The Arts Garage has won two grants from the Knight Foundation of Miami totaling $50,000, including the foundation’s first-ever People’s Choice Award, which was won on the basis of texts.
In a ceremony last month at the New World Center in Miami Beach, the Delray Beach arts engine, which has become a notable South Florida venue for jazz concerts, received a Knight Arts Challenge matching grant for $30,000, and the $20,000 People’s Choice Award.
The Garage beat out four Miami-area arts organizations for the People’s Choice Award, for which only votes by text were accepted. Executive Director Alyona Ushe said her organization received about 790 texts.
“Winning the first anything is phenomenal, especially coming from the Knight Foundation,” Ushe said.
In a prepared statement, Dennis Scholl, vice president of arts at the Knight Foundation, praised the Arts Garage’s work.
“In the short amount of time since the Arts Garage opened, it has garnered a big local following. The strength of its programming was reflected by the fact that so many people supported it for the first ever People’s Choice Award for up-and-coming organizations,” Scholl said.
Ushe said she is hoping to raise enough money to receive the challenge grant over the next month.
“I implore our patrons to step up to the plate and to make as generous a gift as they can,” she said.
Those funds will be used to continue its current operations and expand others, including educational outreach, collaborations with regional arts groups, and producing new plays.
The Arts Garage is the home of Theatre at Arts Garage, which is steered by Lou Tyrrell, who championed new Florida plays for more than two decades at Florida Stage. Its first production. Lauren Gunderson’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear, runs through Dec. 30.
Ushe said she also wants to use the grant to place more emphasis on “regional artists, and what we do to actually retain our artists in South Florida,” she said.
“Ideally what I would love to do is partner with a number of either musical venues, cultural institutions that are not too big, and try to figure out a mini-regional tour for these artists,” Ushe said. Each artist on the tour would receive a DVD of their performance, or something similar that could be used for promotional purposes, she said.
Arts Garage, at 180 N.E. First St., was founded in 2011 as an initiative of the city of Delray Beach and the Delray Beach Community Redevelopment Agency. Its performance projects include Jazz Project, Garage Blues, Urban Underground, Global Invasion, Shades of Soul and Theatre at Arts Garage.
Photographer Saban wins first Rudin Prize
WEST PALM BEACH – Analia Saban, an Argentine-born artist based in Los Angeles, is the inaugural winner of the Rudin Prize, a $20,000 international award for emerging photographers given out by the Norton Museum of Art.
Saban, 32, was chosen for the award by the Norton’s photography committee, museum Director Hope Alswang, and photography curator Tim Wride.
“Analia Saban is leading the field in inventive, engaging new work,” Wride said in a prepared statement issued Dec. 4. “She provides visually elegant and philosophically potent answers to the issues of photography’s materiality and meaning that have dogged the medium since its beginnings.”
Saban’s work was part of an exhibit of five young photographers at the Norton that closed Dec. 11. The other artists were Mexico City-based Eunice Adorno; Mauro D’Agati, based in Palermo, Italy; Gabriela Nin Solis, also based in Mexico City; and London-based Bjorn Veno.
The museum said it plans to buy work by all the artists, including Saban’s Grid and Folded Horizon.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1980, Saban received a bachelor’s degree in visual arts at Loyola University in New Orleans, and completed graduate work at the University of California Los Angeles.
The Rudin Prize, named in honor of Lewis Rudin, a prominent New York City real estate developer, will be given out every two years to an emerging photographer who has not yet had a solo museum exhibition.