CQC 2000
Creating Queer Community: Grants for Emerging Artists
Sunday, June 11; Noon – 3 pm
Location: Jon Sims Center, 1519 Mission St @ 11th
Info / Reservations: 415.554.0402, [email protected]
A project of the National Queer Arts Festival, Creating Queer Community will provide grants between $500 and $1,500 to unleash the creative spirits of individual queer artists and community-based organizations. Creating Queer Community will support the implementation of six to eight inventive ideas that expand the depth, breadth, and diversity of community participation in the arts.
To be eligible, you must attend this workshop which will feature presentations by artists who have originated projects that exemplify the program’s community-building goals and objectives. At the conclusion of the workshop, grant applicants will submit a brief written description of their proposed project.
Funded projects will be selected by a peer-review panel made up of queer artists. Evaluation criteria will include artistic integrity and originality, community participation, community impact, and the applicant’s capacity to complete the project. In addition to financial resources, selected artists will receive free rehearsal space; grant-writing assistance; and for Internet-based projects, access to technological expertise.
The Queer Cultural Center, the Harvey Milk Institute and the Jon Sims Center for the Performing Arts believe arts and culture are an essential component of a healthy community. Through this mechanism, the project’s three sponsors will invest their collective financial, space, and human resources in arts-based strategies that build community by increasing and deepening cultural participation.
The arts unlock human potential for creativity and imagination, expand the scope of our interests to include others, and enable us to discover common ground with those whose experiences are different than our own. While queer artists challenge the status quo and celebrate the human spirit, they also promote civic participation and the region’s economic development. The arts nurture the creativity that permeates the Bay Area’s cultural life and fuels its commerce and technological inventiveness. They develop problem-solving skills that address the needs of many sectors of our community, especially youth. By investing in cultural participation, the sponsors hope to ensure the ongoing development of a robust, risk-taking and culturally diverse queer arts community in San Francisco, which is the international epicenter of queer culture. Creating Queer Community will seed promising projects that increase community participation in arts activities and cultural programs, establish new linkages between arts and non-arts institutions at a neighborhood level, and demonstrate new arts-based strategies to building community. We are committed to being responsive to ideas about how the arts can successfully achieve this goal. We will take risks, realizing that not all ideas will succeed.
This is made possible from The Gateway Initiative from the San Francisco Foundation.
