2007 Grant Recipient List

Cultural Community Partnership

Number of grants: 19
Dollars awarded: $95,000

Brent M. Davids, St. Paul
$5,000; Davids will collaborate with American Composers Forum to produce and distribute his first film music soundtrack. Davids will offer an educational workshop on the scoring for filmmakers. There will be a public screening of the film.

Robert D. DesJarlait, Columbia Heights
$5,000; DesJarlait will collaborate with Francis Yellow to create a memorial mural for the Red Lake Reservation in remembrance of the event at Red Lake High School in March 21, 2005. The mural will use traditional Ojibwe-Anshinaabe art forms on plywood panels with acrylic.

Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer
$5,000; Franconia Sculpture Park will work with Rogger Cummings in a month-long residency to explore aluminum and steel materials for three-dimensional sculptural techniques; the completed sculpture will be on display at Franconia Sculpture Park. A workshop on mural painting will be offered for local children.

Armando Gutierrez G., Mendota Heights
$5,000; Gutierrez will create a Raku firing workshop at the first Gathering at the River Festival in collaboration with ArtStart. He will be the lead artist for a workshop for members of the Latino community, who will be invited to participate in the festival.

Kyrin E. Hobson, Bloomington
$5,000; Hobson and Catherine Kennedy will collaborate on Paths Crossed, a mixed-media installation using sculpture and video that explores the intersections of migration, memory, and family in African and Black American experiences.

Wing Young Huie, Minneapolis
$5,000; Huie will photograph Lutheran church congregations throughout Minnesota that reflect the dizzying ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of Minnesota. He will collaborate with Friends of the Immigration History Research Center to identify, photograph, and conduct interviews of Lutherans throughout the state, including rural areas, that will shed light on many issues including immigration and acculturation.

International Friendship Through the Performing Arts, Burnsville
$5,000; International Friendship Through the Performing Arts will commission artist Gao Hong to compose work for chorus and pipa that will be premiered by World Voices and Gao Hong in the fall of 2007.

Robert F. Karimi, Minneapolis
$5,000; Karimi will work with Pangea World Theater and local community artists to create the performance piece/cooking show Cooking Con Karimi and the Quest for the Secret Ingredient. The project will attempt to engage the audience and address issues of the complexity of cultural intersection.

Karen HeaChung. Lyu, Minneapolis
$5,000; Lyu will collaborate with Maryam Yusefzadeh to create and perform a multidisciplinary performance honoring Korean and Persian heritages in new ways, addressing media portrayals of North Korea and Iran. The artists will explore each other's culture and art forms to create this work.

David A. Mura, Minneapolis
$5,000; Mura and Alexs Pate will create a collaborative performance piece that will explore their friendship, their lives as men of color, and the relationships between Asian American and African Americans. Explorations will take place through monologues, dialogues, poetry, spoken word, and prose narration. The show will be performed at S.A.S.E. night at Patrick's Cabaret.

Valerie Norris, St. Paul
$5,000; Norris will work with the youth of the Red Lake Anishinaabe tribe, in collaboration with Youth Healing Dance, Healthy Life Project Organization, to create a photographic essay that will show the beauty and essence of the women of the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

Stacey L. Parshall, Minneapolis
$5,000; Parshall will collaborate with Exposed Brick Theatre to produce her play SHIPSIDE. This will be her first professionally produced full-length play.

The Southern Theater, Minneapolis
$5,000; Uri Sands will create a new work of dance, commissioned and supported by Southern Theater, that speaks to the common humanity of both dancers and audiences. The work will be premiered at The Southern and will be added to the repertory of Sands’s growing company TU Dance.

Xavier Tavera, Minneapolis
$5,000; Tavera and artist Maria O'Brien will participate in El Circo, an artistic event celebrating the similarities between the journey of Latino immigrants and the traveling circus. The event will offer the community an innovative event that explores the struggles of relocation.

Mu Performing Arts, Minneapolis
$5,000; Mu Performing Arts and Ying Zhang will collaborate to create a new composition using pan-Asian instruments that reflects the Dragon Festival's theme¾Unity of Diversity. The work will be a cohesive blend of Taiko drumming and various accompanying wind, string, and percussive instruments.

Robert K. Tom, Minneapolis
$5,000; Tom will collaborate with elementary students from Cedar-Riverside Community School and Augsburg College to produce a bas-relief ceramic mural. The project will meld the multicultural icons of the groups participating into a single entity, to reinforce the concept of a unity between all things.

VSA arts of Minnesota, Minneapolis
$5,000; Leili Pritschet will collaborate with VSA arts of Minnesota to create an accessible, multimedia production based on Persian dances, and to document it professionally. The production will speak about immigration and the assimilation of Muslim women into American culture.

Kao K. Yang, Andover
$5,000; Yang will collaborate with the Center for Hmong Studies to write and make an object movie about being Hmong and six years old in the Ban Vinai refugee camp. Yang will work with John O’Brien on her vision by studying how to move images, draw them to music, and use words to make them come alive.

Marcus Young, Minneapolis
$5,000; Young and the Minnesota Museum of American Art will collaborate in a public art event on Earth Day, April 22, 2007, called Wishes for the Sky. It will be a large-scale, nature-oriented, interdisciplinary conceptual arts experience using kites and incorporating public participation.