The City’s Office of Arts and Culture has selected 45 local artists to participate in its one-year Seeding Creativity grant program.
The program will provide $10,000 grants to research, create, or present new work in Sacramento County.
The Seeding Creativity grant program is funded through a $500,000 award to the Office of Arts and Culture from the National Endowment for the Arts’ federal American Rescue Plan dollars.
“These awardees represent an array of artists and styles with exciting and creative projects to execute across Sacramento,” said the City’s Arts Program Manager Melissa Cirone. “This program directly supports local independent artists, the key drivers of the creative industries in Sacramento, and these projects will enrich the lives of all Sacramentans.”
The awarded artists specialize in a variety of art forms including visual arts, music, performance, photography, film, dance and more. The selected awardees include:
- Kimberly Garza will research the disparity of tree canopy in Sacramento’s urban landscape. The project will produce a visual series from both aerials and street level readings, along with personal testimonies, of existing tree canopy coverage.
- Citlalin Rodriguez will create dance regalia items for Aztec dance traditions such as shields, headdresses, gourd/seed pod rattles, jewelry, etc. for use in the Aztec dance tradition.
- Sunny Eselekhomhen will explore West African music and instruments through student music workshops.
- Spencer Tsang will create a short fantasy film on the history and mythology of the town of Locke, a culturally significant town on the Sacramento Delta for Chinese immigrants.
Find a full list of artists and projects here.
In addition to grant funds, artists will receive one year of support programming to assist them in career building skills such as building entrepreneurial expertise, leveraging resources, deepening collaborations, developing portfolios and work samples, and crafting work statements.
The City received 409 applications for the program. They were reviewed and scored by a diverse panel of artists as well as local community members. They also were reviewed by the Sacramento Arts, Culture and Creative Economy commission.