NYFA press release

Whoo hoo! "Depression: The Musical" is now a fiscally sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts! Too bad I feel too depressed to work on it right now... ;)

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Sent by: New York Foundation for the Arts

For Immediate Release
Contact: Mark Rossier
212.366.6900 x211

Visual Art, Literature, Theater and Film Among the Latest Round of
New York Foundation for the Arts’ Fiscally Sponsored Projects

New York, NY (September 26, 2008) – FLASH: The Underwear Diaries, Jennifer Safina’s book and accompanying art installation, and Kirsten Majors’ theater piece Martin Luther The Musical! are among the 30 artist projects and organizations selected to receive support through the New York Foundation for the Arts’ (NYFA) Fiscal Sponsorship Program. Fiscal sponsorship enables artists to secure critical funding to complete their work. NYFA’s program is the oldest and most established in the country and currently sponsors over 400 artist projects and emerging organizations.

Among the other selected projects are two topical documentary films: Sean Neumann’s Supermen, a history of sports and steroids, and Lulu Fries’dat’s Holler Back [not] Voting in American Town, which looks at problems with the U.S election system. These projects follow in a long line of NYFA sponsored films including: Albert Maysles’ Islands; Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, and Robert Levi’s Billy Strayhorn, winner of the 2008 Emmy Award for Best Documentary. A complete list of newly sponsored projects follows.

Since 1976, New York Foundation for the Arts has sponsored thousands of artists’ projects and emerging arts organizations by lending use of its tax-exempt 501 (c) (3) status, so that these artists and mission specific groups can gain access to crucial funding for documentary films, photography, literature, theater, multimedia and dance projects, as well as the establishment of museums and festivals. Sponsored artists have access to funds from individual, corporations, foundations and government sources which would otherwise be unavailable to them. In addition to providing access to funding, NYFA offers financial services ranging from bill payment to payroll management, as well as consultations on grant proposals and arranging fundraising events. This training sets NYFA’s program apart and is critical to allowing artist to develop projects at their own pace and without compromise.

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About the New York Foundation for the Arts
New York Foundation for the Arts is the nation’s largest provider of funding, information and services to artists in the United States– annually awarding nearly $6 million to hundreds of artists throughout New York State and the U.S. Its Fiscal Sponsorship program is supported by generous grants from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Continental Airlines is the official airline of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2008 Fiscally Sponsored Projects

Artist Projects by Discipline

Literature

Francesca Granata, Fashion Projects
Fashion Projects is a digital and print publication which sets out to deepen the understanding of fashion and textile design in relation to other branches of design and greater visual culture.

Jennifer Safina, FLASH: The Underwear Diaries Project
FLASH: The Underwear Diaries Project is a book that uses images, interviews, and stories to explore women’s unique emotional attachments to their underwear, and also to promote awareness about cervical cancer and HPV. Content from the book will be featured as a traveling art exhibit.


Media

John Bush, Human Reunion
Human Reunion lyrically brings together major discoveries in contemporary science that reveal, during dangerous times, the essential unity of the human family. The confluence of rivers, ocean and epic sites at the tip of Manhattan is the dramatic setting where this documentary embarks on a cinematic journey of discovery. Meeting with leading scientists and social visionaries, SHADOW & LIGHT explores this unifying concept and its utmost relevance to an emerging and imperiled planetary culture.

Lisa Carlbom, Where Is My Home?
In this documentary, we follow five young Israeli professionals who are striving to build a career in New York City. Issues of war, immigration and the hardship of getting by in New York, come up in the interviews with our subjects. The questions that we are trying to answer in this film are why so many Israelis currently are leaving their country, and how it will affect the future of Israel.

Rocco Caruso, Four Backyards
A feature film centered around four people on the course of one day during which each has a life changing experience.

Bart Everly, Velvet Vision
Velvet Vision is about the photographer/director James Bidgood who shot beefcake photographs in the 1960s that were unlike any other and featured elaborate fantasy scenarios drenched in lush color.

Edward Gray, Back in the World: Vietnam Veterans after the War
A 90 minute documentary film that will explore how the Vietnam War affected the lives of Americans who fought it.

Steven Hillyer, My Place in the World
A film, based on a true story, which takes place on the South Side of Chicago, where Ken Ryan and his husband Mark have just returned home for the Christmas holiday. But this is no ordinary holiday - Ken and his siblings have planned a surprise for their mother Nancy, a first class trip to Hawaii. What would have been a magical vacation turns into tragedy when Nancy dies of an unexpected heart attack just before leaving.

Hiroshi Kumatani, Sister Doll
An experimental 2D/3D computer animation and graphic short film based on old Japanese folklore with traditional folkcraft doll design on main characters.

Arash Mokhtar, All Tomorrow’s Parties
A short film based on an original screenplay. The film deals with the theme of over-consumption and questions what is primarily of value to an individual in today's hyper-real world.

Sean Neumann, Supermen
Supermen is a two-part documentary series providing a comprehensive history of steroids and sports.

Daniel Powell, Pieces of a Man
Pieces of a Man is a feature film about a young black woman who sets out to visit her white father upon receiving a letter from him twenty years after he left.

Zakir Thaver, Abdus Salam Documentary Film
Abdus Salam, born to a poor family in rustic Pakistan, overcame poverty, a modest education and religious persecution to become one of the leading physicists of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize in 1979. Salam's work remains largely unacknowledged in his own country and this entirely unique story will be documented for the first time on film.

Lulu Fries’dat, Holler Back [not] Voting in AmericanTown
An ambitious full-length documentary with an explosive soundtrack and a hip graphic interface, "Holler Back" explores the entrenched problems of U.S. elections: from the twisted complexities of the Electoral College to easily hackable voting equipment.

Carole Langer, Lady Bill: The Story of Julian Eltinge
A feature length documentary film on the life and times of Julian Eltinge, the great American female impersonator of the early 20th Century, who achieved wealth and fame, yet was condemned to a life of loneliness and despair due to the denial and concealment of his true sexual identity.


Multi-Disciplinary

Alison Compton, Window Shopping
A public art project that proposes to install sculptural dress forms into twenty storefronts on Grace Street between E. 6th and Foushee Streets in downtown Richmond. This project merges recycled materials, fashion, and advocacy within a public art context. Incorporating historic references of the heyday of shopping in downtown Richmond and environmental practices generates awareness of domestic recycling and downtown revitalization.

Clarinda MacLowe, Sign Language
A public art installation and performance to be made by TRYST in collaboration with fourth and fifth graders from P.S. 124 and the businesses on the triangle formed by Division, Canal and Orchard Streets in New York City. It will temporarily replace the language and imagery of commercial signs in Chinatown, inviting a critique of consumption in the urban landscape. "Sign Language" creates exchange in the local community through playful interaction.


Music

Cheron Cowan, New York Street Opera Project
Singers, specializing in opera, musical theatre, and cabaret song genre present on-going concert series at nursing homes, youth organizations, schools, and local festivals in the Washington Heights/ Inwood area. The concerts are presented at minimal or no cost to the community and are accompanied by piano or a small chamber orchestra.


Performance

Christopher Robbins, “Dirt for Nauru”
In 'Dirt for Nauru,' the artist drags a barge of dirt across the Pacific Ocean to the nation of Nauru, an island reduced through years of phosphate mining to a thin perimeter of arable land around a gaping maw of hard white coral. But this is not international development; it is art.


Theater

Kirsten Major, Martin Luther: The Musical!
Martin Luther: The Musical! is the story of the last great attempt by the Islamic Ottoman Empire to take over the Holy Roman Empire, and the astounding role played by a dynamic yet humble German monk, Martin Luther. It is story about society and conscience similar to The Crucible.

Marianne Pillsbury, Depression: The Musical
Depression: The Musical (A Girl's Guide to Falling Apart & Putting Yourself Back Together) is a darkly humorous but ultimately uplifting pop/rock musical about city women learning to live with depression.

Lisa Dowda, WACO
This full-length drama examines the lives of five women who unite in their infatuation for American terrorist Timothy McVeigh. The play follows their relationships from the morning before his execution in June of 2001 to a group terror event in DC on September 11, 2003. Stage show contains a solo first act and full ensemble second act, with rock/soul spoken word monologues and transitions.


Visual Arts

Heide Lee Alexander, 9-11: A Local Perspective
A photo exhibition of the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks, how it affected the local neighborhoods and the recovery phase; designed for 10th anniversary of attacks.

Brendan Carney, Mapped Art
Mapped Art is a project to map public art in Greater New York. This represents a dynamic textual analysis of experiential connections brought to maps, through use on the internet.

Cesar Conejo, Puno Museum of Contemporary Art
The Puno Museum of Contemporary Art redefines the traditional conception of a Museum, to transform it into an institution based in the community. It proposes to use unfinished rooms in houses of low income areas in the town of Puno, Peru, offering their owners to carry out those works for free, with the condition that, in exchange, they would allow an exhibition of contemporary art for a period of time.

Virginia Creighton, Different at Every Turn: Contemporary Painters of the Hudson River
"Different at Every Turn: Contemporary Painters of the Hudson River" will be a traveling art exhibit with venues in or near the Hudson River Valley, between New York City and the Adirondacks. It will start in 2009, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's navigation up the river in 1609, and run to approximately the middle of 2010. Works by seventeen artists will be included in this exhibit, displaying stylistic diversity with a range of sizes.

Jane Schreibman, Lime Turf
A photography project depicting the female workforce in Rajasthan, India, as they extract limestone from quarries and transform in to quicklime.

Vishavjit Singh, Who Am I?
Who am I? is an exhibit of turbaned Americans. The cartoon/caricature-based exhibit of real life Americans will chronicle men and women from the Sikh community. A small minority dispersed around the U.S., Sikhs represent the most mis-identified Americans making them a target of constant wave of hate crimes since 9/11. The caricatures will visually stimulate the imagination with turbans and male beards complimented by text based introductions to the real life person.

James S. Vlasto, Homer L. Wise Memorial Committee
This project will commission and erect a bronze statue in Stamford, CT of Master Sergeant Homer L. Wise, who was awarded the Medal of Honor on June 14, 1944.

Amy Zimmer, The Miss Subways Project
This is an exhibition about the Miss Subways beauty contest held by New York City's transit system between 1941 and 1976. The show, scheduled for the New York Transit Museum in 2010, will feature portraits and oral histories of approximately 30 former winners. Building upon the popularity of a recent "New York Times" full-page spread on our project, the exhibition will further explore the contest's historical meaning and social context.


Newly Sponsored Organizations

Black and White Project Space
Black & White Project Space is committed to production, presentation and promotion of innovative and audience engaging site-specific installations otherwise in danger of under-representation in commercial galleries due to their scope and production costs. With these efforts Black & White Project Space will continue to bring cutting edge contemporary art to an expanding audience and give artists an opportunity to show their work in a high visibility setting.

Urban Art Beat
We believe that creative expression through the Hip-Hop arts has the potential to enhance the mind, spirit, and artistic energy of children and young adults and will support this mission by providing underserved youth with extracurricular opportunities in the arts, particularly Hip-Hop.

Art Angels
Art Angels is dedicated to ensuring that student artists, particularly the disadvantaged, are given a quality visual arts education. Our programs and services augment the existing art curriculum with opportunities to gain professional artist perspectives and real world experiences. We will motivate visually talented and skilled art students to pursue an education in the arts and become fully vested members of an artist profession.

Feeling tired? Feeling blue?

We've got just the pill for you...

DEPRESSION: THE MUSICAL

A Girl's Guide To Falling Apart & Putting Yourself Back Together

Coming soon to an off-off-off-off Broadway theatre near you!

"Better than Prozac!" -- My Mom

lions & tigers & bears oh my?!

I never really understood why Dorothy was so anxious to get home to gray, depressing Kansas. Did you?