The Knight Foundation asked artists in the Akron community to dream big for the second year of the Akron Knight Arts Challenge, culminating in the awarding of another $1 million to 19 new grass roots projects.
The winning projects, ranging from a new hip-hop festival to a series that blends art and science, will be announced Wednesday night at the Akron Civic Theatre.
Many of this year’s ideas are in the performing arts, with a concentration in dance. New projects include a dance-focused fringe festival and residencies to bring professional dancers to local high schools. The city-run Heinz Poll Summer Dance Festival will receive $143,000 to expand its partnership with Reach Out and Dance to bring dance education to community centers during the festival, a program it piloted last summer.
Other ideas include theatrical works that explore Akron’s relationship with the rubber industry, a celebration of Akron’s canal heritage through song and illustration, and the creation of the Akron High Arts Festival to expand the Akron Arts Prize concept.
The goal is for residents to have encounters with art all over Akron.
“Knight Arts Challenge winners help make that possible. In them, you’ll find a range of voice and neighborhoods, and projects that delight, challenge and inspire us to think differently about the city and our lives,” Victoria Rogers, Knight Foundation vice president for arts, said in a statement.
Robert Wesner of Neos Dance Theatre said he took the advice to dream big to heart when he brainstormed Lose Your Marbles: A Dance-centric Performance Art Fringe Festival, which was awarded $100,000. The goal is to present both untried artists and accomplished groups in a festival format, getting the community involved by voting on favorite acts for a final “best of show” performance.
“It definitely started with the history of marbles in Akron and I think the idea of losing your marbles is something every artist can understand,” Wesner said of the festival’s playful title.
The festival would expose local audiences to a broader taste of more experimental work and encourage dance artists to take risks. It also will incorporate performance artists who use movement.
“Artists are always taking risks. I want to, in a sense, harbor that,” Wesner said.
The new festival is inspired by others in Colorado Springs and Milwaukee, as well as the famed Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland. Wesner plans to kick off Akron’s as a one- to three-day festival at multiple locations in the downtown area in August.
All of the Knight Arts Challenge awards are matching grants. This is the second year that Neos has received a Knight Arts Challenge grant for its projects, with last year’s award of $40,000 supporting Dance.r.evolution, a two-year project joining ballet, hip-hop and freestyle dancers, graffiti artists and DJs.
Hip-hop project
Another new project is Keepers of the Art’s $69,000 award for its Annual International Hip-Hop Preservation Project. Keepers of the Art — known locally for its summer Hip-Hop Showcase at Lock 3 and its “Keeper’s Lounge” concerts featuring neo-soul and non-mainstream hip-hop artists — will create a weeklong festival aimed at using hip-hop culture for community-based arts education and youth development.
Ishmael Al-Amin, executive director, said the grant will allow Keepers of the Art to expand its programming, bring a large-scale festival-style concert back to Lock 3 next summer, and create smaller concerts, workshops and seminars. The goal is to repair the image of hip-hop in the mainstream media and counteract commercialization, he said.
“It’s our job as hip-hoppers to take this culture that we love and use it for its intended purpose, which is peace, love, unity and having fun but also to add a strong education component to it,” Al-Amin said.
Theater trilogy
In the theater realm, the Devil’s Milk — All Over Akron is a first-time award winner with $30,000. The grant will support full productions of New World Performance Laboratory’s The Devil’s Milk Trilogy in 2017.
The trilogy, which NWPL began creating in 2015 to explore Akron’s relationship with the rubber industry, includes the one-man show Death of a Man, focusing on genocide in the quest for rubber in the Amazon; the original musical Goosetown, set in Akron in 1913; and Industrial Valley, based on the book by former Akron Beacon Journal reporter Ruth McKenney and set in Akron during the Depression and the Goodyear rubber strike of 1936.
The grant will support two-week premieres of the second and third parts of the trilogy (Death of a Man premiered in February), as well as a week of the entire trilogy in repertory at Balch Street Theatre. The company plans to take each piece to other neighborhoods and venues to expose them to more audiences. This outreach program will include a 1930s radio play created in conjunction with Industrial Valley.
The grant money also will pay actors and technical artists’ stipends.
“I think without this award, the life of the project would be much shorter. We wouldn’t be able to think about extending it and trying to do the tour within Akron,” said co-artistic director James Slowiak.
Spectrum of arts
The $154,000 given to the Akron High Arts Festival and Downtown Akron Partnership will be used to expand the Akron Arts Prize into a 30-day festival featuring not just the visual arts, but the complete spectrum of visual and performing arts in Akron.
“We are rebranding the Akron Arts Prize,” Suzy Graham, president of Downtown Akron Partnership, confirmed. “It’s currently a 30-day voting period, but it’s limited to the visual arts only. So the goal is to rebrand it and to diversify the genres by being inclusive of music and film in the first year, then expand to non-musical performing arts in the second year.”
Graham hopes to work with downtown organizations like the Nightlight Cinema, Jilly’s Music Room, the Civic Theatre and radio station 91.3-FM The Summit.
She said the process will be the same, with a 30-day period of public voting to choose the best, only they will be voting on an increased number of genres.
“At the end the people who are the winners, who are voted by the populace as the winners, we will take them on a bus trip to different cities to look at the arts scenes there. The Knight Foundation has done such a wonderful job of taking people to different cities,” Graham said. “It’s always inspirational to see what sorts of friendships they form on these short trips.”
Science meets art
The University of Akron’s Synapse program, Steam Into Stem, was granted $20,000. The program makes connections between science and art by bringing artists to Akron to explore biomimicry, art and design that takes inspiration from nature.
In 2017-18 the University of Akron’s Synapse Art and Science Series will present a group of lectures and workshops by artists who work at the intersection of art and science, said Matthew Kolodziej, professor of art at the University of Akron Myers School of Art, who helped found the program.
“Biomimicry looks to nature to solve human problems or systemic problems, like the communication of ants, where ants use chemical signals to communicate information about food sources,” Kolodziej said.
“Another example is the anti-microbial systems of lotus leaves,” he noted. A European research team has found a way to replicate the naturally occurring lotus effect to create a self-cleaning metal that could boost efficiency and safety in food production facilities.
The Knight Foundation’s investment in Akron includes $3 million in support for three years of the Knight Arts Challenge. Last March, 27 Akron-centric projects were awarded a shared $1 million in the first year of the initiative.
Malcolm X Abram and Dorothy Shinn contributed to this report. Arts writer Kerry Clawson may be reached at 330-996-3527 or kclawson@thebeaconjournal.com.