San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
4 local art makers awarded Rainin Fellowships
Kenneth Rainin Foundation is awarding its Rainin Fellowship, which includes an unrestricted $100,000 grant, to four local artists and arts organizations.
The recipients are 21-yearold Oakland dance company Naka Dance Theater, which is led by Debby Kajiyama and José Ome Navarrete Mazatl; Oakland Grammy nominee and theater artist Ryan Nicole Austin; Berkeley multidisciplinary artist Brett Cook, who makes installations and other kinds of public art; and Fremont filmmaker Maria Victoria Ponce, whose work highlights the Bay Area Latinx experience and has appeared at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and the New York International Latino Film Festival, among many others.
“I’m just floating. I’m still floating,” Austin said of hearing the news. “Logistically, it just puts you on another level. It validates me as an artist-activist. I’ve taken a nontraditional path — I’m not just a theater artist. I’m not just a hip-hop MC. I’m not just a writer.
“In approaching my career that way, I know I’m splintered,” she continued. “I know the impact can be felt less in any one particular area. This award makes me feel, OK, this was the right way to go.”
For Cook, who has “made a career acknowledging and valuing the complexity of intersectional experiences of race, ethnicity, gender, spirituality, class and other identities and honoring these complexities as assets,” being a fellowship recipient, he said, “solidifies my association with work of human value, honorably continuing a Bay Area tradition of creating loving communities in public space.”
The Rainin Fellowship, administered by grant-maker United States Artists, is now in its second year; last year’s recipients were Amara TaborSmith, Margo Hall, the People’s Kitchen Collective and Rodrigo Reyes.
Bay Area artists and arts leaders nominate candidates, who are then chosen by national and local panels. Among other artistic criteria, candidates must have a longterm commitment to the Bay Area. In addition to the grant, fellows get professional services ranging from marketing advice to legal aid.
Austin plans to use part of her fellowship to ground her family in the Bay Area, including by paying for her son’s education, and part to work on projects including “FitTrip,” a travel show about making healthy choices when away from home, and “CoFounders,” about a Steve Jobs-type and “a Black girl from West Oakland,” as Austin put it, who find they need each other to create a startup accelerator. (The show recently ran at Joe’s Pub, an arm of the Public Theater in New York.)
“There are projects that have been in the queue for a long time,” she said. “Now I get to invest in those.”