2019 FAll GrAntees

Music Grantee - Gabriel Chakarji

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Music Production Grant to Gabriel to complete work on his “Venezuela in Motion” project. Gabriel Chakarji is a Latin Grammy Award nominee pianist and composer who merges the influences of his Venezuelan musical backgrounds with a New York City Jazz sound. “Venezuela in Motion” is a collective of U.S.-based Venezuelan musicians that fuse songs and chants from the traditional Afro-Venezuelan repertoire with modern rhythms, harmonies, and improvisation from the jazz language.

Music Grantee - John Escreet

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Music Production Grant to John to complete work on a yet unnamed recording project by the John Escreet Group. Over the course of his career, John Escreet has earned a reputation as one of the most active and diverse pianist/composers working in jazz and improvised music. His prolific output is reflected over the course of 8 diverse and critically acclaimed albums.

Music Grantee - Carmela Ramirez

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Music Production Grant to Carmela to complete work on her “Outcast” project. Ana Carmela Ramirez Contramaestre combines a solid classical musical training with the art of singing and composition. Traveling around various genres and sounds, her artistic uniqueness is rooted in the need of a better future for children and youth in Venezuela. “Outcast” is a contemporary vision of the sounds from South America, specifically Venezuela. Combining elements of electronic music with ancestral rhythms and poetry, weaving the past with the present, the rural with the urban, Carmela is aiming to create a unique pathway so that people from all over the world will be able to connect to their roots.

Music Grantee - Sofia Rei

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Music Production Grant to Sofia to complete work on her project entitled “Umbral” . An exhaustive exploration of the voice as an instrument of texture and expression, Sofía breaks away from the established continuity of her work in an attempt to create a new soundscape that blends South American folk with pop, electronic music and improvisation. “Umbral” is set to be released during the first half of 2020 and is produced by world music luminary JC Maillard. JC and Sofía decided to go deep into the DNA of South American folk grooves, taking the original rhythmic content of music styles such as Afro-Bolivian saya, Argentine chacarera and  Colombian seresesé and cumbia, and translating it into new sounds and instruments to create their envisioned sonic landscape.

Visual Grantee - John Descarfino

Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation NYC 2019 Fall Visual Grant has been awarded to John Descarfino to help with the future installation of his project “Interlayer” in NYC. John’s surroundings inform his paintings. In ways literal and metaphorical, they become them. For John, painting is a practice spirited by a sense of discovery and mystery, and by an urge to find harmony between himself and the world. Arranging colored pigments on a surface is a revelation of oneself, of an interiority invoking the emotional resonance of experience. 

Visual Grantee - Zac Hacmon

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Visual Grant to Zac for the September 2020 installation of his project “Hedgehogs”. Zac is a sculptor and installation artist who explores sociopolitical conflicts through architecture. Through large-scale interactive installations, Hacmon’s work gives viewers access to sites that are usually rejected or hidden from public perception. He investigates the use of architecture as a tool for division or as a measure to generate identity.  “Hedgehogs” is an interactive sound installation that explores the Mexican American border and creates a manipulated border crossing experience in the gallery space. “Hedgehogs” addresses acts of displacement and relocation and also calls attention to global borders, social emergency and the inhumanity of these crossings.

Visual Grantee - Beatrice Modisett

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Visual Grant to Beatrice Modisett to help with the installation of her 2020 exhibtion “Scorched Earth” presents Modisett’s recent investigations into the visualization and layering of landscapes - referenced, imagined and remembered - in various states of formation, collapse and upheaval. Modisett pulls heavily from her travels to remote and extreme landscapes which have been pivotal in shaping her understanding of what it means to manipulate, navigate and rely on a shifting landscapes.

Visual Grantee - Eva Redamonti

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Visual Grant to Eva Redamonti to help with the installation of her 2021 solo exhibtion “What Happens at Night”. Eva’s exhibition will showcase her journey in the arts from the visual to the auditory, and aims to show how they interact with one another - including a presentation of her visual 2D art, mural work, animation, and music. In this week-long showcase, Eva’s goal is to bring the viewer deeper into her conceptual work by giving them a chance to see the 2D work in plain sight, and then see it come to life in animation on a screen, and to hear the music that was born from it.

Literature Grantee - Drew Pisarra

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Literature Grant to Drew Pisarra to help continue his work on two projects. The first, tentatively entitled “Periodic Boyfriends”, is his new series of sonnets inspired by both the periodic table of elements and his own history of past relationships, be they longterm or last night. Simultaneously to this endeavor, Pisarra will be putting the finishing touches on “Poems for Fassbinder”, his book of innovative verse inspired by the late, great German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Literature Grantee - Catherine Texier

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Fall Literature Grant to Catherine Texier to help continue her work on “After David”, a portrait of a divorced writer in her early sixties, mother of two grown daughters, who, after numerous affairs and a long relationship, decides to try online dating. She is surprised and intrigued by the number of young men she hears from and enters in to an affair with a 37 year-old jazz guitarist. French born and raised, Eve sees her affair with Jonah, like the French author Colette with her young lovers, as a delicious, sexy, if slightly scandalous romance, while he sees it as an impossible romance because of their age difference.

2019 SPRING GRANTEES

Visual Grantee - Steven Burton

Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2019 Spring Visual Grant to Steven Burton to help with the installation of his “Skin Deep” project at a future Exhibition. Originally from the UK, now a full time NYC resident, Steven Burton is a self-taught portrait, travel and lifestyle photographer with an education in graphic design and advertising. Steven was inspired to launch his “Skin Deep” photo project after seeing the documentary G-Dog which is about the work of Father Greg Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries, to help former gang members reintegrate into their communities. With “Skin Deep” Steven is trying to change the way people view former gang members and lift the stigma that surrounds them in their post-gang lives.