Creative Capital has announced its 2015 awardees in the categories of Moving Image and Visual Arts, representing a total of 46 funded projects selected from a nationwide pool of more than 3,700 proposals. Drawing on venture-capital principles, Creative Capital seeks out artists’ projects that are bold, innovative and genre-stretching, then surrounds those artists with the tools they need to realize their visions and build sustainable careers.
Two Parsons Fine Arts faculty member, A.K. Burns and Jeanine Oleson have been selected as awardees in the Visual Arts.
VISUAL ARTS AWARDEES & PROJECTS
Artists proposed projects that included new takes on sculpture, portraiture, comics and performance art. Ideas surrounding mass incarceration, gender and sexuality, nuclear waste, ancient languages, and global warming are represented.
A.K. Burns (Brooklyn, NY)
Funded Project: Negative Space, a multi-channel video installation that presents a surreal narrative of bodies in transition and their relationships to nature, technology, territories and resources.
Jeanine Oleson (Brooklyn, NY)
Funded Project: A human(e) orchestra, an ever-changing “orchestra” that uses a range of noises, from conventional music to speech acts, to produce compositions around agreed-upon issues or audiences in need of “music.”
The 2015 Creative Capital Artists are an incredible group of creative thinkers, representing 50 artists at all stages of their careers with an age range of 28 to 80 years old. They hail from 13 states plus Puerto Rico and Canada; more than half are women, and more than half identify as non-European American. Each funded project receives up to $50,000 in direct funding (disbursed at key points over the life of the project), plus additional resources and advisory services valued at $45,000, making the organization’s total 2015 investment more than $4,370,000.
“We believe it is so critical to sustain a commitment to invention and experimentation, to provocation and beauty,” said Ruby Lerner, Founding President & Executive Director, Creative Capital. “This class of Creative Capital awardees does it all; these artists are engaged with the world, and the immediacy of their projects is breathtaking.”
