Twelve Organizations Receive Grants for Humanities Projects
Arizona Board of Regents
Northern Arizona University-Cline Library
Grand Canyon National Park Centennial Perspectives: A Lecture Series
$5,000
In celebration of Grand Canyon National Park’s Centennial, Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library in partnership with Grand Canyon Conservancy will host a summer lecture series raising awareness of the park’s historical and cultural impact on the state and region over the past 100 years. The series presents a wide variety of authentic and enriching perspectives offering a depth of understanding into the stories of the people, history, and cultures of the Grand Canyon.
Arizona Board of Regents
Northern Arizona State University
Philosophy in the Public Interest
Hot Topics Cafe
$5000
The Hot Topics Café provides a forum for civil, rational, compassionate discussion about issues of contemporary concern. Philosophers from northern Arizona will facilitate ten discussions in Flagstaff and Sedona community venues which are free and open to the public. The Hot Topics Café does not aim to achieve consensus. Rather, it seeks to give community members an opportunity to explore diverse viewpoints and explain the reasoning behind competing positions.
Arizona Masters of Poetry
Hotter Than the Sun: Arizona Youth Poetry Festival
$4,000
Hotter Than the Sun: Arizona Youth Poetry Festival (HTTS) is a community festival where telling of honest, authentic stories with the voices of youth witnesses is not only valued, but is essential to building bridges between isolated populations. At HTTS a shared love of writing and performing creates bonds where typically there are boundaries. Through poetry workshops, performances and a competition youth poets, teachers, families, and community members come together in celebration of youth culture and literacy and to open up dialogue around “who we are as individuals” and “who we are as members of our communities”.
Black Canyon City Community Association
Black Canyon Heritage Park
“Water, Black Canyon City & Me”
$8,370
The Black Canyon Heritage Park hosts “Water, Black Canyon City & Me,” a year-long lecture series on water-based issues using the lens of various disciplines and customs. Lectures combine STEAM and humanities topics to introduce youth and adults to water’s broad impact and complement the Smithsonian Museums on Main Street exhibit Water/Ways and a local Black Canyon City water exhibit. “Water, Black Canyon City & Me” runs from April through December 2019 at various venues in the Black Canyon City and the surrounding area.
Borderlands Theater
Bordertown: Historias Fronterizas of Ambos Nogales
$10,000
Borderlands staff and Nogales youth will explore the unique history and heritage of Arizona’s border region by video capturing oral histories from Ambos. The oral histories enhanced with digital effects and archival images will be projected onto the sides of historic buildings in Nogales, Arizona throughout the Heritage Festival that will take place in April 2020, and subsequently stored at the Raul Castro House, a new University of Arizona School of Journalism satellite campus in Nogales for access via their website portal.
Cinefemme
Route 66 Women: Untold Stories of the Mother Road
$5,000
The three-part documentary television series “Route 66 Women: Untold Stories of the Mother Road” uncovers the extraordinary lives and achievements of women who overcame gender discrimination and segregation to build fulfilling lives for themselves and generations to come on America’s most iconic highway. The series director and a panel of historian experts will present film segments pertaining to Arizona’s Route 66 legacy from the series to the public at presentations in Scottsdale, Sedona, and Flagstaff. The panel places segments from the film in a wider historical context with a focus on the roles of women in Arizona history and will answer questions from the audience.
Living Streets Alliance
Poetry Cyclovia
$8,000
Cyclovia Tucson is a biannual event that temporarily transforms a network of streets─ the largest source of public space─ into a linear park by removing cars and inviting thousands of people to explore the city on foot, bicycle, in strollers or wheelchairs. On April 7th, 2019 a new effort, Poetry Cyclovia, will co-celebrate National Poetry Month by harnessing the energy of poets, literacy organizations, and the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center to achieve a common goal: all 40,000 people who attend Cyclovia Tucson will interact with a poem in some way. Activities will include live poetry readings, audio recordings of poetry in different languages, poetry stations where poets can work alongside members of the public to create poetry, live screen-printing of poems onto ready-to-wear clothing, chalked poetry, and printed poems distributed by Poetry Center docents.
Museum of Northern Arizona
Summer 2019 Heritage Insights Series
$5,000
The Heritage Insights series, a component of the Museum of Northern Arizona’s three Native American heritage festivals─ Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo Festivals of Arts & Culture─ features informative and interactive presentations by tribal members, culture bearers, and scholars. The program series introduces festival visitors to the history, culture, visual arts, heritage preservation, and contemporary cultural identity of the Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo. The three festivals include lectures, film screenings, interpretive musical and dance performances, and more.
Rising Youth Theatre
Face to Face
$10,000
Rising Youth Theatre, a Phoenix company dedicated to creating plays that start community conversations, will produce Face to Face, a youth led theatre and dialogue project that brings adults and youth from a wide range of backgrounds together to explore the intersections of race, class, and age. These discussions inform the play creation process to create an inclusive, intensive process of artmaking and critical dialogue in our community.
The Vail Preservation Society
Place Building through Story: Community Series & Student Written Stories
$5,000
Previously funded by Arizona Humanities, the documentary film project, Voices of Vail, began as a way to record oral histories, but has evolved into a platform to educate residents about Vail’s history, its landscape, and culture groups integral to its story. This latest project enhances the accessibility of Voices of Vail through an integrated format that includes story writing and illustrating by youth, community meetings, and increased access to the stories and information contained in Voices of Vail for educators, researchers and the general public.
Tolani Lake Enterprises, Inc.
Little Colorado River Farms Story
$5,000
Four Navajo communities in the Little Colorado River (LCR) Valley worked together on community farms from 1978 to 1998. These farms were launched, inspired and heartened by traditional Navajo elders no longer with us. Their vision was grounded in the cultural knowledge and experience that hard work, generosity, respect, and cooperation are the foundation of healthy balanced individuals, families and communities. Tolani Lake Enterprises will work with some of the LCR Farm’s initial participants and their families to weave archival photos and teachings with narrative descriptions, designing and creating written and visual materials of historic, cultural and educational value; and to share them with Navajo, Native and non-Native communities.
Western New York Public Broadcasting Association
The Warrior Tradition
$5,000
“The Warrior Tradition” is a one-hour national PBS documentary telling the astonishing, heartbreaking, and largely-untold story of Native American service in the U.S. military. This production will be broadcast nationally on PBS-member stations beginning in late 2019 and explores the many and varied reasons why Native Americans have chosen to fight on behalf of the U.S., examining the roles played by history and culture. Additional complementary components include the creation of a series of digital videos by Native American producers, educational curricula and outreach components to be used in schools for Arizona students K-12, and an extensive companion website.