2021 WiNTER GrAntees

Visual Grantee - Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Winter Visual Grant to Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya for her current show “May we know our own strength” at 401 W 14th Street. During the show we are invited to anonymously share a personal story via a public website. A row of sixteen printers at the store front, wired to incandescent bulbs sitting on a platform will print the submission, illuminating a corresponding bulb. Amanda will periodically seat herself at the base of the growing heap of submissions, begin a brief ritual involving an affirmation of human dignity and courage in the face of adversity and weave these stories into a collection of intricate hanging paper sculptures, growing abstract shapes and natural textures onto a massive arched trellis made of wood.

Amanda weaves art with science and science with art, she is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, TED speaker, STEM advocate and artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights.

Visual Grantee - Ruth Hardinger

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Visual Grant to Ruth Hardinger for her upcoming show “Transcending Fields” at Mana Contemporary. An “artist’s artist”, Ruth has long explored the dialectic between physicality and spirit. Her proficient handling of "poor" materials—concrete, string, cardboard, graphite, rope, suggests a kind of transubstantiation, an impulse to transcend the mundane, through artistry, and evoke the eternal, the sublime. This theme is echoed in Hardinger's passionate environmental concerns and in her reverence for both Classical and Pre-Columbian art.

The experiential “Transcending Fields” will invite visitors to follow a path from room to room, as though from shrine to shrine on a private pilgrimage, following a designated route, reminiscent of an ancient spiritual pathway.

Visual Grantee - Paul Fabozzi

A Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation NYC 2021 Spring Visual Grant has been awarded to Paul Fabozzi for his project Temporal Tracings.

Inspired by the exploration of the dynamics of visual movement and its relation to fracture, overlay, and weight distribution, Paul’s starting point for some of his works are his sensory investigation of specific architectural spaces and the many questions that come up during his process of translating a fully sensorial engagement into a physically static painting poses, such as how can painting evoke the physical sensations and conceptual associations one has while navigating dynamic spaces that can’t be reduced to purely visual elements?

The answer may be found in Temporal Tracings.

Performance Grantees - Annie-B Parson

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Winter Performance Grant to Annie-B Parson of Big Dance Theater for their performance of The Mood Room, working specifically from the text of Guy de Cointet’s (1982) text The Five Sisters and very lightly referencing Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

Annie-B Parson has been labeled as the choreographer who democratised dance and her staging of the The Mood Room will use dance and the abstraction of bodies in space. In Cointet’s text, the five sisters often exit to what is referred to as a “mood room”, and Annie-B’s intention is to create a pre-recorded film of the sisters who are not present in any given moment on stage. With 77 entrances and exits, this will create a layer of meaning, plus a complex formal problem to design and navigate.

The performance will be one single event, performed by five self-identified women, and run approximately one hour.

Performance Grantee - Sarah Cameron Sunde

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Winter Performance Grant to Sarah Cameron Sunde, an interdisciplinary artist and director working at the intersection of performance, video and public art for her upcoming project, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea. The ninth and final work in the series is scheduled to take place in September 2022 at the Cove at Socrates Sculpture Park.

The project began as a poetic gesture in response to Hurricane Sandy’s impact on New York City and has grown into a complex large-scale series of productions made in collaboration with communities around the world. It is a site-specific participatory performance and video artwork that invites New Yorkers into conversations around deep time, embodiment, and sea-level rise. Sarah will walk into the Cove at Socrates Sculpture Park, and stand in one spot for a full tidal cycle (12+ hours) as Water slowly engulfs her body up to her chin and then recedes back down to her feet. The public is invited to join Sunde standing in the water for however long they like. Collaborating artists and community members will mark the passing of each hour from the shore.

Sarah’s work investigates scale and duration in relationship to the human body, our environment, and deep time.

Performance Grantee - Ildiko Nemeth

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Winter Performance Grant to Ildiko Nemeth of the New Stage Theatre Company for their upcoming performance of Melody of Things (working title) created by Ildiko Nemeth and Marie Glancy O’Shea.

Melody of Things (working title), an original play is based on the stories and unfulfilled ideas of the inimitable Italo Calvino.  Calvino’s novella, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, centered on a group of travelers who lose their ability to speak after traversing a forest and use tarot cards to communicate.
This germ of an idea suggests fantastic theatrical possibilities.

Ildiko’s New Stage Theatre’s performance will feature a very different milieu: a Route 66-style motel, where characters present tales harrowing and humorous through a very different set of symbolic Americana images. Through these images, and narration/interpretation by the motel receptionist, the travelers’ stories are intertwined into a beautiful and haunting drama, as these characters move fluidly between their surroundings and the realms of memory and imagination. The result is a hauntingly evocative drama imbued with a sense of magical possibility.

Music Grantee - David Krakauer

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Winter Music Grant to David Krakauer to help complete Mazel Tov Cocktail Party, a "good vibes explosion" created in response to the current climate of incredible polarization and negativity that pervades our daily lives.

Spearheaded by David and producer Kathleen Tagg, Mazel Tov Cocktail Party showcases an international crew of high octane musicians. Together they bring their enormous musical and cultural diversity to the project creating powerful original material. Mazel Tov Cocktail Party’s influences are global, but the sound they create collectively has produced something uniquely their own. Familiar dance forms such as Polka or Square Dance never sounded this way before, with hand drumming, propulsive electronic beats, lyrics calling for catharsis and positivity, deep grooves and Krakauer’s wailing clarinet crying out for us to join together, celebrate and feel the power in our aliveness!

Music Grantee - Mark Stewart with Biodun Kuti

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Music Grant to Mark Stewart with Biodun Kuti to help continue their duo work on Heart of Worlds. Mark and Biodun have shared the stage as guitarists touring internationally in 2018 and 2019 with Paul Simon. But they had first met in 2013 when Biodun was a fellow at 1Beat, and Mark was a Visiting Artist at 1Beat. Immediately Mark recognized in Biodun, both a remarkable young artist and, (more to the point), a kindred spirit.

In Spring of 1999, Mark had to learn all the guitar and vocal parts necessary for the upcoming Paul Simon tour. Mark received his schooling in the deep lore, from the deep well, the contrapuntal genius of “Rhythm of the Saints”, Vincent Nguini. 18 years later Mark was charged with the same task: teach the “new guy” the guitar and vocal parts for the upcoming tour. The “new guy” happened to be the African master, Biodun Kuti.

Biodun showed Mark the glimmer and promise of what has become the touchstone of this project. Biodun was the student who took Vince’s spirit back to the village from whence it came and, in doing so, took Mark there as well, revealing this beautiful intersection between them, Heart of Worlds.

Music Grantee - Dan Pugach

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Winter Music Grant to Dan Pugach who will complete his second album, Dreams. The project will be completed with his 18-piece jazz orchestra and will include his BMI Jazz Award-winning piece, the premiere of a work made possible by the Manny Albam Commission, as well as arrangements and original pieces for large ensemble and voice written during the 2020 COVID19 pandemic quarantine.

The title, Dreams comes from a Van Halen tune that Pugach was commissioned to arrange for big band in honor of a pilot friend who became the U.S Navy’s newest F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot and got his Wings of gold during the pandemic.

Literature Grantee - Tyler Mills

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Winter Literature Grant to Tyler Mills for her new book, The Bomb Cloud. An essay collection The Bomb Cloud investigates Tyler’s grandfather’s possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission. What does it mean when your own link with a horrific event is, on the one hand, a family secret, and on the other hand an (as yet) unsolvable mystery? How does this personal connection to classified military information intertwine with stories half told to the public about bomb fallout, scale, and scope?

The Bomb Cloud is a memoir-in-essays that investigates Tyler’s grandfather's experiences as a pilot tied to the Nagasaki bombing in World War II in conversation with the legacy of nuclear history in New Mexico, where Tyler lived for four years in the shadow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory before moving to NYC.