and create Virtual Terrain, a web project that facilitates public arts in residential neighborhoods internationally.
Tracers Book Club will produce a series of public events over ten months that radically considers and celebrates the history, present and future of “women’s work” in Chicago.
Learn more about recipients at www.propellerfund.org.
