In its first grant year, The Velocity Fund awarded 14 grants to independent Philadelphia artists and artist groups to create projects that ranged from performance to an online blog run by an alternative gallery. More about the fourteen 2018 awardees here. On the 2018 jury panel were Courtney Fink, co-founder and executive director of Common Field; Margot Norton, curator at the New Museum in New York City; and Philadelphia-based independent curator Blake Bradford. Below, you will find information about three of the 2018 projects that are currently underway.
And if you have questions! Artblog did a Q&A last Spring with Rob Blackson, Director of Temple Contemporary and head of the Velocity Fund team. Read what Rob has to say about the application details. Some of what he says may answer your burning questions!
More from the Velocity Fund about their program
Applications for 2019 open on Monday, March 11th. The deadline to complete an online application through Slideroom is Friday, June 7th.Apply for a 2019 award online at the Velocity Fund website.
Attend an information session
There will be a series of informational sessions at different locations in the Philadelphia area to assist with general inquiries and online application troubleshooting. Register for free on Eventbrite.
Thursday, March 21st at Vox Populi at 6pm RSVP
Monday, March 25th at Taller Puertorriqueno at 6:30pm RSVP
Wednesday, April 17th at Fleisher Art Memorial at 3pm RSVP
Monday, April 29th at The Print Center at 3pm RSVP
Tuesday, May 7th at The Art Dept at 6:30pm RSVP
Wednesday, May 15th at Philadelphia Folklore Project at 3pm RSVP
If you love internet chats, ask your questions of The Velocity Fund team via G-chat sessions they’ve set up:
Friday, May 24 1-3pm
Saturday, June 1 from 10am-12pm
Thursday, June 6 from 9-11am
How to do that? Join Gmail hangouts here and add velocity@temple.edu to your gmail hangouts to chat. Only those that have gmail will be able to chat.
A Few 2018 Grantee Project Updates
Aislinn Pentecost-Farren & Corey Chao: Quarantine Play
Quarantine Play is a 2-person interactive audio tour of the Lazaretto, offering visitors a visceral, intimate experience of the site and its past. For 100 years the Lazaretto Quarantine Station was the first stop for many immigrants to the Philadelphia region, yet there is minimal public information about the place. Participants will be able to listen to different but compatible audio tracks of narration, music and instructions to create a performance, staged for one another. In the summer of 2019, the audio tour will be premiered at a public reception and will be made available for free online.
Brooke O’Harra & Sharon Hayes: Time Passes
On Saturday, February 2, 2019 from 12 to 8pm Time Passes was performed at the Christ Church Neighborhood House Theater in Old City, Philadelphia. Time Passes is an ongoing collaboration that takes the audiobook of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine. The performance was an 8-hour continuous event with Brooke, Sharon, their kid Alice, and their dog, Cosmos. We are performing with and through the book in its entirety as a proposal-in-performance to occupy Woolf’s deeply gendered containers of time and thought.
The first iteration of the work was performed May 8, 2011 at the Performing Garage in New York City. This iteration of Time Passes will be followed by others to be performed over the next two and a half years.
Sarah Mueller & cinéSPEAK: The cinéSPEAK Youth Crew
The cinéSPEAK Youth Crew will be beginning their work at The Calvary Center for Community and Culture (48th and Baltimore Ave) in May 2019. The project features digital storytelling, media literacy + event production workshops for West Philly teens. Youth trained in these workshops are employed as cinéSPEAK Production Crew for community events in the future. Topics Include: Unpacking Media Messaging; Cultural Preservation + Media Representation as Human Rights; Intro Design; Visual Storytelling; How to Produce an Event. Each month has 3 workshops + a culminating film screening, so look out for upcoming announcements on screenings!
About the Velocity Fund
The Velocity Fund directly supports artists to organize new collaborative projects throughout the city of Philadelphia by awarding grants up to $5000. Philadelphia’s visual artists are a diverse community of makers and thinkers from multiple social, economic and cultural backgrounds; The Velocity Fund is open to a wide range of experimental practices, particularly those that emphasize collaboration between artistic genres leading to expanded audiences, fresh outcomes and an enriched multi-disciplinary discourse.
In 2017, The Velocity Fund was established by Temple Contemporary at the Tyler School of Art with the support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts becoming the 12th Regional Regranting Program nationwide.
Please visit velocityfund.org for more information, or email velocity@temple.edu with any questions or concerns.
