Creative Capital, the New York grant-making nonprofit, announced $100,000 awards for three Bay Area artists Wednesday as part of a $3.5 million funding round for projects nationwide.
Oakland filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes and Oakland dancer and social practice artist randy reyes (no relation) as well as San Francisco poet, essayist and editor Tonya Foster are among the 41 artists selected by a nine-member, multidisciplinary panel to receive $50,000 in career development services and $50,000 in project funding as 2020 Creative Capital Award winners.
Rodrigo Reyes, whose 2014 film Purgatorio portrays life and death along the U.S.-Mexico border, won the award for an as-yet-untitled documentary about two Mexican migrants in rural California “told within the frame of the dramatic clash between systemic forces and personal choices that envelop young, incarcerated men of color in America,” according to the press release.
randy reyes, who’s been a fellow and resident at CounterPulse and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is launching Encuentro 33: LINE/AGE | Queer Neuro-Cognitive Architectures Hidden in Plain Site(s), a collaboration with a diverse, national cast of artists to develop performances “centering ecology, lineage and ritual through a choreographic lens,” the announcement reads.
Tonya Foster, meanwhile, is combining poetry, nonfiction prose and what the announcement calls “fictive FBI records” in Monkey Talk, a multi-volume writing and multimedia project exploring surveillance and race. Foster, an assistant writing professor at California College of the Arts, is the author of two books and recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies.
