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Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh announced on Thursday, Dec. 21, that it is once again awarding grants totaling $1.6 million to assist individual artists and collectives for planning and operating support.
For the first time, this year’s grants, funded by philanthropist MacKenzie Scott with contributions from The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation, provide 35 of the 38 recipients with funding for two years instead of one.
“Black artists and arts organizations in our community produce amazing work, but the financial challenges they face are significant,” says Lisa Shroeder, the Pittsburgh Foundation’s president and CEO, in a release. “We expect that extending the grant time frame to two years for most awardees will relieve some of the financial stress and allow artists and arts organizations more time to develop projects.”
Many of the individual artists seeking project support received grants of $50,000 over two years.
In an interview with The Pittsburgh Foundation, Indira Cunningham of Confluence Ballet Company — who won a YWCA Emerging Leader Equity Award earlier this year — says she will be using the funds to develop her career in the performing arts.
“One of the main fields I am looking to progress in is ballet — a field that has an entrenched history of racism, as well as elitism, body shaming and sexism,” Cunningham says.
Local producer and singer-songwriter INEZ’s grant will go toward producing a 12-track album and a documentary following its process.
“This album will serve as a stage for my realizations and recovery,” INEZ says to The Pittsburgh Foundation. “I will channel these into a work that serves as a navigational tool for emotional healing. One that doesn’t look at Black women’s anger as a ‘low vibrational’ but as a human emotion that need not be vilified — our anger is an emotion that needs to be acknowledged and released in a way that aids growth, and doesn’t perpetuate continual internal harm. I hope this album can be a project that serves to dispel the harmful troupe of the ‘Angry Black Woman.’”
Afro-Cuban prose and poetry writer Jorge Olivera Castillo, City of Asylum Pittsburgh’s writer-in-residence, received $14,000 over two years to assist with the translation and publication of sonnets and short stories, and also the production of two original songs.
Castillo hopes his works educate and inform English readers who do not understand the persecution that occurs in Cuba.
“In Cuba I did not have the opportunity to express myself freely on many issues of interest, due to my critical position against the dominance of a political ideology based on the dictatorship of a single party,” Castillo says to The Pittsburgh Foundation. “For expressing my ideas, I was in jail for two years, receiving doubly hostile treatment because of the color of my skin. Although the government claims to have eradicated this phobia, reality points to the maintenance of a discriminatory vision against the Black population that survives in worse conditions than the rest.”
The full list of awardees and detailed information about them is available on The Pittsburgh Foundation’s website.
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