News
Creative Capital: Info Sessions in AZ and Upcoming Deadlines
Creative Capital is now accepting online Letters of Inquiry for grants in Emerging Fields, Literature and Performing Arts. The deadline for submitting inquiries is March 1 at 4:00pm EST. Visit creative-capital.org/apply to learn more about the application process, read the grant guidelines and access the Inquiry Form.
Creative Capital provides integrated financial and advisory support to artists pursuing innovative and adventurous projects. Acting as a catalyst for the development of exceptional and imaginative ideas, they support artists whose work is provocative, timely and relevant; who are deeply engaged with their art forms and demonstrate a rigorous commitment to their craft; who are boldly original and push the boundaries of their genre; and who create work that carries the potential to reshape the cultural landscape. Selected grantees receive up to $50,000 in direct support for their project and advisory services valued at more than $40,000. (more…)
Cultural Tourism and Economic Strategy for the Arts
Cultural Tourism is an important component of economic development and revenue for most any community large or small. The Arts Commission supports the development of cultural tourism in communities across Arizona through seminars, grants and informational resources. Most recently, we partnered with the Arizona Humanities Council and Smithsonian Magazine.
Our statewide arts and cultural industry and artists contribute to the richness of our state and attract tourists from across the world. As President Obama speaks about tourism as an economic driver and source of jobs in Arizona this week, we thought it was important to bring the focus in just a little closer, and further discuss tourism from an Arts and Culture point of view.
President Obama recently said, “I directed my administration to send me a new national tourism strategy focused on creating jobs. And some of America’s most successful business leaders — some who are here today — have signed up to help. We’re going to see how we can make it easier for foreign tourists to find basic information about visiting America. And we’re going to see how we can attract more tourists to our national parks. We want people visiting not just Epcot Center, but the Everglades, too. The more folks who visit America, the more Americans we get back to work. It’s that simple.” (more…)
Guides to Grants for Fiscal Year 2013 Cycle Now Available
If you are currently a recipient of grant funding from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, or are interested in applying for the first time, please visit www.azarts.gov/grants to find information about grant categories, eligibility and application requirements.
Guidelines are now available for applying to the 2012-2013, fiscal year 2013 cycle of grants for organizations and schools.
Applicants are strongly encouraged to begin preparing application narratives and materials now, using the Guide to Grants documents. The Electronic Grants Online Resource, or EGOR – the online system used by applicants for grant application submission – will open in late January 2012.
Applicants should pay special attention to the following changes:
- Cultural Data Project: After nearly two years of preparation, trainings and orientations, the Arizona Cultural Data Project (CDP), a free financial tool for Arizona arts organizations, is now the primary vehicle for application budget submission. All applicants to the GOS and Festivals grants categories are required to submit their organization’s budget information using the Arizona Cultural Data Project (www.azculturaldata.org). Applicants should not delay: an organization’s first CDP data entry effort takes time and should not be postponed until the last minute. See the GOS Guide for more information.
- Festival Grant Funding: For the fiscal year 2013 grants cycle, Metro Phoenix/Metro Tucson organizations may not apply for support for both a Festival Project Grant and a General Operating Support (including Organizational Development Grant, General Operating Support Levels I, II, or III, or Basic/Locals Aid). Additionally, up to 10 of the grant review panels’ top-ranked festivals may receive merit-based $1,000 awards in addition to the flat $1,500 Festival Project Grant award, as well as an “Arizona Commission on the Arts Superfestival” distinction for the grant cycle (based on the availability of Arts Commission funds).
- Grants on hiatus: Due to sustained reductions to the Arts Commission’s grantmaking budget, Partners in Arts Learning Grants, discipline-based Project Grants and Arts Link to Tourism and the Economy (ALTE) are on hiatus for the 2012-2013, fiscal year 2013 cycle.
Applicants are encouraged to review all updates and changes to the Arts Commission’s grant application and review process in the Guide to Grants, Overview.
The deadline to submit an application for the upcoming grants cycle is Thursday, March 15, 2012.
Questions? Contact the Arts Commission at 602-771-6502 or info@azarts.gov.
SWAC on the Road: Public Art Workshop Series
Public Art Workshops Series
Join us for Season 3 of Arizona Public Art Workshops in 2012! The 2012 Public Art Workshop series will include five different sessions hosted by various Arizona Public Art programs and supporters of public art. Featured partners include members of the Arizona Public Art Network, Metro Light Rail, Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, Scottsdale Public Art, City of Tempe, Tucson Pima Arts Council, Volunteer Legal Assistance for Artists, Phoenix Art Museum and the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
Arts professionals and supporters of public art will find a breadth of valuable information, tools, resources and networking opportunities.
The evening presentations will be held in Phoenix and Tucson. For questions about this event, please contact the Arizona Commission on the Arts at 602.771.6502 or the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture at 602.495.0893. Register here. (more…)
Visions of Arizona: An Exhibition at the Arizona House of Representatives
Together, the Arizona House of Representatives, the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Arizona Art Alliance have developed an exhibition to provide visibility for Arizona artists.
Visions of Arizona is currently on view from November 4, 2011 – November 2, 2012 at the Arizona House of Representatives on the 2nd floor. Click here to view the video. Viewing hours for the public are Monday through Friday 9am-5pm. (more…)
Coming to Arizona: Dance Exchange’s Creative Aging and Tools for Health Training
Photo from the MetLife Healthy Living Initiative at Dance Exchange website.
Presented by Dance Exchange artists Shula Strassfeld and Elizabeth Johnson this workshop will prepare participants to use simple yet effective artistic tools to enhance their professional work, whether they are practicing professional artists or healthcare professionals new to the arts. Participants looking to expand their skill set in creative aging and patient care will experience a movement-based artistic practice that assists in achieving artistic, community building and clinical goals. Experiential activities, model teaching, and critical thinking help participants explore the ways in which dance and art-making can re-energize their relationship to elders and expand the effects of their work. (more…)
Opera in the Valley of the Sun: A telenovela gone wild?
The following post is by Arizona Corporation Commissioner, Bob Stump, and was originally published in the Arizona Capitol Times on January 9, 2012.
Commissioner Bob Stump: Bob Stump was elected to the Arizona Corporation Commission in 2008. He represented District 9 in the Arizona House of Representatives from 2002-2008. Bob holds degrees from Harvard University, where he studied political philosophy with columnist George F. Will, as well as American religious history, and the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied philosophy and social thought and from which he graduated with High Honors. In his free time, Bob enjoys music, hiking, travel and exploring our great state of Arizona.
Opera in the Valley of the Sun: A telenovela gone wild?
Arizona Capitol Times
by Bob Stump
Published: January 9, 2012One of the finest voices of the past 100 years — and arguably the greatest living baritone — is set to take the stage in Phoenix next week.
Dmitri Hvorostovsky — winner of the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition and one of People magazine’s 50 most beautiful people, no less — will be singing at the Orpheum Theatre on Jan. 10, courtesy of the Phoenix Opera.
Phoenix is known less as a hub for the arts than as a haven for sunshine and golf. But Hvorostovsky’s visit may recalibrate our reputation. It is not hyperbole to say that Hvorostovsky’s one-day performance in the Valley of the Sun will increase the sum total of Phoenix’s cultural capital.
But what is opera, anyway? And why should we care?
Fusty, antiquarian, elitist — such are the charges leveled at opera.
But opera, at its very best, is a telenovela gone wild — love and death, and madness and transfiguration, are its principal themes. It abounds in praise of the earthly joys of gluttony and intoxication. Opera customarily features characters at the end of their tethers — or slipping from them.
Opera was launched in 17th-century Europe as a pagan attempt to restore on stage the chorus of ancient Greek tragedies. It was steeped in the mysteries of rite, ritual and high drama — the stuff of Greek myth. When music and language and theater converged, opera was born.
“Music,” said German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, “is the most sublime language, and if we were higher beings, we would only need to listen, and then we would see.” By fusing words with music and drama, opera lets us see through our listening, and listen through our seeing. Orfeo, in Monteverdi’s eponymous opera, declares Euridice’s eyes his sunrise in the underworld — and underlines the age-old kinship between love and mortality, opera’s two greatest themes.
Opera is animated by the primal — even quasi-religious — desire to conjure a world through the human voice. Walther, the hero of Richard Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” gets the girl through the beauty of his song — and sings of retrieving Eden itself.
He rightfully calls it his “prize song,” and his song of praise becomes a sort of prayer. Through this prayer he attains the world and his heart’s desire — which are one and the same.
Small wonder many Romantics equated singing with speaking in tongues. Composer Gustav Holst declared music “identical with heaven.” The greatest opera puts beauty to the service of truth, enabling poetry and power to become one.
Human beings become, on the opera stage, forces of nature. Their vocal pyrotechnics — their razor’s-edge virtuosity — elicit listeners’ awe. It is a high-wire act, where performers teeter on the thin line separating failure from success, and where sheer luck and the frailty and unpredictability of the human voice each play a role.
As such, singing resembles the exhilarating high stakes of many sports: A singer ascending to a series of high-Cs may be analogous to a baseball player hitting a home run.
Opera today is no anachronism. Like the best movies and literature, it can educate the heart’s passions, tapping a gleaming quarry within one’s deepest self. For its devotees, it provides an enlargement of life. The fluidity of music, its mercurial ebb and flow, renders it the stuff of metamorphosis — it erases boundaries, melding intellect with heart. Opera is nothing less than a fulfillment of the old Jewish blessing: “More life into a time without boundaries.”
George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is set in the “Golden Age,” as its librettist, DuBose Heyward, put it, “when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten.”
Opera grants us passage into a golden age, if only fleetingly, in which time is suspended and hearts unfold. Opera is a vehicle for rapture. Of how many other things might this be said?
Hvorostovsky’s performance will make vivid our potential for a more spirited cultural life in the Valley, one congruent with our collective aspirations: to render Phoenix a cultural golden city, its ranks swelling with citizens whose personal “prize songs” reverberate.
Join the Phoenix Opera on Jan. 10, and see — and listen — for yourself.
— Bob Stump is an Arizona corporation commissioner, former state representative and a member of the Phoenix Opera Board of Directors.
Friday, January 13, 2012; Last Professional Development Grant Deadline of the Fiscal Year!
Bob Booker, our executive director, was strolling through the grounds of the Audubon Center in Phoenix when he met an artist selling her artwork. She proceeded to tell him about the Professional Development Grant that she had received, which made it possible for her to attend a workshop with a mentor and learn new techniques that she had incorporated into her repertoire – she pointed to a sample – that had in turn led to increased sales.
We are always delighted to learn about the pivotal impact these mini-grants have on the careers of artists, arts administrators and art educators in Arizona. We continue to support individuals by annually offering a limited number of Professional Development Grants (a subset of the Quick Turnaround Grants) with January 13, 2012 being the last of two deadlines for the current fiscal year. This spans opportunities occurring in the period between January 1 through June 30, 2012. (more…)
