[game_edu] Creative Capital support for alternative gaming research

[Roberts, Scott]

As if in response to our current discussion, news of more funding for creative game research:


CREATIVE CAPITAL RECEIVES GRANT FROM THE TOBY FUND TO SUPPORT EMERGING FIELDS ARTISTS

$540,000 to benefit artists working in alternative gaming, internet-based activism, new media installations, robotics, and more
NEW YORK, NY (March 20, 2008)

Creative Capital, the premier national artist support organization, is the recipient of a major, three-year gift from The TOBY Fund, established by collector, philanthropist, and former curator Toby Devan Lewis. This $540,000 gift specifically supports the production costs of Creative Capital emerging fields artists, a category that encompasses artists whose work includes imaginative uses of new technologies, as well as genre-blurring applications of familiar creative practices.

"From our very first grant round in 1999, Creative Capital was committed to artists whose work doesn't neatly fit the usual discipline categories," said Creative Capital's president Ruby Lerner, "While the sometimes indefinable nature of these projects is tremendously exciting, it also creates a handicap, as this kind of work often lacks the support infrastructure of more traditionally defined disciplines. Ms. Lewis has always had a similar passion for artists who boldly cross all sorts of boundaries‹discipline, aesthetic, thematic‹and we're thrilled that The TOBY Fund for Emerging Fields at Creative Capital will draw more attention to how these artists challenge the very landscape of the contemporary arts."

The TOBY Fund grant will allow Creative Capital to support more of its emerging fields grantees at the $50,000 level, the organization's maximum award. These artists will also benefit from the organization's trademark program of artist services, which is valued at an additional $25,000 per artist. To date, Creative Capital has funded 48 emerging fields projects representing 65 artists, with $1.1 million in direct funding and more than $1 million in artist services. Artists previously supported through this category include Cory Arcangel, Luca Buvoli, Hasan Elahi, Marie Sester and art collectives such as The Yes Men and SubRosa. The organization is currently conducting a grant round that will result in another class of 15­18 emerging fields grantees being announced in early 2009.

For Creative Capital this gift marks a major step in its initiative to partner with donors who wish to support artists working in areas and with themes that are paramount to their personal philanthropic goals. Later this year, Creative Capital will be launching a set of funds to support artists whose creative practice addresses important public issues, including Science & Technology, Environmentalism, and Social Justice.

About Creative Capital
Nine years ago, Creative Capital embarked on a mission to reinvent the existing model of arts philanthropy, to construct a new paradigm, and to fulfill the specific needs of the country's most innovative artists. Today, it is committed to the principle that time and advisory services are as crucial to artistic success as funding. Over the lives of its funded projects, Creative Capital provides artists with a flexible program of multi-faceted, sequential support and partners with them to determine how those targeted funds and services can best work in concert to progress towards the grantees¹ own goals. Since its founding in 1999, the organization has committed more than $12 million in financial support and services to 283 projects representing 349 artists. A complete list of grantees, profiles of funded projects, and up-to-date grant cycle information can be found online at the foundation's website at www.creative-capital.org.

Sustaining support for Creative Capital is currently provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and more than 200 other foundations and individuals.




Scott Roberts
Associate Professor
DePaul University
sroberts at cti.depaul.edu