Creative Response Fund Grants Awarded to 12 Artist-Led Community Healing and Well-Being Projects
Tuesday June 14, 2022 | Arts & Cultural Affairs
Judah Gardner, singer songwriter performs at The Rock Royalty Experience at George Floyd Square. Photo by Bruce Williams.
Learn more about the 2022 projects here >
$180,000 in grant funding to 12 Artist-led teams to deliver community healing and support for the City’s most impacted communities
The City of Minneapolis’ Arts & Cultural Affairs Department is pleased to announce funding for 12 artist-led teams for projects that provide creative healing and support to Minneapolis communities that continue to be directly impacted and affected by stress and trauma. Along with the lasting effects of the pandemic, communities continue to grapple with ongoing challenges related to the murder of George Floyd.
Now in its third year of funding, the Creative Response Fund provided resources in 2021 for 15 teams of artists on urgently needed community healing projects. Through this effort, Arts & Cultural Affairs has supported 51 local artists, 94% BIPOC and 63% Black. This work continues in 2022 with 12 new Creative Response Fund projects, each team will receive $15,000 in project support.
These new grants are intended to continue to mobilize the unique and specialized skills of community based artists and designers to respond to community needs and engage with and expand the impact of community healing and support. The projects will provide the much-needed spaces for dialogue and engagement with communities impacted and affected by the trauma, stress and violence caused as a result of the long and painful history of police brutality disproportionately experienced by Black communities for generations.
This year’s funded projects respond to community needs by centering their work in community driven cultural practices, uplifting marginalized voices and local indigenous knowledge and healing practices. Each project will embed creative healing into arts activities such as: workshops that create safe space for writing, artist led spaces that allow for grieving, healing and fostering community joy through making Mexican alebrijes, cultural healing workshops; ‘Radical Acts of Remembrance’ that foster the making of public shrines and memorials; hip-hop gatherings for everyone; music performance, drumming, spoken word, community mural making with youth, community painting, song, dance, story-telling and theatre making. These projects are examples of the ways that artists collaborate with communities to define safe spaces for healing.
