The Council is pleased to start the new year with the announcement of our recent mini grant awardees. Congratulations to our grantees! Over $12,000 was awarded to the following 7 humanities projects:
Davisville Middle School, $1,000 to Smokeless Tobacco: Past, Present, and Me. Funds support a field trip for Davisville Middle School students at the Gilbert Stuart Museum to learn about the colonial slave trade, snuff production, and historical and contemporary health concerns associated with tobacco use through interdisciplinary workshops.
Direct Action for Rights and Equality, $2,000 to Providence: The Backstreets. Funds support the final cut of a documentary web series examining the inter-connectedness of education, poverty, art, culture, and demonstrations related to the local and national #blacklivesmatter movement and challenging the identity of Providence as a “renaissance” city.
Paul Daglieri, $2,000 to Walking in Light – African American Gospel Churches in Providence. Funds support phase two of a project focused on the social significance of African-American gospel churches in Providence, Rhode Island through photographic documentation, oral history collection, and an online exhibition.
Providence Public Library, $2,000 to Portals: A History of the Future. Funds support an exhibition and programming series that uses archived technologies, artifacts, and publications to create a time travel exhibit examining how people of the past looked into the future and inviting today’s visionaries to speculate on the future through creative innovation and experimentation.
Rachael Rosner, $1,500 to Illuminating the Golden Ghetto of Providence: Aaron Temkin Beck and the Origins of Cognitive Therapy. Funds support archival research on the early years of Aaron Temkin Beck, a son of Providence’s early 20th-Century Jewish community who is regarded as the father of Cognitive Therapy. Research cumulates into public presentations and the first chapters of an authorized biography.
Vartan Gregorian Elementary School PTO, $2,000 to Vartan Gregorian CityArts STEAM Friday Residency. Funds support the activation of a STEAM curriculum (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) examining community, urban planning, history, and culture through hands-on interactive projects in a school-wide partnership with youth arts organization CityArts.
Wilbury Theatre Group, $2,000 to Invisible UpSouth. Funds support a project examining race relations in a “post-racial society,” drawing inspiration from Providence communities and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” to develop and workshop an original work that uses storytelling, poetry slams, rap battles, and hip hop to connect the past to the present.
