Download the article here: Joyce Foundation awards grant for Clark-Fulton installation Crain’s Cleveland Business
A sculptural installation and gallery exhibition exploring themes of displacement, diasporic identity and cultural memory is coming to Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood, thanks to a grant from Chicago’s Joyce Foundation.
Cleveland’s The Sculpture Center and Puerto Rican-born artist Edra Soto are one of five winners of the 2024 Joyce Awards, an artist grant program designed to support artists of color and arts and community organizations throughout the Great Lakes Region. This year marked the program’s 20th anniversary.
Soto will collaborate with Latinx artists in Cleveland to create La Distancia, a sculptural outdoor bus shelter housing art and mementos from the surrounding community and a stage for performance and dialogue, at The Sculpture Center.
The work will take place over an eight-month residency, featuring workshops, interviews, community meals and gatherings. Contributions from local artists and community members will be displayed in the installation and The Sculpture Center’s indoor gallery space as well.
It will be Soto’s first major project outside of Chicago, where she lives.
“Along with so many others, mine is a story of moving between various liminal spaces in search of home,” Soto said in a statement. “Through this project, I want to enshrine those moments of waiting, of existing in the in-between, both through the collection of stories and mementos and the performance and celebration of community art, but also in a literal sense — by changing the physical architecture of the landscape and unapologetically taking up space.”
The other winners of this year’s awards include Andrea Assaf with the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; Marcus Elliot with the Detroit Parks Coalition in Detroit; Terry Guest with Chicago Children’s Theatre in Chicago and Katie Ka Vang with Theater Mu in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Each pair will receive a $100,000 grant to support a new commission, which includes $30,000 allocated for an artist stipend.
The Joyce Foundation, established in 1948, is a private nonpartisan foundation that “invests in public policies and strategies to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the next generation in the Great Lakes region,” focusing on culture, democracy, education and economic mobility, environment, gun violence prevention and justice reform and journalism.
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examines the intersection of business and public policy.)
examines the intersection of business and public policy.)
