25 Aug Celebrating the 2022 Velocity Fund Grantees

BY KRISTAL SOTOMAYOR

The Velocity Fund, which is administered by Philadelphia Contemporary, distributes $60,000 in grants each cycle to support Philadelphia-based artists. The fund has a particular focus on experimental, collaborative, and interdisciplinary practices. In its fifth cycle, the Velocity Fund has funded 64 projects–more than $300,000 in grants awarded to individual artists in Philadelphia.

According to Philadelphia Contemporary, this year’s grantees have “a shared interest in illuminating and inviting dialogue around the region’s complex histories and critical realities.” The 12 grantees were selected from the largest application pool in the five-year history of the grant. A regranting program started by the Warhol Foundation, the fund supports “vibrant, under-the-radar artistic activity in partnership with leading cultural institutions in communities across the country.”

The Velocity Fund states: “The 2022 awardees have proposed a wide range of projects, including a digital community archive by Disabled people, public sculptures exploring Philadelphia’s radical queer past, a performance art work at a recycling facility, a video synthesis workshop, an immersive theater production, a collaboration with high school students, a storytelling project about Philadelphia’s local fish, and an an experimental short documentary on the historic Black business corridor in West Philadelphia.”

Check out the full descriptions of the 2022 Velocity Fund projects below. 

Shannon Brooks – UNDUE BURDEN

UNDUE BURDEN is a digital community archive and exhibition series created by Disabled people in Philadelphia. They invite Disabled artists from Philadelphia to contribute to the archive and respond to existing archival materials. Their responses are documented and folded into the archive. They will use the Velocity Grant to expand the archive to include additional oral/video, visual, and demonstrative histories, improve digital access, and curate an accessible physical exhibition with remote accessibility. Collaborators include: Pam Price, Maggie Mills, Vinetta Miller, Byahat Ham, Parker Gabriel and Peter Schranz.

Amelia Carter, Raishad Momar, Aidan Un – Spirit on 52nd St

Spirit on 52nd St. is an experimental short documentary (40 minutes) about the historically Black business corridor in West Philadelphia. This film will cultivate an intergenerational community conversation about the corridor. Through dialogue exploring culture, ownership, gentrification, uprising, and memory we will excavate the “spirit” embodied by the street. With the community, we will reimagine the corridor’s future by reconciling its past and letting the spirit speak.

Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales – Waste Scenes

As artists in residence at RAIR (Recycling Artist in Residence) in Philadelphia, they will develop, rehearse, and film a series of performances that take place at an operating construction and demolition waste recycling facility. The project will attempt to forge a stronger bond between waste and everyday life. It will include observational footage, scripted and improvised spoken text, as well as music, dance, and song, all derived from materials pulled from the waste stream.

Logan Cryer –  Invited: Take Care of the Square Footage

Invited: Take Care of the Square Footage celebrates the curatorial work that happens outside of institutional contexts. 10 Philadelphia-based organizers will be invited to work within the Icebox Project Space gallery, which will be divided into 10 unique exhibiting spaces. Throughout the public exhibition, free workshops will assist participants in developing skills around wall fabrication, art handling, the operation of A/V equipment, grant writing, and budgeting.

Stephen Foster –  The Eyes Beneath the Oak

Foster will create a book, exhibition, and public programming about the intimate experiences of incarceration, framed within the larger contexts of racism, slavery, surveillance, and capitalism.

Nicolo Gentile  –  Tough Love

Tough Love is a series of site-based public sculptures and performances that explores Philadelphia’s radical Queer past and the act of remembrance as a gesture of communal mourning, celebration, and exegesis.

Noah Jacobson-Carroll, Juliette Rando, Elissa Freeden, Sound Museum Collective  –  Cathode Ray Tapestries: Memory, Nostalgia & Analog Video Synthesis

Sound Museum Collective will organize a 6-week, open-to-the-public experimental video synthesis art project based on ideas of collective memory, deprogramming and nostalgia, culminating in a final performance and introductory video synthesis workshop.

Melissa Langer  –  Untitled Illegal Dumping Project

Untitled Illegal Dumping Project traces Philadelphia’s protracted efforts to curb illegal dumping and littering through a series of vignettes about excess, neglect, and human behavior. Presented as both a multichannel video installation and a non-fiction feature film, the project reveals the complex ecosystem of the city’s many fraught campaigns to manage its own waste.

Gilletta McGraw  –  Black In The Days: A Community Building, Multidisciplinary, Interactive Memoir

Performance art meets reader’s theater as a coming of age story involving an unusual Black girl and her colorfully dysfunctional Philadelphia-based family is told innovatively using first person narrative. Presented as a one-woman dramatic project, the artist takes viewers on a journey spanning the 1970s to the 2000s. Performed with script-in-hand and PowerPoint slides to provide visual enhancements, audience talk back segments are weaved throughout the performance for full-on participation.

Li Sumpter  –  Blade Runner: Illadelph 2025

Blade Runner: Illadelph 2025 (The Rise of the Replicants) is a multimedia immersive theater production that reimagines the world of the sci-fi classic film Blade Runner through an Afrofuturist, BIPOC perspective. The speculative story, set in future Philadelphia, follows a reluctant member of an underground colony of humanoids planning a revolt against their human makers. Illadelph explores themes of oppression and liberation, solidarity and survival, and the nature of technology and the human soul. The project will be developed for the stage in collaboration with Theatre in the X led by company founders LaNeshe Miller-White, Walter DeShields, and Carlo Campbell.

Mat Tomezsko  –  Revolutionary Philadelphia

Revolutionary Philadelphia is a series of collaborative artworks produced through a process of research, analysis, and discussion among high school students, social justice educators, and an artist. Launched in Summer 2021, Revolutionary Philadelphia is a partnership between Philadelphia artist Mat Tomezsko and the University Community Collaborative, a media-based social justice initiative, housed at Temple University, that provides leadership programming for high school students in Philadelphia.

Feini Yin  –  Our Fishing Log

Our Fishing Log is a Philly-centered storytelling project about our local fish, people who love fish, and the ways fish connect us to the world, each other, and ourselves. The project includes a podcast, photography series, and accompanying gyotaku (traditional fish printing) workshops for youth. Each episode follows a different species of fish found in waters local to the Philadelphia region, from catching the fish to sharing it in a meal with a local cook. This project will be done in collaboration with Fishadelphia, which aims to make fresh, local seafood accessible to Philadelphia’s diverse communities. 

Learn more about the Velocity Fund.

*Featured Image: Still from Waste Scenes site visit at RAIR. Image Credit: Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales.

Have a local arts announcement you would like the cinéSPEAK journal to share? Send any press releases to journal@cinespeak.org

---

Kristal Sotomayor is the Editor-in-Chief of the cinéSPEAK Journal. They are a bilingual Latinx freelance journalist, documentary filmmaker, and festival programmer based in Philadelphia. They serve as the Awards Competition Manager for the International Documentary Association, Programming Director for the Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, and Co-Founder/Journalist of ¡Presente! Media Collective. In the past, Kristal has written for ITVS, WHYY, AL DÍA, Documentary Magazine, cineSPEAK and Autostraddle. They are a 2020 and 2021 Sundance Press Inclusion Initiative awardee.