Waterloo Region awards $122K in arts grants

Waterloo Region announced 18 arts grants on Christmas Eve, totalling just over $122,000, for literary, theatre, musical and visual arts projects.

In a release, the region said the goal of its arts fund is to "make art happen in the community through active promotion of arts and culture, and by providing meaningful grants and other support to artists and to arts and culture organizations."

The 18 recipients of the 2015 grants are:

Literature

• Jockie (Jocelyn) Loomer, $7,500 for publication of Valley Child – A Memoir in Stories and Folk Art, a story of rural childhood in the 1940s, illustrated with original artwork.
• Robert Motum, $4,850 for Kitchener Waterloo: A Guidebook from Memory, a community-sourced collection of personal stories and memories attached to places in the Region, plotted into a guidebook and launched with a walking tour.

Visual arts

• YWCA Kitchener-Waterloo, $1,700 for the creation and exhibition of Truth Portraits, a collection of mixed-media self-portraits by girls aged 11-16, accompanied by poetry and statements about identity.
• Catherine Mellinger, $4,790 for a series of large collages entitled Deep Salt Water, which illustrates the prose of writer Marianne Apostolides' forthcoming book of the same title.
• Robert Achtemichuk, $2,000 for an original artwork entitled Embers, influenced by and in response to an untitled Alfred Laliberte painting of a bonfire.
• Button Factory Arts, $12,000 for Art That Moves You, a public art project displayed inside Grand River Transit buses, featuring monthly visual art and poems by local artists.

Music

• Monarch Woods, $6,815 for composing and recording on vinyl their second album of original symphonic metal music.
• Bass Lions, $6,000 for new studio recordings, building on a previous collaborative performance with members of the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony Orchestra.
• Ryan Cassidy, $5,500 for a full-length debut recording of original music, fusing traditional elements of jazz with contemporary elements of hip hop/R&B.

Theatre/performance

• Stephen W. Young, $12,000 for At The Crossroads, an original who-done-it play to be performed by local actors at the Waterloo Region Museum for the 100th anniversary of the infamous 1916 referendum to change the name of Berlin, Ontario.
• Blue Bird Theatre Collective, $12,000 to produce the première performance of Blue Bird, an original work based on universal themes communicated through very personal stories.
• Waterloo Chamber Players, $7,000 for As a Garden Waits for Rain, a cross-cultural concert of newly-commissioned orchestral music and classical Bengali dance performed by Enakshi Sinha.
• Gwyneth Mitchell, $6,000 for Barflies, a fully animated and playful music video based on classical cartoons of the 1920s to complement Richard Garvey's song of the same title.
• Carol Leigh Wehking, $3,000 for Fresh Stories, a storytelling performance series that features trained storytellers and creates open mic opportunities for local tellers once a month at a Cambridge venue.
• Viktoriya Kovac, $12,000 for a re-imagined performance of King Lear, with Lear himself being a large-scale puppet manipulated by multiple performers.
• Isabella Stefanescu, $8,500 for the creation and production of Compact, a 90-minute one-person drawing performance based on self-portraiture, using live projections, electroacoustic sound and voice, and efficiently compact for travel to small venues local and distant.

Video/documentary

• Rob Ring, $9,000 for a documentary film Care for the Child: The Story of the Bridgeport General, based on the story of local hero Frank Groff.
• Laura De Decker, $1,500 for an abstract video animation based on original, purpose-created code and in response to research of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery's permanent collection.

The Arts Fund received a total of 71 funding requests, the release said.