Lately there has been more grants and prizes than you can shake a stick at. Beginning with the Frieze prize, I’d say it’s the perfect time to devote yourself to writing. If you’re lazy like me though, you take pictures and should apply for the Humble grant for emerging photographers. If you’re just straight up post modern (read: into ‘net art) you should apply to the new Creative Commons prize, notably titled “The Liberated Pixel Cup.” If you’re a painter…well, I just don’t know what to tell you. More info below!

 
It’s also worth noting that there’s a new video up of the ENTIRE how-to-win-the-Propeller-Fund workshop AKA, “Funding and Creating Your Independent Projects.” Check it out here.

OR, be there in person:

Saturday, June 16, 2pm
Hyde Park Art Center
5020 South Cornell Avenue, Chicago

Wednesday, June 27, 6pm
Mess Hall
6932 North Glenwood Avenue, Chicago

Wednesday, July 18, 6pm
Gallery 400, UIC
400 South Peoria Street, Chicago

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Frieze Prize 2012
deadline: July 20th

Aspiring writers are invited to submit an unpublished 700-word review in English of a recent contemporary art exhibition. Applicants must be over 18 years old and must not have had more than three pieces of writing on art published in a newspaper or magazine. The winner will be awarded £2,000 (a lot of American dollars) and commissioned to write a review for an upcoming issue of frieze.

http://www.frieze.com/writersprize/

Humble Foundation’s New Photography Grant
deadline: June 29th

Given twice annually (fall and spring), the grant is a $1,000 cash award that recognizes the strongest new proposal in contemporary art photography as submitted to Humble Arts Foundation.
Funded projects can be new or ongoing and with visual strength and clarity of proposal.

http://hafny.org/grant/guidelines/

THE LIBERATED PIXEL CUP
deadline: June 30th

Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and then program a bunch of free software games that use it. Liberated Pixel Cup brings together some powerful allies: Creative Commons, Mozilla, OpenGameArt, the Free Software Foundation, and you.

http://lpc.opengameart.org/

 
p.s.

I definitely missed the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation grant program for arts writers, but with that said, there is always next year. It’s basically amazing and I think everyone involved in the arts should enter.
http://artswriters.org/home.html

This morning I found an email from Richard Holland that simply stated “utterly awesome” with a link. I clicked on the link and found myself at the home page for the film Sita Sings the Blues. I had seen the movie poster while I was at the Gene Siskle Film Center and had thought about seeing it based on the animation. But as usual I was too lazy and forgot about it. On the front page you are greeted with a letter to the audience: “I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.” The film came about when Nina Paley was dumped by her husband after he had moved to India via e-mail. The film is a recreation of the Indian story The Ramayana.

Wired has a great interview with Nina Paley:

Wired: What is your movie about?

Nina Paley: Sita Sings the Blues is a musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana. The aspect of the story that I focus on is the relationship between Sita and Rama, who are gods incarnated as human beings, and even they can’t make their marriage work [laughs].

Wired: And that ties in with the film’s second narrative.

Paley: Right, and then there’s my story. I’m just an ordinary human, who also can’t make her marriage work. And the way that it fails is uncannily similar to the way Rama and Sita’s [relationship fails]. Inexplicable yet so familiar. And the question that I asked and the question people still ask is, “Why”? Why did Rama reject Sita? Why did my husband reject me? We don’t know why, and we didn’t know 3,000 years ago. I like that there’s really no way to answer the question, that you have to accept that this is something that happens to a lot of humans.

Wired: And this whole movie was rendered on a laptop?

Paley: I started on a G4 titanium laptop in 2002. I moved to a dual 1.8-GHz tower in 2005, moved again to a 2-by-3-GHz Intel tower December 2007, with which I did the final 1920 x 1080 rendering.

view the entire interview here.

I just downloaded it and am looking forward to watching it after the Blackhawks play the Red Wings tonight. Yeah, I like sports.