The 2020 Added Velocity Fund grantees:
Artist Name: Arielle Julia Brown/ Black Spatial Relics
Title: Black Spatial Relics 2021 Convening
Grant Amount: $15,000
Proposal: Noting “now, as much as ever, radical gathering spaces for rumination on Black freedoms are crucial” Black Spatial Relics (Arielle Julia Brown*) will host a weeklong Black Spatial Relics 2021 digital convening featuring their artists-in-residence and several other Black performance makers and scholars from around Philadelphia and beyond. At the digital convening, they will engage workshops, artist talks, performances, salons, zine making, and short lectures from artists engaged in critical performance work about slavery, justice, and freedom. Concurrently, they will celebrate and learn from the centuries-long Black freedom dialectic between the Caribbean and Philadelphia, as they launch new spaces in their residency program for artists in the Caribbean.
Artist: Érica Mukai Faria/ Philadelphia Packaging Company
Title: A PHONEBOOK, care of Philadelphia Packaging Company
Grant Amount: $15,000
Proposal: Initiated in 2019, A PHONEBOOK is a free, multilingual, 144-page print publication and archive project featuring the stories of local shopkeepers and entrepreneurs in Philadelphia. Intended to draw readers back into local brick-and-mortars with community conversations, this oral history project evolved in 2020 amidst a pandemic, a state-wide shutdown and the unrest brought by continued state violence. As they adapted strategies for A PHONEBOOK, its relevance and growth exceeded the pages for which they had budgeted. Added Velocity will allow Philadelphia Packaging Company to continue this work, print more copies for wider distribution, expand the video portrait series of featured individuals, and offer a unique exchange between offline and online materials.
Group: Sound Music Collective
Artist Collaborators: Elissa Flute, Jackie Milestone, Gladys Harlow and Eileen Shumate
Title: Virtual Sound Museum
Grant Amount: $15,000
Proposal: Virtual Sound Museum will be a curation of tutorials in tandem with performance pieces and artist talks that exhibit the technologies and techniques explained in the educational videos. SMC will use the website and YouTube channel they built from the previous Velocity Fund Grant, in addition to the Instagram account to reach audiences. They will also add a PA system to their Gear Library for collective members and the community at large to use.
Artist: Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela
Title: Migrations and Movements
Grant Amount: $15,000
Proposal: Migrations and Movements project consists of a series of public events coupled with a substantial online presence to engage a wide-ranging audience with the video artwork of the No Otro Lado series and other similarly themed film work. This project seeks to expand on No Otro Lado’s questioning of the legitimacy of the border by further exploring how migration transcends borders and false binaries. This project builds on No Otro Lado’s focus on Latinx migration and history with film screenings that align similar short film work about other communities who navigate issues of identity and status. This project puts all of the video work in conversation. At least one outdoor screening will culminate in a masked, socially-distant dance party.
Group Name: FORTUNE
Artist Collaborators: Andrienne Palchick, Heidi Ratanavanich and Connie Yu
Project Title: Many Folds Press
Grant Amount: $15,000
Proposal: FORTUNE, a print collective that has produced monthly publications and regular programming by and for queer/trans Asian publics, will reprint out-of-print revolutionary queer Asian archival works, and produce new publications for three Philadelphia-based QTBIPOC artists, to distribute by mail as parcels of collected time. By engaging past FORTUNE contributors as annotators of archival documents, and operating a model of free distribution, we will extend our support for printworkers, and make moves toward a more functional, accessible, and responsive small press—Many Folds Press.
Added Velocity—which is administered by Philadelphia Contemporary with generous support from the William Penn Foundation—builds on the momentum of The Velocity Fund by directly supporting five previously funded Velocity Fund grantees who demonstrate a commitment to expanding their initial projects in meaningful and far-reaching ways in Philadelphia.
More about the William Penn Foundation:
The William Penn Foundation, founded in 1945 by Otto and Phoebe Haas, is dedicated to improving the quality of life in the Greater Philadelphia region through efforts that increase educational opportunities for children from low-income families, ensure a sustainable environment, foster creativity that enhances civic life, and advance philanthropy in the Philadelphia region. In 2020, the Foundation will grant more than $117 million to support vital efforts in the region.