516 Arts announces recipients of the 2024 Fulcrum Fund grants
516 Arts has announced its 2024 Fulcrum Fund grantees, comprising of 13 recipients.
A total of $70,000 has been awarded in varying amounts determined by this year’s jury, supporting the development and presentation of independent, artist-led projects and programs. This year’s funded projects include independent and self-made book publications, research projects, performance series, art installations, DIY art venues and more.
The Fulcrum Fund is an annual award that provides unrestricted grants to artists and artist collectives based and operating within New Mexico, created and administered by 516 Arts as a partner in the Regional Regranting Program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support in 2024 from The Meow Wolf Foundation. The Fulcrum Fund serves as an essential support structure in enabling artists to expand existing work and explore of new directions in creating and showcasing projects that inspire curiosity, engagement and dialogue.
Grant recipients are selected through a juried process featuring arts professionals from around the country. This year’s guest jurors included Laura Augusta, curator at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso; Carlo McCormick, an art critic and independent curator based in New York City; and Nancy Rivera, director of planning and program at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, as well as an independent curator and artist. Collectively, they selected the following proposals:
Santa Fe Noise Ordinance — Santa Fe
Santa Fe Noise Ordinance (SFNO) presents concerts featuring experimental sound and performance art by artists based in New Mexico and the broader Southwest. SFNO works with rotating venues around Santa Fe including art galleries, artist-run and DIY spaces, and provisional or temporary venues.
Fourteenfifteen Gallery — Albuquerque
Fourteenfifteen Gallery is a noncommercial, collective-run exhibition space in the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque on Tiwa land. Fourteenfifteen’s objective is to cultivate accessible opportunities for experimental, underrepresented, emerging and established artists.
Alas de Agua Art Collective: “Tlacuilo Neo Codex Makers” — Santa Fe
“Tlacuilo Neo Codex Makers” is an exploration of asemic writing, neo codex-making, poetry and creating abstracted language. Free public workshops offer the opportunity to explore ancestral connection to language and examine the space in between in language, memory, ancestors, future and culture.
Nick Larsen: “Old Haunts, Lower Reaches” — Santa Fe
“Old Haunts, Lower Reaches” is a publication weaving together collages inspired by archival material about Stonewall Park, a failed planned queer community proposed on the site of a ghost town near Death Valley.
Jocelyn Salaz: “Curando Con Nuestras Manos” — Albuquerque
“Curando con Nuestras Manos” is an exhibition and catalog of embroidered quilt pieces organized around the question, “How can the things we make with our hands nurture people we encounter?” The work explores the connection between fiber arts and remedios (remedies) plants and animals, as well as in both the historic and contemporary healing and care practices.
Marcus Chormicle: “Prayer for My Triste” — Las Cruces
“Prayer For My Triste” is a photographic and multimedia project that documents the ocotillo on Tortugas Mountain, an important pilgrimage site for local Indigenous and Catholic people, and that became a site of personal pilgrimage for the artist following the death of his grandmother in 2022.
No Name Cinema — Santa Fe
No Name Cinema is a microcinema, gallery and community-gathering space that exists as a no-profit, nonbusiness, anti-capitalist operation. Its programming mission is to select works that use the filmic medium as an art form rather than passive entertainment, encourage an open dialogue and the presentation of marginalized voices and perspectives.
Thea Storz – “A Fertile Season: Reproductive Lists” — Truth or Consequences
Reproductive rights are under siege. Artist and educator Thea Storz relays her experiences with reproductive dilemmas in “A Fertile Season: Reproductive Lists.” Storz will create a limited-edition artist book, as well as lead a bookmaking and storytelling workshops.
Best Western (Shane Tolbert) — Santa Fe
Housed in a former sheet metal shop, Best Western is a 600-squarefoot artist-run space. Best Western is also a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging the hubris of starting an art gallery in Santa Fe, which already has 250 galleries. Its core mission is to elevate the visual art discourse in Northern New Mexico through accessible and free public programming.
kelechi agwuncha & mika castañeda: “amplifies it, doubles, trebles it” — Santa Fe
“Amplifies it, doubles, trebles it” is a multimedia, site-specific installation for performances centering QTBIOCtransgenre, experimental sound artists. kelechi agwuncha will imagine a new schema for restaging sound through public activations that are in line with experimental, spatial approaches of the disco, punk and Jamaican dub that crafted unified air spaces, as cited in “Figures in Air: Essays Toward a Philosophy of Audio” by Micah Silver. The project will incorporate video installation, poetry, sound and lighting to communicate a language of possibility that engages with nature.
Apolo Gomez: “Tracing Queer Chicano and AIDS Gay Rights Movements Through Art” — Albuquerque
This zine project explores the interconnected narratives of the Chicano Queer and AIDS Gay Rights Movements during the 1970s and the 1980s. Using art as a primary lens, it uncovers shared ideologies, visual expressions and the transformative power of creative activism.
ACVilla: “Murals of Nani Chacon” — Alcalde
“Murals of Nani Chacon” is a film about Nanibah Chacon’s (Diné/Chicana) overarching vision of life, illustrated by her many murals across the U.S. It features interviews with Nani and mural organizers, and an original soundtrack by Thollen.
Karl Orozco: “Signs of Life” — Albuquerque
“Signs of Life” is a video installation project which considers the life cycles of the urban landscape through a study of abandoned roadside signs. Karl Orozco’s extensively photo archive of these signs is transformed by new digital afterlife 3D and animation software, giving them a new digital afterlife.