Kleinman

Owens

The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) is looking for potential arts projects that will expand the boundaries of a discipline, foster inter- and multidisciplinary collaborations or cultivate new forms of artistic production.

Artists on campus are encouraged to submit project proposals for 2011-12 CCA grants by Oct. 21. The merit-based grants are available for students, staff and registered student organizations; and for faculty, departments and programs from all disciplines.

Awards for up to 25 student and 15 faculty projects will be announced in November. Awardees will have 12 months to complete and present their work.

"It's my hope to get wider participation from across the university," said CCA Director Stephanie Owens, who stressed CCA's mission "to encourage interdisciplinary projects."

This year's maximum for CCA grants for students, staff members and student organizations is $1,000; faculty and academic units can receive up to $2,500.

The CCA's call for proposals encourages applicants "to use the grant as an opportunity to experiment and to cultivate new forms of artistic production that may be difficult to engage within the traditional classroom setting."

High priority will be given to work that encourages student-faculty and cross-campus collaboration. The grants also will allow faculty "to reach out to creative peers in other disciplines and departments to explore new forms of art, media, design and performance that will have broad effect on the arts community at Cornell," Owens said.

The CCA and the grants program are in a transitional phase for the next two years while the organization implements a new structure, which will focus on organizing and presenting a single collaborative, thematically unified creative project each year that highlights Cornell's interdisciplinary strengths and engages broad participation. The grants program, which previously distributed funding to artists twice a year, is on a streamlined annual cycle for 2011-12 and 2012-13, and also will provide Cornell Cinema and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art with block grants for programming during those two years.

Last October, acting on recommendations from a task force review of the CCA and from conversations with stakeholders, Provost Kent Fuchs committed additional resources from his office to assist CCA with the transition, including continuing the grants program for two more years.Fuchs increased the CCA's annual budget to $225,000 from $175,000, and committed an additional $68,000 a year for two years to support the grant program. After 2014, the CCA is charged with recruiting participation by the academic units to help fund the grants.

The provost also named Kent Kleinman, dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, as lead dean tasked with steering the transition to a new CCA model.

He and Owens -- a visiting assistant professor of art who was recently appointed to a three-year term as CCA director -- will work with college and department leaders to find a durable model for continued support to individual artists and projects, Kleinman said.

The current streamlined grants program "is an efficient and effective way of distributing precious support in lean times to a broad population of artists," Kleinman said.

"I believe a more distributed model of support will ultimately be the best means of expressing the diversity of artistic approaches and attitudes that already thrive in various departments," Owens said. "Success for the CCA would be its ability to act as the catalyst for bringing these endeavors out of home departments so that a critical dialogue about contemporary art and culture can be part of our shared experience."