Bad at Sports would like to congratulate the 2015 Propellor Fund Grant Recipients!
Propeller Fund proudly announces the fifteen grant recipients for 2015. Selected from a pool of over one-hundred candidates, these small, self-organized, and radical projects are vital to Propeller’s mission of encouraging more varied models, spreading these activities into more diverse areas, and to spark ambitions beyond current formats in Chicago’s visual art world. Propeller Fund offers $50,000 (five grants at $6,000 and ten grants at $2,000) annually to artists producing a wide range of public culture.
Propeller Fund recognizes that such independent artist-organized events, informal roundtables and workshops, collectively organized exhibition spaces, and publishing endeavors constitute a large catalyst for the creative activity and vitality of the Chicago visual art world. These projects are responsible for much of the complexity and richness in the art community.
Propeller Fund 2015 Award Ceremony and Reception
This year’s recipients will be recognized in an award ceremony on Wednesday, November 18 at the Jane Addams Hull-House Residents’ Dining Hall. Join grant recipients and the community to celebrate with food, drink, and a reception.
Wednesday, November 18, 6–9pm
Jane Addams Hull-House Residents’ Dining Hall
800 South Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60607
Award Ceremony: 6:30pm
Awardee Reception: 7–9pm
Free and open to the public
Propeller fund would like to thank this year’s distinguished jury: Jen Delos Reyes, Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at UIC and Founder and Director of Open Engagement (Chicago, IL); Deana Haggag, Director of The Contemporary (Baltimore, MD); Nicole Marraquin, Artist, Co-Organizer of Multiuso, and Associate Professor of Art Education at SAIC (Chicago, IL); Meida McNeal, Artistic/Creative Director of Honey Pot Performance and Arts and Culture Manager for the Chicago Parks District (Chicago, IL); and Astria Suparak, independent curator and author (Pittsburgh, PA). And much appreciation to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, funder of Propeller Fund through its Regional Regranting Program.
2015 Awardees
$6000
BRUJOS (Stephanie Jeter, Ben Kolak, Ricardo Gamboa)
BRUJOS is a queer-of-color, radically politicized web series following four gay Latino doctoral candidates—that are also witches. They navigate magic, sexuality, and surviving a witch-hunt led by a secret society of white heteronormative male descendents of the first New World colonizers. BRUJOS blends Latino soap opera and U.S. sitcoms to deliver 12, seven-minute episodes developed through queer men of color testimonies, interviews with magic pracitioners, and cultural studies academics. In a world conditioned by white supremacy and inequality, BRUJOS makes visible people and ways of life that have been made invisible by dominant culture and mainstream media.
filmfront (Alan Medina, Malia Haines-Stewart, Alyx Christensen, Rudy Medina)
filmfront is a multidisciplinary project that uses the exhibition of film, video, and new media from around the world and down the street to facilitate exciting, challenging conversations that are open, free, and accessible to everyone. Curation is based on a collaborative model of programming in which artists, curators, and free thinkers are invited to work together to create exhibitions, interactive projects, performances, workshops, and lectures open to the community.
Floating Museum (Faheem Majeed, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, Andrew Schachman)
Floating Museum is a mobile exhibition structure and structural interpretation of the DuSable Museum of African American History that will move by land and water through the city of Chicago in 2016 and 2017. The project blends creative place-making, activism, and exhibition design to make a platform for conversations, art viewing and community engagement.
https://museumfloating.tumblr.com
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street (Allison Glenn)
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street is a public art exhibition that couples artists and practices with the materiality of the built environment. Through the use of junior billboards, sculpture, performance, media, and sound, the artists in the exhibition will consider landscape and the built environment, encouraging viewers to traverse rich and varied expanses of the city.
Report to the Public: An Untold Story of the Conservative Vice Lords (Benneth Lee, Lisa Junkin Lopez)
Benneth Lee will organize film screenings and train young people to lead tours expanding upon the exhibition, Report to the Public: An Untold Story of the Conservative Vice Lords. By training former gang members to become community docents and targeting youth audiences, the project demonstrates that young people in gangs are capable of addressing the most challenging issues in their communities. Report to the Public draws upon the thesis that gang members, like all of us, have “multiple, conflicting identities” and that we must affirm their positive identity formation in order to decrease violent and destructive behavior.
$2000
The Chicago ACT Collective (Sarah Atlas, William Estrada)
The Chicago ACT (Artists Creating Transformation) Collective is a diverse collective of artists creating work to support movements, struggles, and communities in Chicago. Through a partnership process, this project generates art that reflects on and responds to current and local needs identified by those most impacted. This project has many facets—building a collective of socially and politically engaged artists, forming partnerships with grassroots organizations and social justice movements, and producing prints, graphic arts, and visual campaigns for social change that promote collaboration and dialogue across multiple communities.
Fielding (Amber Ginsburg, Sara Black, Billy Dee)
Fielding is a collaborative art and design practice, a youth workshop series, a design/build service and a social justice initiative. Fielding leads workshops for girls, young women and gender variant youth to design and build structures while learning to use woodworking tools competently and confidently. In addition, a diverse core crew of skilled women and gender variant carpenters will respond to invitations (local, regional and international) to design and construct building projects.
Freedom Dreams (Alice Kim )
Freedom Dreams is a project that creatively connects Illinois prisoners serving long-term sentences with local and national artists. Their writings and visual art will be featured in a multi-media exhibit and series of events centered on the question: What does freedom look like?
HAIR CLUB (Suzanne Gold, Kelly Lloyd, Michal Lynn Shumate )
HAIR CLUB is a growing community of artists, writers, and scholars whose aim is to conduct a collaborative inquiry into the multi-valent topic of HAIR in our wider culture via conversation, publication and meaningful programming, and organizing HAIR-centered work across medium and discipline into thematic publications, exhibitions and events.
https://www.facebook.com/hairclub
Kitchen Space (Traci Fowler, Trevor Schmutz, Mirko Velimirovic)
The organizers of the project/exhibition space Kitchen Space will develop a cookbook that provides readers with a variety of recipes for main dishes, appetizers, drinks, etc. from the unique perspective of two artists who have to combat monthly exhibitions in the very kitchen they cook their meals.
https://www.facebook.com/kitchenspace
One Room (Kate Thomas, Devin Pendergast, Kitty Conde, Jessica Rosenbaum, Roxy De Luca, Jeanne Walker)
One Room is a social practice project that invites the public into conversations with CPS artist-teachers to playfully explore the complexity of a teaching practice within our current climate of constraints and monitoring. Artist teachers in conversation with the public will generate creative approaches to systemic problems.
Paper Work (Third Object: Gan Uyeda, Ann Meisinger, Raven Munsell, Elisabeth Smith)
Paper Work is an exhibition organized by Chicago-based curatorial collective Third Object that, through a central exhibition site and office-bound satellite locations, explores a range of current artistic responses to notions of bureaucracy, administration, and the ordering of information.
Social Furniture (John Preus, Jamie Kalven )
Social Furniture produces 2x4s out of materials salvaged from closed Chicago Public Schools. Working with Lathrop Community Partners and the Invisible Institute, we will work to develop projects that provide both a source of income for Lathrop residents and a forum for developing relationships between the developers and the residents. The 2x4s are both literal and figurative building materials to produce new structures.
UnJustified (Jacob Klippenstein, Crista Noel, Ric Wilson, Teresa Campagna, Deonta Terry)
A series of screenings and discussions will debut a series of UnJustifiable mini-docs. The series will provide a retrospective and prospective look at Chicago Police violence from the 1800s to the present with a timeless focus on educating and engaging Chicagoans especially youth through dialogue led by community elders, analogue, and digital media.
W.A.R.P. Westtown Artist Residency Program (The Weaving Mill: Emily Winter, Matti Sloman, Eva Joly, Monika Kimrey, Envision Unlimited, and more)
W.A.R.P is a series of short-term residencies at The Weaving Mill, a small-scale production mill in Humboldt Park. In partnership with Envision Unlimited’s Westtown Center, The Weaving Mill pairs artists with developmental disabilities with visiting artists from the wider Chicago community. The groups are guided through a series of workshops that allow the artists to approach an unfamiliar industrial textile technology together.
About Propeller Fund
Launched in May 2010, Propeller Fund is administered jointly by Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago and threewalls. Propeller Fund provides grants to artists, curators, and groups living and working in Cook County, Illinois, and seeks to support projects that are independent, informal, and self-organized. Propeller Fund receives support from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts through the Regional Regranting Program.
Further descriptions of Propeller Fund projects can be found here.
- First there is a man, then there is no man, then there is (The Pina Colada Song) - March 2, 2022
- “What Does It Mean?” - September 29, 2020
- The Reality of Rejection - August 9, 2018
