2019 Grant Recipients
WaveMaker Grants Cycle 5 provided cash awards up to $6,000 each—totaling $60,000—to twelve visual artists, curators, creative/arts writers, cultural organizers, collectives, collaboratives, partnerships, and artist-run spaces residing in Miami-Dade County.
Grantees for the fifth cycle of WaveMaker Grants were selected by an independent jury panel of distinguished arts professionals: Daniel Fuller, Curator at Atlanta Contemporary; Natasha L. Logan, Associate Director of Public Projects at Creative Time, NY; Phillip Agnew, 2017 WaveMaker Recipient & Co-Founder of Smoke Signals Studios, Miami; and Carolina García Jayaram, President of CGJ Consulting, former President & CEO National YoungArts Foundation, and Co-Founder of Cannonball (formerly LegalArt), Miami. The jurors selected the grant recipients based on the project’s conceptual rigor; relevance to the local cultural, geographic, and socio-economic context; innovative and visionary impact on the local community; and accessibility to the public.
2019 WaveMaker Grantees
Untitled (forms from MEDIAPRO HD ULTIMATE F/X 18 COLOR MAKEUP PALETTE)
A celebratory public event highlighted by a curated program of time-based queer expressions staged at Miami-Dade’s first and only public artwork dedicated to the contributions of Miami-Dade County’s LGBTQ Community.
A public event utilizing the artist’s permanent sculpture Untitled (forms from MEDIAPRO HD ULTIMATE F/X 18 COLOR MAKEUP PALETTE) as a site for a curated program of time-based queer expressions ranging from drag performances to spoken word.
BLCK Freedom Sessions
A mobile, monthly series highlighting sound based work activating a variety of live music venues and arts institutions. Formatted as a 45 minute live performance with non-hierarchical dialogue taking place thereafter, this program facilitates space for artists to participate in, appreciate and discuss their practice.
HamacaS
An ongoing project exploring the cultural dissonance and emotional displacement experienced by immigrants in the United States, consisting of an interactive installation and research hub activated through collective-weaving sessions and workshops.
Vivarium Meconium Laboratory
A native butterfly rearing and painting laboratory where the artist collaborates with South Floridian species of butterfly to collect their meconium later releasing them back into South Florida’s ecosystem.
OCR : Lincoln Memorial
An art and research project, diving into less-often-celebrated spaces in Miami gathering knowledge and narratives that interrogate its shaping and history in order to present the findings to a larger audience.
Emahoy In Miami: Prophesy of The Future In Exile
A community engagement project using dance performance and film to simulate the future reality of environmental instability for people living in South Florida featuring the music of Ethiopian composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose work is reflective of her experience in political exile.
FEARLESS
A short documentary film that reveals the spiritual side of boxing through an unexpected group of boxers, teenage girls and women who uncover their power both inside and outside the ring.
Buenezas
A project exploring, identifying, and experimenting with edible weeds around Little Haiti through a series of workshops, panels and activities addressing the topic of these local weeds and their forgotten, ancestral benefits.
Auto-mariachi
A group performance bringing together approximately 50 musicians from different mariachi groups to serenade each other. Presented in the context of a Central American flea market in South Florida, the project will aim to address questions of national identity, gender, and migration in a US context.
GET A CLOSER LOOK into this artist’s other work on the blog.
Quilting Stories, Narrating Through Their Eyes
An outreach project engaged in distilling the essence of the immigrant experience as seen through the eyes of children and the prism of textile art. Using the personal narratives of immigrant Haitian children, this project will revitalize and increase the visibility of traditional Haitian drapo sèvis (ceremonial Vodou flags).
“Alosúgbe: remembering (as far as the sun)”
A research based project focusing on colonial era and contemporary ethnobotany of the Caribbean region as material source for understanding the migrations of both humans and plants during those periods/
Temporary Terrains
A site-specific installation of endangered flora housed Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, recreated in unfired clay attached to a wooden and wire mesh framework mounted to an architectural element: overtime the unfired clay will dry and crack.