UArtists Receive 2020 Pew Grants

October 30, 2020

On Oct. 21, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage announced that more than $10.5 million will fund 29 project grants and 12 Pew Fellowships for Philadelphia’s artists and cultural organizations. Programs will be a mix of in-person and virtual, and many will focus on historically underrepresented perspectives and important societal issues. Pew’s long-standing annual fellowships provide unrestricted awards of $75,000 to individual, Philadelphia-based artists from all disciplines. Two of these fellowships were awarded to Alexandra Tatarsky MFA ’18 (Devised Performance) and School of Dance MFA guest artist and lecturer Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Tatarsky explores concepts of self and community through clown practices, comedy, physical theater and performance art, experimenting with language and narrative structure. Their live performances are tailored to the venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall to reveal vulnerability and humanity through humor.

“I seek the slippery edges of disciplines—where one becomes another—as a mode of questioning the categories we use to organize our experience,” Tatarsky says in Pew’s press release.  

Kosoko is also a multidisciplinary performance artist, incorporating elements of dance, film, music, poetry and visual art to reflect on Black and queer identity. His work speaks to contemporary life through the use of historical events and archival relics and considers how performance can be used to negotiate differences and create new methods of understanding.

“I am especially interested in presenting narratives that disrupt conventional performance to recast the historical positionality of the Black body, confront trauma and offer creative processes for healing,” Kosoko says in Pew’s press release. 

In addition to individual fellowships, Pew also awards project grants to cultural institutions in amounts up to $400,000, to engage a broad and varied audience throughout the region. Three of these project grants feature UArts alumni and theater faculty.

Black artist Jayson Musson BFA ’02 (Photography) will present His History of Art at the Fabric Workshop and Museum during a two-year residency. The project will examine how our current cultural consciousness reflects a narrow understanding of art history. Musson will develop a new comedic persona to scrutinize the art world’s biases through wit and research, the museum’s costume-design expertise, videos, film sets, gallery installations, and a publication.

Pig Iron/Devised Performance MFA faculty member Dan Rothenberg will direct a devised performance work of theater, installation, cabaret and visual projection titled The Pregnant Speakeasy with Pig Iron Theatre Company. Working with filmmaker, writer and director Josephine Decker, the immersive performance will draw from her experience of pregnancy and motherhood, and initiate audience members into the “secret knowledge” of the pregnant through a series of performance environments. 

With Theatre Horizon, Theater faculty member and director Nell Bang-Jensen will create a large-scale play with music titled Our Norristown—written by Michael John Garcés—which will be staged in a public parking lot. Using the structure of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the piece will draw on various stories of Norristown’s residents as it challenges the myth of small-town homogeneity in the U.S. The performance will feature both professionals and “citizen artists,” with an original score by the UArts alumni–packed collective ILL DOOTS.

“At this moment of acute challenge precipitated by COVID-19, our grants represent a steadfast belief in the resilience of the Philadelphia region’s cultural community and the abiding importance of the arts in civic life,” said Pew’s Executive Director Paula Marincola in the organization’s press release. “These grants affirm and bolster the cultural sector in continuing its essential work: nurturing creative practice and presenting innovative public programs that deeply connect us to one another as they illuminate diverse personal experiences and some of today’s most pressing issues.”

View the full list of grantees.