Kristen Lyle’s short films Playground Stories and Outside the Sandbox will be projected in M-AAA’s storefront gallery

The Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) is glad to present the October exhibition of reflections/projects by St. Louis artist Kristen Lyle and their short films. Playground stories and outside the sandbox.

Laila’s project began as a desire to create an environment through video. For many transgender, non-binary, gender-non-conforming people, thoughts about gender are a constant part of their daily life.

These videos depict an environment in which this often internal or private dialogue about gender identity, gender presentation, and gender perception becomes externalized and inevitable for the viewer.

Films are on display in the gallery of the M-AAA store from October until November 5th. The works are available for online viewing, along with additional work from Lyle’s chosen artists.

Reflect / Project is a series of exhibitions. It features video works that involve social aspects, hand-selected by artists who identify as queer, trans, black, indigenous, and colored. In addition, the “Reflect/project” brings together practicing artists associated with the exchange program, creating a digital outlet for investigative techniques impacted by the remote restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Designed in the gallery of an M-AAA store, this series will expand the under-represented perspective in the public sphere. The new content premieres on the first Friday of every month, starting in August and continuing through June 2021, with a two-month hiatus in February and March.

The works featured in the gallery are complemented by an online series featuring additional works selected by the artists.

GRANT MANAGEMENT

The Mid-America Arts Alliance (M-AAA) strengthens and supports artists, cultural organizations, and communities in our region and beyond. The organization achieves this primarily through national traveling exhibition programs, innovative leadership development, and strategic grants. M-AAA strives to enrich the cultural life of historically underserved communities by providing high-quality, meaningful, and affordable arts, and culture programs and services.

The nonprofit regional arts organization represents Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and other regions. M-AAA focuses on strengthening communities and improving people’s lives through extraordinary cultural experiences.

M-AAA co-works with the region’s government arts agencies, as well as artists, cultural organizations, sponsors, and other stakeholders, to provide access to cultural experiences and a growing creative economy across the region.

M-AAA has previously used a variety of programs to track its exhibitors, exhibitions, grant recipients, and grant recipients. This grant management system limited the organization’s ability to improve its processes and make work processes more efficient.

M-AAA management realized that existing technology was time-consuming and prevented its staff from focusing on their mission. M-AAA also aimed to offer its grantees a more user-friendly and reporting interface.

Todd Stein, CEO of Mid-America Arts Alliance stated that they needed a solution that would allow us to better interact with grantees and exhibitors and track related information. The lack of a self-service approach for their grantees and exhibitors slowed down the grant and exhibition bookings life cycle and created a rather laborious process with repeated redundant data entry fraught with the possibility of inaccuracies.

After carefully evaluating the ecosystem of grant management and CRM applications, M-AAA chose Cloud for Good to build its next-generation technology with Salesforce.org nonprofit packages, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Communities Cloud to meet their member, grant, and trade show management needs.

Using the Salesforce platform and several integrated applications, Cloud for Good created a “one-stop-shop” for the client’s software needs.

Stein said they turned to Cloud for Good for help. They were strongly recommended by one of the sister regional arts organizations, which completed a similar grant management project with them. Their consultants spent plenty of time with the team evaluating and documenting the process flowchart. They had to ensure they were developing a system that increased the capacity to serve customers more efficiently.

The Grantee Community, built using Client Communities with Lightning Experience, allows grantees to submit funding requests, view active and past requests and reporting deadlines, and submit grant reports. The community also has features for managing reviewers.

In addition, Cloud for Good implemented trade fair management and contracting solutions, including document fusion and e-signature tools, to simplify the contracting process. Automation was created to focus customer input on items that require personal viewing.

Reports and dashboards have been created for both internal Salesforce users to gain insight into specific metrics and timelines. The data was migrated from their legacy system, resulting in the necessary transformation to accommodate the change in structure. Training and ongoing support were provided to ensure that solutions can be managed by the client’s team.

 

The Cloud for Good solution allowed M-AAA to accept online grant applications, saving the organization countless hours and precious resources each year. Stein added that they realized a vision of the future in which they would increase productivity, enabling us to work smarter and serve the customers much more efficiently.

Artistic Innovations

The Artistic Innovations Grant Program encourages a spirit of experimentation and research by engaging exclusively local artists to create new, original work for audiences in the M-AAA region. This grant program offers up to US $ 15,000 to cover costs incurred in the creation and implementation of artworks.

An excellent project Artistic Innovations is a project based on personal experience of art, art creation, or artists, which introduces the applicant’s audience to a new or original idea or product. Engagement through feature presentation and outreach include, but is not limited to speaking, publishing, lecture/demonstration, exhibition, master class, and/or seminar.

M-AAA is inviting individual artists to submit a letter of intent for a project. The project has to meet the requirements listed below. Letters of intent will be sent on November 13, 2020.

The first criterion is that the project is new and original, culminating in two public events, including at least one information event and at least one premiere presentation at accessible locations in the M-AAA region from 1 July 2021 until June 30, 2022.

Second, all applicants and artists participating in the project’s public events are residents of the M-AAA region of six states at the time of application and throughout the grant period.

Finally, the expected project budget must match the requested grant amount in a 1: 1 ratio. The maximum permitted grant request is the US $ 15,000.

Artistic Innovations Eligibility

Individuals mustn`t have been an Artistic Innovations Grant recipient in the previous fiscal year OR participate in an award-winning project. It is obligatory to be at least 21 years old, have a social security number, and have a resume that demonstrates at least three years of consistent creative practice.

Applicants must also reside in the M-AAA region on a permanent basis for at least three years before the deadline stated in the letter of intent, and remain resident in the region for the entire grant period, and have a good track record with M-AAA and all other federal agencies, with no late payment reports and/or grant documents.

Organizations should not have been an Artistic Innovations Grant recipient in the previous fiscal year OR participate in an award-winning project, be a 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization, state or local government, or a federally recognized tribal community, and be registered with the Data Universal Number System (DUNS). The organizations also must have three years of work experience before the deadline for the letter of intent form.

Organizations also need to be incorporated and located in the M-AAA region; and have a good track record with M-AAA and all other federal agencies, with no late payment reports and/or grant documents.

Projects should not be those that attract an audience exclusively through online broadcasts. They mustn`t be adaptations from one medium to another. Remounting of past work is also prohibited.

Rereleases of previously published material, art festivals, fairs or competitions or fundraisers or projects engaging any artists from outside M-AAA’s six-state region are not allowed too.

2020 Recipients

The Pilot Dance Project (Houston, TX)

It is a community-based research/performance project that explores the history of the Houston LGBT community to create an archive of oral and visual storytelling. This historiography serves as material for the evening dance work. It includes various pop-up performances at local LGBTQ and art events before and after the main performance.

Oklahoma City Ballet (Oklahoma City, OK)

April 19, 2020, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in downtown Oklahoma City, which killed 168 adults and children.

A Little Peace paid tribute to those who were lost, those who survived, and those who changed forever.

Matthew Gossage (Austin, TX)

This project is a documentary that brings together four different time periods of history together, using cinema-vérité, artistically written interviews, archival oral histories, dramatizations, animation, and drone cinematography to show how race played an integral role in Austin, Texas Development.

Moving beyond the usual historical documentary of historians, the style of this film will alternate between meditative and disturbing. Exploring Austin in the late 1900s after reconstruction, in the early twentieth century and today, he demonstrates the ubiquitous nature of racial segregation in the United States.

Voices from past and present marginalized communities make up a large part of the film and are filmed dynamically, with characters moving and interacting in their neighborhoods.

Daniel M. Ketter, on behalf of American Wild Ensemble (Springfield, MO)

Women’s Voices: The American Aviatrix

Women’s Voices create opportunities for women composers to write new music that celebrates the life and work of women who are critical to shaping America’s past, present, and future.

By performing these commissioned works in communities and places that matter to the personalities of the composers and the subjects of these commissions, the American Wild Ensemble celebrates the work of local composers and historical figures by inviting the public to a deeper connection with their own local history.

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE)

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art supports the production and premiere of a new experimental sound performance by artist Nadia Botello of San Antonio, Texas.

Bemis Center’s new Sound Arts and Experimental Music program offers artists three-month residencies that push the boundaries of sound, composition, voice, and music of all genres.

Justin Sherburn, on behalf of Montopolis (Austin, TX)

The Living Coast

Montopolis has developed a unique live concert creation process inspired by specific Texas ecosystems. The Living Coast uses the 500 miles of coastline between Port Arthur and Brownsville, one of the epicenters of the global fossil fuel industry and a diverse ecosystem, as a metaphor for a key challenge facing humankind in this century: the conflict between industry and our changing environment.

Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artist Collective (St. Louis, MO)

The WHY of MY City

WHY of MY City is an art commission created to raise awareness about preventing gun violence and reviving civic pride in St. Louis, Missouri, which has neighborhoods affected by gun violence.

New work by African American artists explores why citizens care and should take care of their neighborhoods, even if outsiders may view the same neighborhoods as uninhabitable. The St. Louis Stitching Artist Collective is working together to create an approach to public health issues affecting Missouri’s African American urban youth.

The collective brings art to the fore with a unique form of urban storytelling that incorporates rhythm, rap, and word to grab attention, excitement, and communicate key concepts from public safety and health professionals.

TheatreSquared (Fayetteville, AR)

2020 Arkansas New Play Festival

TheaterSquared (T2) brings more than thirty local and regional professional theater artists to Arkansas New Play Festival (ANPF) 2020, the state’s only dedicated professional laboratory for new play development.

TheaterSquared features two full weekend performances, including four staged readings and a fully prepared workshop premiere in Fayetteville and Bentonville. In addition to the work of professional playwrights, T2 produces demonstrations of ten-minute plays written by Arkansas high school students, as well as original work developed by the LatinX Theater Project.

Creative Waco (Waco, TX)

Giant Puppets on Parade

This project represents a completely new approach to bringing excitement, innovation, and interactivity of art to the heart of the Waco community by engaging a group of professional artists to work with community groups to create five giant puppet parades.