6,500 Cuyahoga County Residents Participated to Help Choose Winning Projects
CLEVELAND (February 25, 2013) – Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC) today announces that Dancing Wheels and LAND studio are the winners of its Creative Culture Grants competition. Dancing Wheels will receive $130,421 for its DARING TO BE “DUMBO” project, and LAND studio will receive $150,000 for AHA! FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS. 6,500 Cuyahoga County residents participated in the public voting process that was held February 1-20. More details about the winning projects follow this news release.
“We are pleased to see that so many residents of Cuyahoga County made their voice heard by voting for the projects that they wanted to see happen in our community,” said Karen Gahl-Mills, CAC’s executive director. “The winning projects will engage the community in creative ways, and we congratulate all of the organizations involved for designing exciting cultural encounters that will benefit all of us in Northeast Ohio.”
Arts and culture organizations based in Cuyahoga County proposed many creative and diverse projects that were narrowed down to the top six by an independent panel of arts and culture experts. Between February 1 and 20, residents of Cuyahoga County were invited to vote to help decide which two new creative projects would come to life in our community. Cuyahoga Arts & Culture’s Board of Trustees approved and announced the winning projects during its regular meeting on February 25. View more details about the Creative Culture Grants program.
Cuyahoga Arts & Culture’s mission is to inspire and strengthen the community by investing in arts and culture. CAC was approved by Cuyahoga County voters in 2006, and since 2007, CAC has invested more than $95 million dollars in more than 208 local arts and cultural organizations in Cuyahoga County. CAC’s vision for its first ten years of public funding for arts and culture is to help build stronger, more resilient arts and culture organizations, create vibrant and energetic neighborhoods infused with culture, and establish Cuyahoga County as a hub of creative activity and a destination for artists.
Cuyahoga Arts & Culture
Creative Culture Grants
Winning Projects
DARING TO BE “DUMBO”
Lead Organization: Dancing Wheels
Project Partners: WKYC-TV Ch. 3, The Diversity Center of Cleveland, Girl Scouts of America and others.
Grant Award Amount: $130,421
Led by Dancing Wheels, this project will expand on the dance company’s world premiere performances of the multi-media ballet “Dumbo” (May 6-11, 2013) to create an entertaining and educational TV documentary based on the issues of bullying and social injustice. Using the life stories of artists and community figures, the documentary will explain how they rose above the ridicule to become successful. The program will be made into a school assembly program that will be performed at schools and in the community throughout the county. The documentary will premiere in March 2014 and will air on WKYC-TV Ch. 3 in Northeast Ohio, and outreach programs will take place April – August 2014.
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AHA! FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS
Lead Organization: LAND studio
Project Partners: Cleveland Public Library, Positively Cleveland, Downtown Cleveland Alliance and others.
Grant Award Amount: $150,000
This project is a free, multi-day festival of lights in downtown Cleveland’s public spaces to celebrate the recent development boom and “illuminate” changes to our urban landscape. AHA will bring together people from across the region in the spring or summer of 2014 to highlight these beloved public spaces through art installations using light, video projections and live cultural performances by a combination of local, national and international artists.
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