Fall 2007 cadre $10 art grant recipients We are thrilled to announce the winners of the Fall 2007 cadre $10 grant for visual artists. As with the first round last winter, it was a very difficult selection process as all of the jurors were overwhelmed by the quality of the applications. With the $2002 we collected, and with the creation of the new "Baby 'dre," or cadre Choice Award--funded by a personal donation of $340-- we were able to fund, in part or full, five artists’ projects, again believing that the amount we could contribute would still make a significant difference in the realization of the work. Our jurors for this cycle (not including our own collective single vote) were:

Bernice Coleman, Artist, Educator, CSU Northridge

Dia Penning, Artist, Arts Education Program Manager, SF Arts Commission

Charles Guice, Charles Guice Contemporary

Jennifer Steensma Hoag, Artist, Educator, Calvin College

We continue to seek additional ways to support artist’s work, especially under-represented artists, or those working in alternative forms or media. Please help continue to spread the word about cadre in order to insure its continued success and growth.

And finally, we're off and running toward the next grant cycle with $200 already donated!

And the recipients for the Fall of 2007:

Ginelle Hustrulid and Erica Freyberger will use the cadre $10 grant to insert re-stickable, and re-movable vinyl replications work by photographer Mark McKnight into the San Francisco urbanscape. “People can relocate, acquire, exchange, and remove the photographs, allowing the project to become a transferable medium where vandalism has no role.”($400)

Eric Gottesman will use cadre funds in his ongoing work in Zebqine, south Lebanon. The artist has been working with a youth group to understand and document the impact of the war. Beginning by asking the participants to draw maps of their childhood visions of their village and identifying the locations of particularly vivid memories, artist and youths then visit those spots and use Polaroid cameras to make photographs of reenactments of their memories. The photographs are then placed in the landscape and rephotographed. ($600)

Kelli Connell will use cadre funds in the completion of her project, Double Life, an autobiographical questioning of sexuality and gender roles that shape the identity of the self in intimate relationships. Her large-scale, digital photographs are created from scanning and manipulating two or more negatives of the same model in Adobe Photoshop. Connell’s work reconstructs private relationships that she has either experienced personally, witnessed in public, read about in books, or watched on television in photographs which look believable, yet have never occurred. ($600)

In CalliGRAFFiti, Minette Mangahas, calligrapher, and collaborator Ricardo Richie, graffiti artist, are exploring the dynamic relationship between these two writing forms. “In their sophisticated use of space and line, graffiti “writers” echo the techniques that East Asian calligraphers have been practicing for four thousand years.” These artists will use cadre funds to defray the costs of producing work during an upcoming residency in the Project Space at the Headlands Center for the Arts. ($500)

Kirstyn Russell’s Outposts series, in which she photographs queers spaces across the American landscape looks beyond geographic boundaries to the possibility of a psychological, historic, or identity based understanding of place. Given the important place that bars have served in the history of the gay pride movement, these visually bleak photographs of gay bars or spaces that—through rainbow icons or chance linguistic juxtaposition—might be construed as referencing gay culture underline the continued struggle for representation and visibility. ($242.50)

Many thanks to our jurors who put in many hours reviewing our 22 applications. And thanks to all of you for your continued support of this project.

Best wishes,

cadre

Carla Williams and Deirdre Visser

  ¶ 4:12 PM

  "A Blossoming Photographic Romance" - an update from grantee Nora Barrows Friedman

Tea Party Magazine is doing a full spread on Nora's photographs of Palestine, which she
generously attributes to the publicity generated by her receipt of a cadre art grant!
This will be published in August.

She's headed back to Palestine for a third time this year, both for her regular gig on
KPFA's Flashpoints show, and to make more photographs with her refurbished 1950's
Rollieflex knock-off (a 120-mm box camera.) "It takes stunning photographs, and I
can't wait to keep taking them as my journeys unfold!"

She's looking for a good local venue to exhibit her photographs, so get in touch if you
have ideas for her.

Nora has also launched a website where you can check out more of her work, both written and
photographic:
www.norabf.com

She writes that receiving the cadre $10 arts grant has "been a wonderful jump-start
to a blossoming photographic romance."

This is what we hope for. Thanks again to all of our generous donors.

  ¶ 7:12 PM

  Update from cadre $10 art grant recipient Jessica Ingram

Jessica has been busy shooting for the project, A Civil Rights Memorial.  
Her focus during the month of June was Alabama.  The Southern Poverty Law Center 
opened their relevant files to her, which were an "amazing" research tool.  
In a week she leaves again to shoot for another month, focusing this time on events
in Mississippi.  Both excited and upset by all the new information, she is starting 
to work on the book project. We'll continue to follow its development.

Please also note that she has just launched a completed website 
which (like all of our sites!) will be in constant development.  
Check it out at: www.jessingram.com

  ¶ 6:55 PM

  Clearing up the confusion Yesterday, after sending our new emailer out, we received an reply from a donor that surprised us. Carla and I felt it merited a response, because we make every effort to ensure that the grant process is completely transparent.

The author of the email wrote that he'd supposed if we'd given the first grant to a friend here in San Francisco; "not a bad way to help out a friend in need!"

So just in case you've wondered the same thing, we want to be very clear that we've tried to build that possibility out of the process. Admittedly, the majority of both our donors and applicants are from the Bay Area. We live here, and starting a project on this small scale is initially a word-of-mouth deal. However, we recruited jurors from around the country (selected from our board and from the donors), and if you check out our recipients, they hail from Tokyo, London, Canada and the States. We knew none of them personally, though we were familiar with some of the work. So if you have a moment, check out our grantees through the link below. And remember that any donor is eligible to be a juror. Please let us know if you're interested.

http://cadreart.org/grantees.html

As we go forward, our challenge is to build momentum and expand our audience. Sustaining a grant on $10 donations is harder than we expected. We always invite your ideas for new and innovative ways to get the word out.
Cheers.
  ¶ 11:56 AM

  To Nominate or To Apply As you know, we currently operate within a somewhat traditional (albeit electronic) application format. The artist makes a small donation, then sends in an artist statement and request for funding, along with some visual materials to support their application. During the first round jurors struggled over the decisions and in the end, we had to tell many talented artists that we couldn't fund their work. This was a really difficult process for us, as we started the grant out of our own frustration and anguish after receiving lots of rejections, out of our desire to transform our relationship to arts funding. So we got to thinking, what if we go with a nomination process??

You, the donor, would be invited to submit a letter in support of an artist who is doing dynamite work, who would benefit with the level of financial support we can offer. You would include a link to a website or blog with visual materials. What do you think? We'd like to hear from you (please add your comments below). We like the act of generosity that the nomination process entails, and the artist doesn't have to know they were nominated unless their work is selected for support. Let us know what you think. What problems haven't we considered? What are the benefits?

Please note that for the September 1st application deadline, we're still accepting applications.

Thank you!
  ¶ 8:24 PM 0 comments

  grantees update This is a CADRE update.
As you know, Collaborator's Guide, is in full progress and we wanted to let you know what has been happening!

Both Bethany and Selwa have formed two groups in London and Tokyo. Our collective now includes seven members for the project (which we have nicknamed CADRE project for now).

Communicating between Tokyo and London.

Our original goal of working with a newer and bigger group, long-distance, is materializing, and we are dealing with administrative and creative solutions to enable this. Archiving our research, enabling all of us to challenge the concept democratically and synchronizing conversations between Tokyo and London are important parts of our process!

We recently started using a new online tool called Activecollab (activecollab.com). The tool is opensource (free and shared). This tool is helping us archive and manage the process as well as exchange information! We are just demo-ing the software to other Collaborator's Guide members and have uploaded some notes/case studies/files.

Meanwhile, during our process of finding new like-minded individuals to work on this collaborative event/installation with us, we have also been visiting and assessing spaces. This has been a fun and interesting process. Tokyo galleries and some UK galleries charge for showing work (aside from commissions) so while visiting spaces to assess size, interest, location, cost we are also investigating non-traditional spaces.


Proposed Calendar.

ongoing: introducing our concept to artists, gallerists, creatives and receiving feedback about appropriate spaces/opening our concept to questions.
May 20: questionnaires and first meetings with new members of Tokyo group.
May-June: re-evaluating goals. conversations in cultural differences between tokyo and london (and what to portray in the exhibit).

July 5: questionnaire and first 'official' meeting of London group.
July 2-9: mini-exercise. Collaborator's Guide member will exchange detailed journals of each day to share a more intimate picture of our relationships with Tokyo and London (and get to know each other better, faster).
10 July: all members receive short training on how to add info to activecollab tool and the blog.
28 July: tokyo vs. london 'meet n greet' for all members to get to know eachother via online web chat as well as other forms of introduction, possibly a meal, an gift exchange of some sort.

Start of August: second group exercise after agreed concept refinement.
August: fundraising, prep-time, making, sourcing materials....
Sept: final stages of workshop, exhibition/show.

We hope this finds you well and we will email again with an update in a few months!
Please feel free to email thoughts or concerns.

Thanks so much,
Bethany and Selwa

---

(Jessamyn's curatorial debut!)

--
  ¶ 5:37 PM

  design our logo! (and we need computer help) We're looking for some volunteer assistance—we need a permanent logo! Though we love Tiny Tim we're not sure he's going to be the face to move us forward.

Are there any designers out there who'd like to do a good turn and design a logo for the cadre $10 arts grant? If so, please E-mail us at cadreartgrant@yahoo.com.

We also need to create some online forms to streamline the application process. Are there any computer-savvy folks out there willing to help us with that? Again, E-mail us at cadreartgrant@yahoo.com—we'll make it worth your while!!  ¶ 9:14 PM

  cadre at sjica (9/13) Mark your calendars. cadre has been invited to participate in a panel discussion on art, community and the Internet at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art on September 13, from 7:00-9:00pm. We'd love to see you there!

The Virtual Space
Artists and arts organizations create websites that document work and exist as the actual work. Websites can potentially reach an audience and create communities that gallery spaces can only dream of. In our technically-connected world, this panel will discuss various strategies of presenting work on the internet, such as virtual galleries, artists projects and blogs.

Panelists include: Joseph del Pesco, Curator and co-founder of collectivefoundation.org, Christian Frock, Creator of invisiblevenue.com, Erin Goodwin-Guerrero, Producer of artshiftsanjose.com, Deirdre Visser and Carla Williams, Co-founders of cadreart.org

  ¶ 12:59 PM

  Interdependence

Foster An Environment For Mutual Benefit and Make Interdependence Visible

http://www.collectivefoundation.org/

Whew! In the better late than never category, we want to catch you up on the goings on here at cadre art. On May 3rd as promised we participated in a conversation with Ted Purves at the Yerba Buena Center, in an event called "Speaking the Art World into Existence." We left inspired by the work of the other presenters (listed and linked above, who are working on a range of projects to create a more open source and equitable art world) - and with the challenge to make our grant more closely reflect our values and inspirations.

We started this grant out of a desire to transform our relationship to arts funding. After years of applying and receiving mostly rejections in response, we wanted to become agents in this system. We wanted to be able to fund projects that were interesting, even if the applicant had never received funds before. With this in mind, and having experienced last winter being on the other end of sending out rejections to those applicants whose projects we had no money to fund, we're considering a move from an application process to a nomination process. This is in the offing for the Winter 07/08 grant cycle. We welcome your feedback and ideas about how we can make this happen. Nominees won't necessarily know they've been nominated and thus won't receive a rejection, and we like the initial gesture of generosity that's required to nominate an artist for funding.

Best wishes and thanks to the Collective Foundation.
  ¶ 11:58 AM

  cadre at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Speaking the Art World into Existence
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Thursday May 3rd, 6:30pm

cadre is thrilled to announce that we have been invited to present our manifesto as part of the
Collective Foundation exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
tomorrow, May 3rd. The event begins at 6:30pm.

Collective Foundation artists Joseph Del Pesco, Scott Oliver and Ted Purves
are bringing together groups who have both "personalized and pluralized the art world."
Presenters will include collective artist groups, other alternative granting
programs, publishing projects, and spaces for art criticism and dialogue, all
"projects and organizations that exemplify a more democratic, DIY,
people-powered art-world and employ strategies of collective  contribution,
crowdsourcing, and alternative or informal economies."

  ¶ 9:28 PM

  now art grants (spreading the word about a new art grant)

conceptual artist damali ayo, creator of rent-a-negro.com, author of How to Rent a Negro, and nationally touring speaker announces the creation of Now Art Grants.

Artists creating work that engages dialogue about current social issues will receive grant funds (minimum $500), three months mentorship by damali ayo, a second mentor who has specific experience in the project field, and access to ayo's mailing list of over 3000 people.

To be chosen to receive a Now Art Grant, an artist/project must:

· Take place outside of a gallery or limited-access space.

· Engage a wide audience in a dialogue about a current social issue

· Show ability to fully accomplish the proposed project

Artists should send their project ideas and a short bio to nowart@damaliayo.com

Grants will be made on a rolling basis as funds become available. All artists who sign up on ayo's "now artists" mailing list will receive regular information about various grants and support for artists engaged in social change.

Now Art Grants apply the philosophy of microfinance to generate art for social change. Now Art Grants combine the small donations of many individuals and make these available to artists whose work returns the support to those individuals by creating art that catalyzes social change. These artists often work with no pay and slim budgets because the activist nature of their work is often dismissed as "not fine art" or because art remains devalued as a viable career choice by society.

Members of the damali ayo and now art mailing lists donate any amount they choose to the grant pool. This money is combined and granted to artists who show their commitment to social change through their work. The artist will be rigorously researched by the grantor but artists will not be required to spend critical art time writing extensive applications or budgets. Projects can be created specifically for this grant money or can already be in process. Money can be used for any aspect of the project including artist fees. Mentoring helps to assure the success of the project.

Make a donation, ask a question, join the mailing list and apply by contacting nowart@damaliayo.com.

now art
Now Art holds that the primary role and responsibility of art is to mirror the dilemmas of society to its citizens, offering a catalyst for change and development; evolves as society evolves; values the artist's use of a wide range of media; integrates contemporary and emerging technologies; prizes the power of individuals to effect change, discarding divisions between personal and political; honors and engages the work of its predecessors, recognizing that art builds upon art.

  ¶ 9:12 PM

  we're not a 501(c)(3) A point of clarification for all of our generous donors and potential donors:

As much as we'd like to send receipts for donations we receive, we are trying to keep it low key at the launch of this grant. We may eventually go there, but for now we do not have a legal non-profit status and though we could write you a receipt, it would not make your donation to cadre tax-deductible.

This is one of the reasons we asked for donations of $10, reasoning that most people would feel comfortable giving up that relatively low amount even if it wasn't tax deductible.

Thanks!  ¶ 4:36 PM