BY: Elizabeth Harrington,
Billboards about “gender-stereotyping,” LGBT book clubs for kids, an opera about child bullying, and poetry about climate change are all being billed to the taxpayers as new projects from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Issues of immigration, green energy, and gun control are each featured in art projects announced by the agency last month. The latest list of grants is consistent with the first round of projects for 2016, which included plays about food stamps and lesbian gun control activist.
The grant list includes $15,000 for public bus stop ads, posters, and a billboard in Los Angeles “addressing the issue of gender-stereotyping.” L.A. Freewaves, which has been heavily subsidized by the taxpayers in the past, received the funding. NEA-funded work by the group includes advertisements to encourage Californians to give up their cars in favor of bikes.
The new “Dis…Miss” campaign will address “fantasies and realities of gender polarization in local and mass media” and hopes to “open new avenues of thought and stimulate dialogue on new gendered relationships.”
The group previously featured vagina videos on the homepage of its website.
Other projects center around immigration, including funding to an immigration community organizing group in Maryland.
A theater company in Los Angeles received $20,000 for a play about immigration, which will present a “contemporized (sic) look at borders.”
“The musical is a cross-cultural and contemporary adaptation of French composer Bizet’s opera ‘Carmen,’” according to the grant. “Created as a response to the current immigration challenges in the United States, it will incorporate the themes of immigrants’ rights and class struggle.”
CASA de Maryland, an immigration community organizing group that supports amnesty for illegal immigrants and protests “unjust immigration enforcement policies,” received $15,000. The funding will create an art program for kids in Maryland called “Borderless.”
A theater company in St. Paul, Minnesota received $15,000 for the series “Speaking Out: Our Immigration Journey Through Puppetry.”
The San Francisco Mime Troupe received $20,000 for their musical “Freedomland,” a story about the grandson of an ex-Black Panther who returns from fighting in Afghanistan to find “another war zone at home” where young Black men “are in the crosshairs!”
“Unarmed black men being killed by the cops and they can just get away with it,” said one actor describing the play.
The San Fransisco Mime Troupe put on Black Panther puppet shows in the 1960s, and performed the musical 1600 Transylvania Avenue, which decries “corporate bloodsuckers” and capitalism as the “personification of greed.”
Another $40,000 project in Seattle will team up artists with a “multicultural team of professional teaching artists with social justice backgrounds” for a residency program on racial equity.
The NEA is also funding projects focusing on gender and LGBT initiatives, including $10,000 for the National Queer Arts Festival featuring LGBT artists of color in San Francisco.
