Bay Area artists earn fellowships
Three Bay Area artists and a collective will receive unrestricted $100,000 grants as part of a new arts fellowship program announced by Oakland’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation to recognize figures seen as cultural “anchors” for the community.
Choreographer and performance artist Amara TaborSmith, theater artist Margo Hall, filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes and the People’s Kitchen Collective make up the inaugural class of the Rainin Fellowship, announced Monday, March 29. In addition to cash grants, the fellows will receive supplemental support, including tax and legal assistance, from United States Artists, a partner in the program.
All fellows are based in Oakland and correspond to the four cultural categories — dance, theater, film and “public space” — that the foundation has funded since it began making grants in 2009. The new program grew out of a conviction that direct support for individual artists was key, said Chief Program Officer Shelley Trott.
“There’s been polling to suggest that although the public values the
arts very highly, they don’t value artists nearly as much,” she said. “We’re painfully aware of the economic pressures of life in the Bay Area, and after three years of research we concluded that unrestricted financial support for artists would be most valuable.”
For TaborSmith, whose sitespecific work — including the ongoing performance project “House/Full of Black Women” — often deals with issues of housing and community, the fellowship flows directly into her artistic concerns.
“I am housinginsecure,” she said in a phone interview. “Not as insecure as some, but I don’t own a home. I’m still a renter. This funding won’t be able to solve those problems, but it’s a step in the direction, and it helps me think about that more deeply.”
The money will allow all the grantees to pursue their existing activities with greater freedom, said Reyes, whose “499” had its Bay Area premiere in February at SF Indiefest.
“For me specifically, it’s going to let me continue digging and allow myself to fall in love with projects without worrying about how I’m going to eat,” he said.
Reyes moved to Oakland nearly four years ago from Merced and acknowledges that he’s a “relative newcomer, but I came here to build community and to nourish my work from those collaborations,” he said. “As an immigrant, I’m always looking for a place where I feel at home, where I can cobble together an identity from diverse sources.”
Hall, a longtime fixture of Bay Area stages who was appointed last year as artistic director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, said her allegiance to the Bay Area was a deliberate career choice after she arrived here in the 1990s.
“A lot of my colleagues and friends decided to go to L.A. and do the TV and movie thing, and some of them wound up in New York,” she said. “But I committed to the Bay Area.”
The fellows were taken from a pool of more than 100 applicants named by a group of outside nominators. The final selections were made by national reviewers and four local jurors: Laura Elaine Ellis, director of the African and African American Performing Arts Coalition; Lisa Evans, a performance artist and cultural worker; Stephen Gong, executive director of the Center for Asian American Media; and Weston Teruya, an artist at Related Tactics.
“The idea was to find artists who are conceived as ‘anchors’ for the community,” Trott said. “These are figures who have had a measure of influence and impact locally, and through their networks were uplifting other artists.”
This is the first year of a threeyear projected pilot phase.
In addition to using the grant money for her own projects, Hall said she anticipated paying it forward with a little philanthropy of her own.
“I’d like to take this opportunity to help support some of the artists I believe in,” she said. “Maybe do a little producing of my own.”