News
Rocket Grants Awards Art Practical Critical Writing Commission
Published Thursday 01 of December, 2011
KANSAS CITY, MO November 28, 2011 - Rocket Grants, a program of Charlotte Street Foundation and KU Spencer Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, is delighted to announce that Art Practical, a San Francisco-based online publication, will produce an issue of the magazine dedicated to exploring the experimental collective, community-oriented, and public art practices in Kansas City supported by the Rocket Grants program. The anticipated publication date is March 2012.
A team of four Art Practical contributing editors and writers will visit Kansas City in February 2012 to research and engage with regional artists and writers, with a broad focus on locality's role in shaping philosophies and practices. This project will connect Kansas City area artists, critics, writers, and curators with an evolving national and international conversation about contemporary art practice. Art Practical will engage with local artists in a public program and through individual interviews, the results of which will be included in the issue. Additionally, editors will collaborate with up to four local writers who will also contribute to this issue. These local writers will receive the professional editorial review that is a hallmark of this publication.
Patricia Maloney, Director for Art Practical and a contributing editor said "I am very excited to create a dialogue between Bay Area and Kansas City, as well as to see what it means for Art Practical to be embedded in a new community. I hope that this award will enable us to re-examine our approaches, readers, and subjects as we encounter new practices and audiences."
About the Rocket Grants Call for Proposals
The Rocket Grants program circulated a Call for Proposals seeking experimental, critical writing projects exploring connections between Rocket Grants program-supported work in the Kansas City region and broader trends in contemporary art practice. The intent of the award is to support the creation of a germane written response to art projects that are innovative, relational and inserted into public space, and that often draw on familiar strategies and language to build social connection and meaning. The call was distributed to writers, artists, critics, and curators in September 2011 and received numerous and diverse proposals from both Kansas City and across the nation. Art Practical's winning proposal dedicates an entire issue to exploring experimental art practice in the Kansas City region.
About Art Practical
Art Practical defines its mission and activities as "emblematic of the collective and collaborative spirit of the wide-ranging Bay Area visual arts culture, which combines a long local history of incubating experimentation and innovation with international perspectives. Our contributors are some of the most renowned artists, performers, writers, educators, and curators working here. This vibrant, complex mix of cross-disciplinary practices demonstrates a model for visual arts criticism that is highly conscious of the audience it is serving, as well as the culture it is representing"
Art Practical was a 2009 Alternative Exposure program award recipient, which is part of the same regranting initiative (funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation) as the Rocket Grants program. The magazine has formed strategic partnerships with four entities (Bad At Sports, Daily Serving, Happenstand and Talking Cure) that draw contributors and build a readership around contemporary art practices all over the world.
About Rocket Grants
Rocket Grants receive support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and are implemented through a partnership between the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, MO and KU Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, KS. The grants are designed to fuel the dynamism of the Kansas City region's art ecology by providing direct support for innovative, experimental, artist-driven, and artist-centered projects that happen outside of traditional arts venues.
Relevant Links:
http://rocketgrants.org/
http://www.artpractical.com/
http://www.charlottestreet.org/
http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/
