CHICAGO: The Joyce Foundation has announced the recipients of the annual Joyce Awards, which have supported the creation of new work by emerging and mid-career BIPOC artists and institutions since 2003. The $75,000 grants will support the creation and presentation of new site-specific works in partnership with community members in their respective Great Lakes regions.
The 2021 awardees are Sydney Chatman with Congo Square Theatre Company; visual artist Daniel Minter with the Lynden Sculpture Garden; Kameelah Janan Rasheed with FRONT International: The Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; and SANTIAGO X with the Chicago Public Art Group.
“The Joyce Awards are a recognition of the important contributions of artists of color to the cultural fabric of the Great Lakes region,” said Joyce Foundation president Ellen Alberding in statement. “The disparities both brought into sharper focus and exacerbated by the pandemic and the racial reckoning have made this work all the more imperative.”
Congo Square Theatre Company is commissioning Chatman, a playwright, to write a new community-based work that explores healing from intracommunal and state-sanctioned violence. Chatman will partner with a licensed therapist to devise a play in collaboration with an intergenerational group of Black women and girls. Also a director and educator, Chatman is an African-American Arts Alliance Award and 3Arts Make a Wave Award winner. Her New York credits include fellowships with the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation and the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and her Chicago credits include the Goodman Theatre, among others. Chatman is a featured artist in the anthology Black Theatre is Black Life: An Oral History of Black Theater in Chicago 1997-2010.
Congo Square Theatre Company is an ensemble dedicated to producing transformative work rooted in the African diaspora and being a haven for artists of color to challenge and redefine the theatrical canon.
Other Joyce Award grantees will work to create visual, mural, and digital art.
The Joyce Foundation invests in public policies and strategies to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region.
