Culture Program 2010 Annual Report
Several Joyce Award productions that premiered in 2010 embodied the Culture Program’s mission of supporting new works by artists of color, bringing people together to share cultural experiences, and enabling more people to see the arts as integral to their lives.

Photographs, Pottery, Music, and Murals
Chicago artist Theaster Gates at the Milwaukee Museum of Art crossed boundaries of both art and society. Gates, looking for forbearers in the field of ceramics, found his way to Dave Drake, a slave in antebellum South Carolina. “Dave the Potter” made stoneware pottery, mostly functional objects, and inscribed poetic couplets on them.

Gates, a potter, musician, and performance artist, had found his match: an African American potter with a multimedia sensibility. For his homage to Dave, To Speculate Darkly, he collaborated with workers at the nearby Kohler manufacturing plant to create new ceramic work that again relates functional and art objects. He set Dave’s couplets to music and assembled a local gospel choir to record them for the installation and perform at the opening. The result: a collaboration between white workers and African American artists that explores race and craft, past and present, function and art.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA), Iona Rozeal Brown, a painter and a DJ, also worked across media with local residents to create her exhibit All Fall Down.

Brown’s paintings combine the style of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints and hip-hop themes. Her central character, Yoshi, is described as “an enlightened warrior who communicates with divine spirits but remains on the earthly realm to guide young mortal spirits.” Brown engaged her own “young mortal spirits” from a local high school and a hip-hop summer camp. Together they produced a wall painting and a Japanese screen featuring a Brown landscape and rhymes written by the students.

As the MOCA curator put it, “By engaging students in her artistic practice, Brown teaches them to draw inspiration from a diversity of sources in order to help inspire and transform their own experiences, outlooks, and mythologies.”

While Gates and Brown brought in community members as makers of art, in Wing Young Huie’s University Avenue Project, sponsored by Public Art St. Paul, community members are both the subject and the audience.

Huie photographed people who live and work along the St. Paul thoroughfare and then, from May to October 2010, displayed them in shop windows along the route. Five nights a week the photos were projected on 40-foot screens set up in a vacant lot surrounded by shipping containers. The project transformed University Avenue into a six-mile art gallery—and transformed the gritty urban neighborhood, about to be disrupted by construction of a light rail line, into a place of art.

Not Just for Artists
Along with supporting cultural institutions and artists, the Foundation is committed to diversifying the arts world behind the scenes as well. Grants to the Theater Communications Group (TCG) have enabled more than 40 theater professionals of color to network with peers at the group’s annual conference.

“It was fantastic to know that the American theater landscape is changing, and I’m part of that change,” said one participant. “The pre- and post-conference, in which we got to meet and talk to each other, is so meaningful to me as I navigate my career in this industry.” Another participant singled out the mentorship arranged by TCG with the head of a major New York theater group: “Any time you have the opportunity to engage in repeated communications with someone of that stature, you always pick up things.”

The group honored the Foundation at its June 2010 meeting with its Regional Funders Award for supporting “the hundreds of small and mid-sized arts organizations that reflect and promote the cultural life of local communities and ethnic audiences in Chicago.”

Read the 2010 Annual Report
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Download a PDF of the 2010 Culture Program and Grants