Joyce Awards Program Tops $1.6 million since 2003 To Support New Work By Midwest Artists of Color
The Joyce Foundation Honors Artisitc Works In Chicago, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis

CHICAGO — The Joyce Foundation is proud to announce the 2011 Joyce Awards winners in the cities of Chicago, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis. Since 2003, the Joyce Awards program has been the only award exclusively supporting artists of color in major midwestern cities. This year’s outstanding arts organizations will each receive grants of $50,000 to support new works in dance, music, theater, and visual arts.

Winners in each artistic category include:

• DANCE: Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (Chicago) to support a new work by African American choreographer Alonzo King, which will be his first new work on the Chicago stage in more than a decade.
• MUSIC: VocalEssence (Minneapolis) to commission a new work by African American composer/musician Hannibal Lokumbe.
• THEATER: The Children’s Theatre Company (Minneapolis) to support a new play for children written by Asian American playwright, Naomi Iizuka, who won the first Joyce Award for Theater in 2004.
• VISUAL ARTS: Central Indiana Community Foundation (Indianapolis) to commission African American visual artist Fred Wilson to create a new public art sculpture for permanent installation on the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.

“We are pleased to recognize the artistry of these talented individuals and the lively organizations that will showcase these works,” stated Ellen S. Alberding, president of the Joyce Foundation. “On behalf of the Joyce Foundation, we are proud that our Joyce Awards provide a springboard to highlight the vibrant array of artistic talent in the Great Lakes region.”

Since its inception in 2003, the Joyce Awards has supported cultural institutions in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Award winners have not only presented their works to the institutions’ traditional audiences; they have also worked with community groups, school children, and public art projects. The goal is for these commissions to produce vivid, new works of art that strengthen cultural venues and draw people of diverse backgrounds to experience the rewards of participating
in the arts as well as elevate the visibility of creative works by minority artists.

This year’s competition drew 41 entries from around the Great Lakes region. Entries are reviewed by independent arts advisors from outside the Midwest and reviewed and approved by the Foundation’s board of directors. Joyce Awards of $50,000 are made directly to arts organizations and are awarded in dance, music, theater, and visual arts. Each award supports the work of the individual artist as well as significant community engagement efforts. Organizations have up to three years to complete their proposed projects.

2011 Joyce Awards winners are:

DANCE
Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Chicago
Alonzo King

One of the world’s leading contemporary dance companies, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago will commission African American choreographer Alonzo King to create a new dance work that will be premiered jointly by Hubbard Street and King’s own company, LINES Ballet of San Francisco, during Hubbard Street’s home series at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago in 2012. This project is a multi-year artistic collaboration to develop new choreography to further diversify the repertoire and audience of Hubbard Street, and enhance the professional development of both company’s dancers. In addition to performing this vital work together, each company will have the opportunity to perform this repertory addition separately throughout the coming years.

Founded in 1977 by dancer and choreographer Lou Conte, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has been regarded as a leading contemporary dance organization for over 30 years and has become a prominent voice for the nonverbal art form of dance — in Chicago and around the world. With its fresh, bold new works, Hubbard Street encourages dance exploration through its four components: the professional performance company; HS2, the second company; the Lou Conte Dance studio, the school and training arm; and its Education & Community Programs. Additionally, Hubbard Street and Hubbard Street 2 tour year-round, appearing at the American Dance Festival, DanceAspen, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Ravinia Festival, the Spoleto Festivals in Italy and the United States, and the Galway Arts Festival in Ireland.

Alonzo King has created works for companies throughout the world including the Swedish Royal Ballet, Frankfurt Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hong Kong Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre, and Washington Ballet. In 1982, King founded LINES Ballet, an international touring company. In 1989, he opened the Alonzo King LINES Dance Center, now one of the largest dance facilities on the West Coast. King has received multiple awards and honors from the City of San Francisco (where he is based), plus the prestigious dance festival Jacob’s Pillow, and was recognized as one of the fifty outstanding artists in America by United States Artists.

MUSIC
VocalEssence, Minneapolis
Hannibal Lokumbe

Founded in 1969 by conductor and choral scholar Philip Brunelle, VocalEssence is recognized internationally for its exploration of innovative music for voices and instruments. It champions choral music of all genres and has commissioned or premiered more than 135 works to date. Concerts range from Bach to John Philip Sousa, to programs with public radio star Garrison Keillor and the highly popular WITNESS program, an annual celebration of choral music that focuses on new and forgotten works by African American composers. Beyond the concert series, educational programs serve more than 7,000 students annually. VocalEssence has received the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for adventurous programming of contemporary music an unprecedented five times, and was awarded the once-in-an-organizational lifetime Margaret Hillis Achievement Award for Choral Excellence.

Hannibal Lokumbe is a composer and jazz trumpeter whose career spans more than forty years. After moving to New York in 1970, he spent the next twenty-five years there playing trumpet and recording with legends such as Gil Evans, Pharoah Sanders, and Elvin Jones. Lokumbe eventually formed his own Sunrise Orchestra, which has toured the world playing in every major music festival from Istanbul to China. He has composed more than 150 works, many of which have historical subjects such as John Brown, Anne Frank, and Rosa Parks. He is the recipient of numerous awards from the Bessie, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

VocalEssence will commission Lokumbe to create a new musical work for its WITNESS program. Tentatively titled In the Spirit of Being, the sixty-minute, four-movement piece would be scored for mixed chorus, jazz quintet (trumpet, piano, bass, and African percussions), and female soloist. The four movements will represent the stages of the human experience — birth, struggle, forgiveness/resolution, and peace — as seen through the eyes of the composer. During the performance, movements will be introduced by spiritual leaders from the community.

The piece will be premiere at the February 2012 WITNESS Concert on stage at Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

THEATER
The Children’s Theatre Company, Minneapolis
Naomi Iizuka

Established in 1965, Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) is the leading professional theater company for young people in North America and is among the three largest in the world. It serves up to 250,000 children and families annually. In 2003 the theater was a recipient of the 2003 Regional Theatre Tony Award, and in 2005 received a Joyce Award to commission African American hip-hop writer and performer Will Power to write The Five Fingers of Funk, a musical for teen audiences. It was staged in 2008 and is the theater’s best-selling commission project for teens to date.

Naomi Iizuka was born in Tokyo and raised in Japan, Indonesia, Holland, and Washington, DC. Her work has been produced and developed at theaters across the country including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Huntington Theatre, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville, Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s “Next Wave Festival” and the Goodman Theatre among others. She is a member of New Dramatists and has been a recipient of the Alpert Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rockefeller Foundation MAP grant, and an NEA/TCG Artist-in-Residence grant. In 2004, Iizuka received the Joyce Award for Theater and was commissioned by the Goodman Theatre. Her play Ghostwritten, inspired by the classic children’s fable of Rumplestiltskin, premiered in 2009.

CTC and Iizuka will develop an original work based on Japanese folktales that will introduce young audiences to the cosmic dilemmas and archetypal situations in traditional Japanese literature and fairytales. Staging will utilize theatrical elements of Kabuki theater. Designed for audiences of five to eight year-old children, the work will be developed in partnership with Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and is anticipated to premiere during CTC’s 2013 season.

VISUAL ARTS
Central Indiana Community Foundation, Indianapolis
Fred Wilson

The Central Indiana Community Foundation is a $550 million public foundation that consults with donors and family foundations on giving, awards grants to nonprofit organizations, and provides leadership to address community needs. The Foundation was formed in 1997 through a partnership with the Indianapolis Foundation and the Legacy Fund to provide a broader level of philanthropic service and support to communities in Marion and Hamilton Counties.

Fred Wilson is a conceptual visual artist who has worked with museums and collections around the world. He is best known for rearranging art objects and other collectibles into unusual displays to portray the under-represented perspectives of people of color. Wilson’s compelling, site-specific installations draw upon standard curatorial practices to tease out connections between objects, people, places, and local or national histories. Wilson has a long list of honors and awards that includes a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award (1999) and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2003). He is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Object, Exhibition, and Knowledge at Skidmore College; has represented the United States at the Cairo Biennial (1992) and Venice Biennale (2003); and in 2007 received an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University.

The Foundation will commission Wilson to create a new permanent sculpture to be installed along the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, an eight-mile urban bicycle and pedestrian path that connects five downtown Cultural Districts and delivers users within one block of every major arts, cultural, heritage, sports, and entertainment venue in downtown Indianapolis. The work, tentatively titled E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) is inspired by an existing war monument that depicts a freed man sitting half-clothed on the ground with his hands raised up with broken shackles. Wilson plans to recreate and repurpose the figure in Indiana limestone and present him in a more upright position holding a flag of the African Diaspora instead of shackles.

Based in Chicago, the Joyce Foundation supports efforts to strengthen public policies in ways that improve the quality of life in the Great Lakes region. Cultural funding supports projects that bring diverse audiences together to share common cultural experiences and encourage more people to see the arts as integral parts of their lives. The Foundation also makes grants in the areas of Education, Employment, Environment, Gun Violence Prevention, and Money and Politics.