2024 winter GRANTEES

Literature Grantee - zakia henderson-brown

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Winter Literature Grant to zakia henderson-brown for her upcoming collection of poems “Power Theory”.

zakia henderson-brown is a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Poetry Fellow and the author of What Kind of Omen Am I, winner of Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, selected by Cate Marvin. She was a Poets House Emerging Poets fellow.

Power Theory, focus on how different actors navigate,exercise, and grapple with power across different contexts. Overall, the project focuses on themundane, fraught, and necessary ways we connect with one another in the natural and sociallyconstructed worlds, across both time and circumstance.

Performance Grantee - Miguel Gutierrez

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Winter Performance Grant to Miguel Gutierrez for his upcoming dance performance, “Super Nothing”

Miguel Gutierrez is a choreographer, music artist, writer, visual artist, educator, podcaster, community advocate, and Feldenkrais Method practitioner living between Lenape/Canarsie land, colonially known as Brooklyn, NY, and Tongva and Gabrielino land, colonially known as Los Angeles, CA. His work centers attention as a material form and as a means to unravel normative belief systems.

The piece is danced by performers from New York and Los Angeles. How do the dynamics of an art-making process reflect or deny the dynamics of life outside the studio? How is choreography a reflection of the desires, insecurities, and personal investments of the people in the room? How can a dance speak to the overwhelming and constant grief that undergirds our lives?

Visual Grantee - Catalina Ouyang

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Winter Visual Grant to Catalina Ouyang for her upcoming solo exhibition “Trick”.

Catalina Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects. Their practice embraces an array of materials including hand-carved wood and stone, appropriated literature and film, family secrets, animal parts, antiques, a half-scale plywood replica of a historic building entrance, and a full-scale replica of a trench toilet, all presented with varying degrees of legibility. Against affirmational conventions of representation and repair, the works instigate relation through violation.

"Trick" is a solo exhibition of new sculpture, painting, and installation spanning the main gallery and outdoor courtyard of Lyles and King. “Trick” references both an act of deception and the act of selling sex, an ages-old yet maligned method of financing art-making and other acts of living. In the outdoor courtyard stands a 15-foot tall replica of a scold’s bridle, an instrument of punishment and public humiliation resembling a cage on a victim’s head.

Music Production Grantee - Brendon Randall-Myers

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Winter Music Grant to Brendon Randall-Myers for his upcoming Project, “Only in the Dark”

Brendon Randall-Myers is a composer, guitarist, and producer who creates intricate and visceral music at various intersections of rock, experimental, electronic, and classical. His work has been described as "an unflinching testimonial on grief and endurance" (Pitchfork), “emotive and gripping” (The Quietus), and "a yearning explosion” (The Wire).

‘Only in the Dark’ is a 50-minute musical work in eight movements for cello and electronics that will materialize as a recorded album and a live performance. Both album and live performance will be accompanied by a specially curated ‘sensory kit’ containing tactile and/or otherwise sensuous items that correspond to individual movements and sonic trajectories within the work and that can enhance, modulate, or de-escalate the listener’s experience according to their own particular preferences or neurological limitations.