Bush Artist 2003Fellows 2003 Bush Artist Fellows LITERATURE POETRY, FICTION, CREATIVE NONFICTION Mai Neng Moua Lee Ann Roripaugh David Treuer Ka Vang Wang Ping SCRIPTWORKS PLAYWRITING AND SCREENWRITING Vincent Delaney Adelaide MacKenzie Fuss Kevin Kling FILM • VIDEO Liza Davitch Jenny Lion David Ryan MUSIC COMPOSITION Philip Blackburn Tellef Johnson Michelle Kinney J.D. Steele 2 Bush Artist Fellowships stablished in 1976, the purpose of the Bush Artist Fellowships is to provide artists with significant E financial support that enables them to further their work and their contributions to their communi- ties. An artist may use the fellowship in many ways: to engage in solitary work or reflection, for collabo- rative or community projects, or for travel or research. No two fellowships are exactly alike. Eligible artists reside in Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and western Wisconsin. Artists may apply in any of these categories: VISUAL ARTS: TWO DIMENSIONAL VISUAL ARTS: THREE DIMENSIONAL LITERATURE Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction CHOREOGRAPHY • MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE ART/STORYTELLING SCRIPTWORKS Playwriting and Screenwriting MUSIC COMPOSITION FILM • VIDEO TRADITIONAL AND FOLK ARTS Applications for all disciplines will be considered in alternating years. 3 2003 Panels PRELIMINARY PANEL PRELIMINARY PANEL FINAL PANEL FILM • VIDEO MUSIC COMPOSITION Anthony Davis Judy Irving Anthony Davis Composer and Professor of Music Documentary filmmaker Composer and Professor of Music University of California–San Diego San Francisco, California University of California–San Diego San Diego, California San Diego, California Laurence Kardish Erik Ehn Senior Curator, Department of Film Janice Giteck Playwright and theater faculty and Media Composer and Professor of Music California Institute of the Arts Museum of Modern Art Cornish College of the Arts Greenbrae, California New York, New York Seattle, Washington Boo Froebel Yvonne Rainer Elizabeth Schulze Artistic Director, Galapagos Art Space Film/videomaker and choreographer Music Director and Conductor Producer, Performance on 42nd at the New York, New York Maryland Symphony Orchestra Whitney Museum of American Art Williamsport, Maryland at Altria New York, New York PRELIMINARY PANEL LITERATURE PRELIMINARY PANEL Yvonne Rainer SCRIPTWORKS Film/videomaker and choreographer Kimiko Hahn New York, New York Poet and Professor of English Kathleen Dimmick Queens College/CUNY Dramaturg and director Shawn Wong Flushing, New York New York, New York Fiction writer and Professor of English University of Washington Judith Kitchen Erik Ehn Seattle, Washington Fiction and nonfiction writer Playwright and theater faculty Writer-In-Residence California Institute of the Arts SUNY Brockport Greenbrae, California Brockport, New York Elizabeth Wong Shawn Wong Playwright, screenwriter, and lecturer Fiction writer and Professor of English University of California University of Washington –Santa Barbara Seattle, Washington Monterey Park, California 4 Bush Artist Fellowships ush Artist Fellowships support artists of demon- Grants are made through a two-part selection Bstrated ability who reflect any of the region’s process. Separate preliminary panels for each cate- many cultural, geographic, racial, and aesthetic vari- gory review applications and work samples to select ations, both its rural and urban character. Among finalists. An interdisciplinary final panel then the qualities the program seeks in an artist are strong reviews the pool of finalists and chooses those who vision, creative energy, and perseverance. Artists receive fellowships. The final panel includes one must be 25 or older to apply and may be at any stage member from each preliminary panel plus one or of career development, from emerging through two additional panelists. Panelists serve for one year. established. Up to 15 grants are made each year. All panel members are working artists, curators, or There is no requirement as to the number of fellow- critics living outside Minnesota, North Dakota, ships to be made in each discipline, and therefore South Dakota, and Wisconsin. that number may change annually. This catalog introduces the 2003 Bush Artist Grants consist of stipends of $44,000 for a 12- Fellows and their work. We are very proud of them to 18-month period. In 2003, 15 artists were select- and wish them great satisfaction in pursuing their ed to receive 15 Bush Artist Fellowships. They were individual visions. chosen from a total of 475 applicants. Julie Gordon Dalgleish, Program Director Kathi Polley, Program Assistant 5 Perspectives Grace “…Really beautiful works of art are examples of ensembles in which independent factors occur, in a manner impossible to understand, so as to form a unique thing of beauty.” — Simone Weil, The Needs of the Soul Time for supper. then our charge is dangerously weak. When people are widely scattered (ethically) so It’s common sense (the sense that counts). that they depend, at root, on the vehicle of appropri- ation, when folks are dependent on that which The Bush Foundation fulfills its mission with reduces them, and when their dependence is a money ideas and money but most germanely through the machine for the concentrated few… first poetry, next breaking of bread. [For the past ten years the Bush language in general, then memory, then intellect, Artist Fellows program has convened on a quarterly basis then will, and then the soul itself decays. all active fellows for informal social gatherings where Then the soul refuses to disappear. Where the they talk about issues, share work, or simply enjoy each many are taken from and distributed to (the market others company.] scaffolded up as the only apparent reality), a bur- nished insistence shows up when all else wears away: And an impulse among the scattered many to gather pur- pose from themselves, sometimes at the expense of Distributive Culture marks the end of empire. the few. Empires always end. Popular will assembles itself, recognizes and remembers itself, reprises and Ronald Rolheiser laments the atrophy of con- expands its language, and perfects its language in templation in Shattered Lantern; he cites narcissism, poetry (all art being poetry). People in command of pragmatism and unbridled restlessness as interlocked their poetry are revolutionary. causes. If prayer (variously defined as knowledge, Right now, culturally, something is very bleak. thoughtfulness, awareness) is the battery that powers And the bleak reveals a brilliance. The Global is the coherence of a people and directs it to the future, increasingly monolithic, and the local is under siege; 6 the radical return to poetry is almost invisible— The advance guard of poetry can’t retreat from because so out of scale in its opposition to uniformi- eschatology, can’t fear growing old, needs to resist the ty. Hope is secure in small gatherings, in the retrieval trap of generating the next without taking care of the of careful conversation, in the shyness and assertion last. of the face-to-face. Through slow rituals of communion, integrated (In the next sweep of the cycle, art/conversation as habits over time and outside the market, we will be is commodified then priced out of reach of the mass able to memorize, refine and deepen each other’s of people. We are made and kept lonely so that our work and lives. humanity itself can be sold back to us.) To prevent the obliteration of coherence, we The computer age is madly distributive and anti- must literally and figuratively break bread together— nuance (metaphors broken down and resold for more aptly, we must break together, break into each parts). The commercial applications and absolute other, find wholeness in common courtesies, com- devaluation of text have emerged with amazing swift- mon sense, in the common. We do well to convene, ness. Resistance is also rising. A brilliant bulletin in the flesh, honest about the requirements of our board, the Net is increasingly understood as a means humanity (food, shelter). And somehow we’ll have to to a live end. The artist gatherings sponsored by the do more than expose or advertise our work to each Bush Foundation share in that end and are part of a other; we will have to need it, mutually, and to make very great good. room in process for mutual need (writing for and Namely—supper: what we hold in common, with each other; performing, painting in response to alive and in shared space. The sacramental asks for one another, in one another’s spaces/faces). faith in incarnation—the premise that beyond corpo- In this way a bunch of art that happens to be rate illusion (fictive, superior personalities) there is good, a bunch of artists who are madly talented at the the sacred (the just, the loving, the impersonal –S. same time, coalesce to a movement. As long as art’s Weil). We can break through to reunite with what dialogue with itself and its community respects its survives of justice in our flesh and blood humanity. privacy, honesty and urgency more than its broader 7 success—then the work will participate in the evacu- ings are modest and informal, the modesty, the chat, ation of the old and the installation of the new. We the form and non-form are well founded and operate need to succeed at the level and speed of small gath- in the light of a significant shift back to soul, which erings, building out from an integrity of purpose. It is leads to an improvement of the will, then the intel- too soon to talk about being loud enough to out- lect, then memory, then language, then poetry. shout the market. We resist by creating more listen- ing, by showing how sanely we are intimate, human. The next great wave in art is not a matter of style Erik Ehn’s work includes The Saint Plays, Heavenly Shades of or personality. It is a matter of hospitality. Night Are Falling, No Time Like the Present, Wolf at the Door, “Fellowship” = community. The Bush Foundation, Tailings, Beginner, Ideas of Good and Evil, and an adaptation through its deepening custom of gathering artists of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.