Kresge Arts in St. Louis

Kresge

The Arts and Education Council awarded $80,000 in Kresge Arts in St. Louis grants to nine arts and arts education projects in the St. Louis metropolitan area. These projects engaged a wide spectrum of St. Louisans, especially young people, as well as a variety of arts genres and ranged from $5,000 to $10,000. The Kresge Foundation, based in Michigan, partnered with the Arts and Education Council and the Greater Saint Louis Community Foundation to administer Kresge Arts in St. Louis.

“We were thrilled to receive so many quality applications and to be funding nine very creative and inventive projects that will surely enhance the St. Louis arts and education landscape,” stated Regina R. Smith, arts and culture program officer at the Kresge Foundation.

Beginning in 2009, the Kresge Foundation launched a two-year Community Arts pilot initiative designed to use art and culture as a tool to address community issues in five unique, yet distressed urban American cities - Baltimore, MD, Birmingham, AL, Detroit, MI, St. Louis, MO, and Tucson, AZ.

2010 Kresge Arts in St. Louis Grantees

The Black Rep
Youth Residents See – A Closer Look at My Community

In partnership with the St. Louis Housing Authority, The Black Rep proposes to engage 125 youth residents of five public housing developments in St. Louis City in an after-school performing arts residency program.  Participants will have the opportunity to research, create and present a community issue through theatre.  At the conclusion of each residency, youth will perform at each of the five sites a culminating production that they have created about a relevant community issue.  Each performance will be evaluated and those that stand out for excellence will be remounted at a larger public venue such as The Black Rep’s home theatre, The Grandel.

Community Health-In-Partnership Services
Stop the Violence Workshops,Touring Show and Exhibit

This program is in response to requests from Guidance Counselors in St. Louis Public Schools seeking arts programming that will address the recent spread of violence among students in neighborhood schools.  The participants in these two week long residency workshops will create visual and performing arts presentations that will instill a deeper awareness of teen violence causes and prevention. Each student will design a quilt square that expresses their experience or personal view of violence. The quilt pieces will be assembled into a quilt that will be displayed at each workshop’s culminating event and at other venues.

Denise Ward-Brown
Jim Crow to Barack Obama:
A Video Documentary & Virtual Archive

This project will involve two sets of African Americans to be involved as the subject and active participants for the film.  The first set will be the elders who are at least 80 years old having grown up in the now extinct era of Jim Crow.  The second set will be four to six people under the age of 30 who may have voted for the first time with the past election. The video/film project will seek the participation of these two groups working together to build the content for the documentary.  The youth will conduct video history interviews with the octogenarians.  The main focus of the documentary will follow the legacy of slavery in the first half of the 20th century, the Civil Rights Era and a current assessment of race relations in the Obama era as it affects the lives of the participants both young and old in our region.

The Green Center and Provident
Aesthetic Documentation: Addressing Environmental Justice Issues through the Arts

This summer Green Jobs training program is a new 4-week program that will introduce 25 young adults ages 16-21 to conservation practices, including ecological monitoring, native and invasive plant identification, watershed function, rain barrel construction, and rain garden design. Programming will take place at The Green Center’s 30 acres of woods, prairie, wetland and learning gardens in University City at the Shreve Center and the 25 acre Calvary Cemetery Prairie, the sole original prairie in the metropolitan region.  A culminating project will enable students to apply skills and knowledge gained by creating formal plans to enhance greenspaces through nativescaping and art installations.

Metro Theater Company
Celebrate St. Louis Stories

This project is in collaboration with Our Lady of Guadalupe in Cool Valley/Ferguson and Jefferson Elementary in Old North St. Louis.  The program will be launched in each school with their sixth grade classes with a family performance of Metro Theater Company’s production Delilah’s Wish, written and performed by St. Louisan Mariah Richardson. The play draws on Richardson’s experience growing up in a St. Louis urban neighborhood. Following the performance, Metro Theater Company teaching artists and Richardson will enter classrooms to help students launch their own process of gathering and recording stories from community members, sharing and documenting stories, writing and editing stories, and preparing a final presentation for their community. Directed by Metro Theater Company, each group will create a dramatic presentation for their peers, families and community members to honor the rich culture of their neighborhood.

Prison Performing Arts
Summer Hip Hop Poetry Festival at St. Louis City
Juvenile Detention Center

The festival is a literacy and performance project that will engage youth at the St. Louis City Juvenile Detention Center in an intensive arts experience during public school summer break. The centerpiece of the project is a six-day residency with noted Hip Hop poet and publisher Jessica Care Moore.  The young people in detention will participate in classes in poetry writing, performance, costume, set design and Hip Hop dance.  At the end of the residency the poets will perform for their families, staff, community guests and their peers. 

St. Louis ArtWorks and The Urban Studio
Portraits of Old North

Twelve teens from Old North will work as paid apprentices along with two professional artists who will teach them photography, creative writing and oral history interviewing. Each teen will be paired with an older resident of the community to interview and photograph. They will interview their partner about his/her life in the neighborhood and use that as the basis for a creative writing piece and create a photographic portrait of the older resident. Each teen will also create a self portrait using photography and creative writing and a book of these written and photographic portraits will be printed and sold with the proceeds supporting ArtWorks and the Urban Studio Café.

St. Louis Jobs with Justice
Home, Family & Work: A Multi-Media Exploration

In partnership with Riverview Gardens High School, located in Bellefontaine Neighbors, students will explore the topic of “Community: Home, Family, and Work” with the high school’s drama students. Artist-led workshops will be the centerpiece of the program, where participants will address each topic (home; family; work) in 10-week rotations from Summer 2010 to Spring 2011 through the creation of monologues, video documentation, and visual art activities. The workshops will culminate in a multi-media project that engages the larger student body and their families in a social & economic justice dialogue about their community and its future. 

University of Missouri-St. Louis
Public Policy Research Center 
Photography Project Downtown Dutchtown

The project will partner with the Dutchtown Neighborhood Association. Teens will receive guidance from the Neighborhood Accountability Board and Downtown Dutchtown Business Association to create a community photography project and exhibition. Chinyere Oteh, also a Dutchtown resident, will instruct community participants to create artwork focused on their collaborative goals of building community pride, establishing positive relationships between business owners and neighborhood youth, and creating effective communication between residents and business owners.  During an eight-week residency with Oteh, residents, youth and shop owners will capture Dutchtown's people and places through photographs, digital collage, artwork, poetry and autobiographical writing. Selected works from the residency will be displayed in two public exhibitions mid-January through mid-April, 2011.