Winners of the James W. Ray Awards—the big $$$ awards given to Washington state artists—have been announced!
Choreographer Donald Byrd won the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award, which comes with a $50,000 purse and is given "to advance the creative work of an outstanding individual artist."
Byrd is a Tony-award nominated choreographer and the artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theatre. Last year, Spectrum's season was called #RACEish, and it focused on uncomfortable conversations/situations involving race. Ironically, his production of A Rap on Race ran at the Seattle Repertory Theatre just as that theater was having its own difficulties talking about race backstage. It was an incredible (and an incredibly timely) show.
The James W. Ray Venture Project Awards are each worth $15,000, and they're given to "support projects by artists in all disciplines whose work demonstrates exceptional originality."
First up: Juventino Aranda
The money will help Aranda create this:
...Five large-scale bronze castings of pictures wrapped in corrugated cardboard, renditions of the faux gold frames with mass-produced art that sat unhung in their original cardboard protectors in his childhood home. The inspiration for the project is those cheap old frames meant to be home décor. Through the replication of low-brow, Latino kitsch décor to a larger than life size and filling the frames with historically traditional crafts and decorative arts like black velvet paintings and embroidery from southern Mexico, Juventino intends to elevate the status of craft décor that is a familiar presence of beauty in the homes of many Latinos into high-art.
Other first up: Quenton Baker
And here's what Baker's planning to work on:
...A collection of poems tentatively titled Ballast that uses the slave revolt aboard the brig Creole, the only large-scale successful revolt involving US-born enslaved people in American history, as a lens to consider how blackness exists within the white imagination. The collection uses a combination of erasure poems of pages from the Senate document detailing the Creole case and poems in invented forms to look at what some black writers and thinkers call "the long memory" or the "long utterance" of blackness.
Congrats to all!
