BCA Community Arts Fund announces 21 recipients

The BCA Community Arts Fund, a regrants program providing project based grants to arts organizations and artists, announces the 21 recipients for fiscal year 2007-08.

The Bronx Council on the Arts (BCA) sought submissions from Bronx arts organizations and artists for new projects that had not taken place due to lack of funding or already scheduled projects for which additional funds would have a significant impact.

Of special interest to BCA were projects that demonstrated a fresh approach to their work or their art form.   For example, one of the individual artist recipients was Nicolás Dumit Estévez who devised a project entitled Thirty Two Letters to My Dentist. The project consists of a hand-typed, printed and bound edition of an artist book, composed of a series medical letters, one per tooth, as a personal account of a fictitious relationship between myself and one of my three dentists. In this publication, being produced by the Center for Book Arts, the South Bronx is a recurrent subject of discussion and a central point of reference. A prototype of the project will be on exhibit at the Center for Book Arts through June 28.

Another recipient, Desmar Guevara, will compose music to the poetry of Puerto Rican poet. Luis Pales Matos, known for his poetry on the African experience in Puerto Rico. Mr. Guevara’s works makes salient and often novel use of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and instrumentation in a Latin jazz context and he is devoted to new idioms in jazz and musical theater.  The muscular percussion of the Puerto Rican Bomba and related forms allow Mr. Guevara to challenge audience and musicians alike with new interactions of the folkloric and chamber jazz repertoires with the literature of the island. 

The grantees for this year’s BCA/DCA Greater New York Arts Development Fund are:  Inspirit, a dance company; City Island Theatre Group; Uptown Coffeehouse, Inc.; Bronx Hispanic Festival; Focal Point Press, Literary Freedom Project; On World Arts, Inc; Hunts Point Alliance for Children; videographer Ibrahim Gonzalez, NuyoRican School Poetry Jazz Ensemble, Inc.; jazz artist Robert Silverman, muralist Josie Gonzalez; print maker Alejandra Delfin; Fundación Andres Figueroa Cordero; Garces Puppeteria; dancer choreographer Marcos Napa Ormeño; and The Judaica Museum of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale.

Funding was provided by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Bronx Council on the Arts, Community Arts Fund, grants, recipients, Inspirit, City Island Theatre Group, Uptown Coffeehouse, Inc., Bronx Hispanic Festival, Focal Point Press, Literary Freedom Project, On World Arts, Inc, Hunts Point Alliance for Children, Ibrahim Gonzalez, NuyoRican School Poetry Jazz Ensemble, Inc., Robert Silverman; Josie Gonzalez; Alejandra Delfin, Fundaci