Thirteen organizations receive grants for humanities projects
Arizona Humanities is pleased to award $86,984 in Project Grants to 13 organizations. Brenda Thomson, Arizona Humanities Executive Director shared, “The grant process is very competitive. We are pleased to provide support for these outstanding programs, and hope you will enjoy them.”
Project Grants are awarded twice yearly and organizations can apply for up to $10,000 in funding. The next Project Grants Letter of Intent deadline is November 1, 2017.
For questions regarding the grants application process, contact Samantha Anderson, Grants Manager at sanderson@azhumanities.org or 602-257-0335. For more information, visit azhumanities.org.
Read more about each Project Grant below.
ABOR – ASU – English – Tempe, AZ
Red Ink Indigenous Initiative Cultural Series for Teens
Total Project Grant Award: $5,000
Project Director: James Blasingame, 480-965-6074 / James.Blasingame@asu.edu
The Arizona State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Department of English will produce a second year of their RED INK Indigenous Initiative Cultural Series for Teens in collaboration with the Maricopa Community College System and with school districts in Arizona serving Indigenous student populations. The program will engage Native youth in a series of seven two-hour cultural events, which will include prominent Indigenous experts in the humanities: history, literature, theater and film, and song. Presentations will cover their work and its context within the Indigenous diaspora, tribal history and heritage.
ABOR – University of Arizona – Department of Spanish and Portuguese – Tucson, AZ
In Transit/En tránsito: Arts, Migration, Resistance
Total Project Grant Award: $10,000
Project Director: Dr. Anita Huizar-Hernandez, 480-235-3705 / ahuizarh@email.arizona.edu
In Transit/En tránsito: Arts, Migration, Resistance is an art exhibition accompanied by related public events that that together ask how art depicting migration shapes debates about the human rights of migrants. Guests will explore the multimedia exhibition that will feature sketches, paintings, sculptures, and video installations by renowned local, regional, and international artists. Featured artists will discuss how exploring stories of migration drives their artistic practices at a day-long symposium at the Arizona Historical Society.
Attendees are invited to respond by sharing their own personal migration stories to the exhibition through the In Transit/En tránsito website in both English and Spanish.
Archaeology Southwest – Tucson, AZ
Archaeology Cafe 2.0: Exploring Phoenix and Tucson Underground
Total Project Grant Award: $9,000
Project Director: Linda Pierce, 520-882-6946 x23 / lpierce@archaeologysouthwest.org
Archaeology Café 2.0 brings lifelong learners and humanities scholars together to explore the deep history of our local communities. This season participants will have the opportunity to explore life in Phoenix and Tucson in the past and present. Attendees will explore and reflect on the depth and breadth of the human experience through learning and discussion in a nonacademic context. Cafes are held on the first or second Tuesday of each month, beginning in Tucson, October 3, 2017 with the final Café of the season on May 1, 2018 in Phoenix.
Cinefemme – Santa Monica, CA
The Women On The Mother Road in Arizona: Screening and Discussion Programs
Total Project Grant Award: $5,000
Project Director: Katrina Parks, 323-203-5968 / katrinaparks@mac.com
Cinefemme is hosting two screening and discussion programs in communities along Route 66 that highlight women’s contributions to the development and history of Route 66 in Arizona. The programs include a screening of edited interview segments from the documentary film project: “The Women on the Mother Road,” which capture the oral histories of the women who worked and lived along Route 66. Four panelists will present slides, commentary and answer questions that provide insight into Route 66’s impact on the lives of women in Arizona and exploring Arizona’s unique Route 66 heritage from new perspectives.
Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation – Scottsdale, AZ
Footprints on the Desert: Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona
Total Project Grant Award: $4,000
Project Director: Margo Stipe, 480-627-5353 / mstipe@franklloydwright.org
In celebration of Wright’s 150th birthday, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and the Arizona Historical Society are collaborating on an exhibition and lecture series, Footprints on the Desert: Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona. The exhibition will examine how Wright came to Arizona, and captivated by its beauty and power, created new paradigms for living in the desert southwest. With drawings, photographs, 3D models, artifacts, and audio recordings, this exhibition explores Wright’s vision for living imaginatively and sustainably in Arizona.
Friends of Canoa Heritage Foundation – Green Valley, AZ
Canoa Speaks Tohono O’odham
Total Project Grant Award: $1,484
Project Director: Dawn Morley, 520-289-3940 / inspired@visitcanoa.com
The Canoa Speaks Tohono O’odham project will help Friends of Canoa (FOC) continue a historic preservation video series that highlights the people and progress of Canoa for fourteen millennia. This series will include four short videos five to fifteen minutes in length, narrated in two languages, English and the native language of the Tohono O’odham people. These short videos will be combined to produce a longer version to be screened at a public lecture/movie event at La Posada in Green Valley, Arizona on May 19, 2018. Humanities scholars will help facilitate and encourage public discussion and reflection.
Kore Press – Tucson, AZ
Letters to the Future
Total Project Grant Award: $10,000
Project Director: Lisa Bowden, 520-327-2127 / lisa@korepress.org
During the month of October, Kore Press will host a series of community engagement events based on the forthcoming anthology “Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING.” Kore’s engaging series with scholars and writers (including interviews, an exhibit, public conversations, educational materials) will present, preserve and explore the formal and linguistically innovative late-modern and contemporary work by Black women from the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean.
Maricopa County Community College District Foundation – Mesa Community College – Mesa, AZ
TEDx: Representing Disability: An Interdisciplinary Journey
Total Project Grant Award: $10,000
Project Director: Keith Anderson, 480-529-8505 / keith.anderson@mesacc.edu
The TEDx Talk: Representing Disability: An Interdisciplinary Journey will gather experts and people with experience at Mesa Community College’s Red Mountain Campus in October 2017 for an interdisciplinary discussion of the impact disabilities have on all of us. Beyond the TEDx Talk event, there will be weeks of other activities on the topic of disabilities where participants can consider disabilities from different angles.
Morning Star Leaders Inc. – Ganado, AZ
Youth Traditional Bow & Arrow Project
Total Project Grant Award: $5,000
Project Director: Debbie Manuel, 480-406-9152 / debbie.manuel@morningstarleaders.org
This Native youth workshop targeting ages 13-21 and engages up to 20 Native youth in a Bow & Arrow Project. Two cultural educators will demonstrate and engage youth in traditional ways of plant offering, collecting and curing wood to shape a fully functional primitive bow, arrow and arrowhead. As a result, the workshop will instill and increase values of Native American identity and philosophy in efforts to maintain indigenous culture.
Museum of Northern Arizona – Flagstaff, AZ
14th Annual Celebraciones de la Gente Heritage Insights Series
Total Project Grant Award: $6,500
Project Director: Stephen Riggs, 928-774-5211 x227 / sriggs@musnaz.org
The Museum of Northern Arizona continues its celebration of the cultural diversity of the Colorado Plateau through humanities-based lectures, discussions, and presentations that highlight and explore the Mexican, Mexican-American, and Latinx experience of the region and beyond. The Heritage Insights series is part of a larger festival, which offers a balance of ancient and modern topics in cultural presentations, performances, and activities. The festival also features a marketplace to meet and buy directly from the artists, learn the cultural significance of their work, and spend a day or two immersed in the history and artistry of the community.
National Orphan Train Complex Museum and Research Center – Concordia, KS
THE ORPHAN TRAINS – Arizona’s Hidden History
Total Project Grant Award: $6,000
Project Director: Alison Moore, 512 393-9457/ ridersontheorphantrain@yahoo.com
“The Orphan Trains – Arizona’s Hidden History” will be presented at six libraries: Winslow, Prescott, Douglas, Fountain Hills, Wilcox and Prescott Valley. The program is designed to inform, entertain, and engage audiences of all ages and to tell the story of about this little-known chapter of the largest child migration in American and Arizona history and the local legacies of their relocation. The children’s experiences inspire reflection on the meaning of home inherent in the American Dream.
Tohono O’odham Community College – Tohono O’odham Studies Program and Continuing & Community Education – Sells, AZ
History and Stories of the Tohono O’odham Districts
Total Project Grant Award: $5,000
Project Director: Gaye Bumsted Perry, 520-383-0100 / gbumstedperry@tocc.edu
In order to share and preserve the Tohono O’odham’s oral histories, Tohono O’odham Community College (TOCC), a tribal college on the Tohono O’odham Nation (TON), will hold a community gathering at two Districts on the reservation, Sif Oidak District and Pisinemo District focused on the History and Stories of the Tohono O’odham. At each community gathering local historians and story tellers along with the TOCC Humanities Scholars will share their knowledge of the District’s history and rich culture with participants.
Veterans Heritage Project – Scottsdale, AZ
Since You Asked: A Veteran Oral History Program
Total Project Grant Award: $10,000
Project Director: Michelle Elizabeth DiMuro, 877-847-7765 x3 / michelle@veteransheritage.org
Veterans Heritage Project (VHP) will work with students in up to 30 VHP chapters at middle schools, high schools and college campuses in Metropolitan Phoenix, Southern Arizona and Northern Arizona for the 2017-2018 school year. The students will conduct 300 oral history interviews with WWII veterans, documenting their stories through video and essay publication in six regional editions of a hardbound book, Since You Asked (SYA), Volume XIV: A Salute to WWII. VHP will present these stories through a community forum to honor the veterans and present Since You Asked (SYA) Edition 1.
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Any findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in these projects do not necessarily reflect those of Arizona Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.