DC Nonprofits, ARCH Development, and Honfleur Gallery Award Over $315,000 in Artistic Grant and Program Funds for FY 2023

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Press Contact: info@archdevelopmentdc.org

ARCH Development and Honfleur Gallery, DC nonprofits based in Ward 8's Historic Anacostia neighborhood, are excited to announce a series of artistic awards and grants for FY 2023. These awards will provide much-needed funding, resources, and technical support to continue both nonprofits' mission of supporting both east of the river creatives while contributing to DC's artistic community. Details of the FY 2023 awards are outlined below. 

HONFLEUR ARTIST IN RESIDENCY
In a non-conventional residency, the artists can work for over a year in their own space. This annual program is a realization of the vision of the late Sharon Hughes Gautier to provide artists with the necessary time and funding to create their work.

This program is a melding of ARCH's ongoing commitment to artists that live and work east of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, and Sharon's passion for art and her appreciation of a community that is so incredibly rich with history and creative talent. This residency comes with both specific project funding and a monthly stipend. Two grants for FY23 were awarded. 

Mēlani N. Douglass
During her tenure, Mēlani will collaborate with community organizations and partners to use art to activate communities east of the river, focusing on Anacostia. She will work to establish the Family Arts Museum [FAM] as an intergenerational center of creativity and connection here in Washington, DC. Through her socially engaged art practice, Mēlani seeks to provide programming and art experiences that foster relationships in the community. FAM will be a vehicle for artists to engage communities with which they are connected. A diverse group of creators, historians, and cultural architects will be invited to collaborate with her through FAM.

FAM projects are designed to bolster accessibility and inclusion in the arts while expanding notions of who is an artist and what is a museum.

Rik Freeman
Mr. Freeman will execute a series of paintings based on the subject matter of African American beaches during segregation and Jim Crow. The series will focus on the Eastern seaboard, featuring the communities of Chicken Bone Beach, Atlantic City, NJ; Highland Beach, MD (founded by Charles Douglass, son of Fredrick Douglass); Ocean Beach, and Wrightsville Beach, NC. The paintings will be from the late 19th century through the mid-1960s.

The subject will contain beach life, founders, families and get-togethers, and entertainment. Many locals had venues for dancing, dinners, celebrations, and concerts. They were on the "Chitlin Circuit," and many black performers stayed there as Jim Crow laws prohibited them from accommodations in all White areas. The racial strife and inequities that caused the formation of the beaches will be included. Each canvas will focus separately on each community.

HONFLEUR WOMEN IN ARTS PROGRAM
Grants are given to individuals or collaboratives who propose a project that focuses on the impact that being a woman [or identifying as a woman] has had in pursuing creative endeavors. For 2023, the following artists were granted awards:

Awungjia (Gia) Foretia
To produce a film, BLIND JUSTICE, a narrative drama that centers around a teenage girl afflicted with glaucoma who must work out of the crime-infested neighborhoods of Washington, DC, to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Blind Justice is the first short film for this writer, producer, executive producer, and actor. Foretia was inspired to write this short film to highlight the struggles that female minority children face as they strive to achieve success outside their parents' traditional career path expectations.

Marta Staudinger
The project will include a research component and an exhibition. First, the project will select five local women-identifying artists/arts workers to participate who come from different socio-economic backgrounds and who work in various media. Staudinger will interview them and collect data as a field study focusing on how they have felt discriminated against by artworld systems in the past, their current needs, and how they imagine art spaces and art publics can hold in the future. The selected women would then create a response to the interview, which could be in the form of audio, video, visual art, poetry, or other forms of expression. Staudinger will then curate an exhibition at Honfleur Gallery with audio excerpts from the interviews, their call and response work, and/or visuals of data tracking.

Zsudayka Nzinga
The project, "Infinity Program," will target eight underrepresented African American women artists, ages 18 to 30, interested in progressing their artistic careers. With an emphasis on artwork that tells Black stories, the program empowers artists by providing creative support, business support, and an opportunity to highlight their work and create future opportunities and relationships. Artists will gain essential tools to navigate the visual art scene. They will get direct opportunities to establish a business practice around their art and be encouraged to explore their creative process and form kinship amongst upcoming industry peers. Nzinga's project will result in an exhibition at Honfleur Gallery in FY 2024.

Amelie Haden
The project will focus on the stereotypes and expectations that are put on all genders. The concept for Haden's project formed after seeing Salvador Dali's 1936 The Anthropomorphic Cabinet (1936, 1979) and his Venus de Milo with Drawer (1939) sculpture. While at the Corcoran College of Art & Design, Haden took a wood sculpture class where she was the only woman, and students questioned her being there. For her final project, she came to the professor with a design that focused on the female anatomy and would force the viewer to confront it. The professor told her it would take too long to execute her plan, and Haden produced the male version, which was half as much work. She created her piece lovingly called Family Jewels. Over time, she realized she needed to make the companion piece for Family Jewels. There was a need to discuss gender stereotypes and how they shape relationships with our bodies and those of the other sex. The creation of the female version of this piece would play on stereotypes of the female body and would be a compelling juxtaposition between how male and female bodies are viewed. Viewers engaging with the two pieces would be forced to face their biases about human anatomy and how it should be displayed and interacted with. She will also create three to four other works, resulting in an exhibition at Honfleur in FY2024.

The Other You
An independent feature film written by Julie Gold, directed by Shoshana Rosenbaum, and produced by Robin Noonan-Price, a District of Columbia-based women's collective whose goal is to build their careers and increase the visibility of the nascent D.C.-area fiction film industry.

Phyllicia Hatton
Will publish a book, "Captivated: Fearfully, Wonderfully Made!” which will be a Compilation of Women Visual Artists. Hatton's work will highlight and "educate the public about women who have long been underrepresented in the national narrative'."

BREathe Dance Project
"Origin" is a choreographic installment that explores the interlacing patterns between trauma and kinesthetic response. What does the body look like, internally and externally, when trauma begins? Research has proven that trauma can be an acute incident of extreme suffering or a prolonged culmination of cyclical moments of pain and stress. And while the human body has unfortunately become accustomed to existing within and healing from the matrix of traumatic

experiences, the existential question remains "Can we really ever experience joy in its purest form?" Through this work, the dance company hopes to highlight how the psyche and body respond throughout the cycle of trauma- exploring themes such as anxiety, suffocation, coping mechanisms, and healing. In some ways, this work will dive deeply into the five cycles of grief from an internal perspective rather than through an external experience.

ABOUT ARCH DEVELOPMENT
A small neighborhood-based nonprofit with its entire focus on the economic regeneration of DC's Historic Anacostia community, using arts, culture, and the creative economy. ARCH's mission is "To create, in partnership with artists and arts organizations, small businesses and stakeholders of the neighborhood, a home for small businesses, arts and culture in Historic Anacostia and promote the wealth and diversity of artistic talent that resides east of the Anacostia River."

ABOUT HONFLEUR GALLERY
Honfleur Gallery is a contemporary art space in the Historic Anacostia neighborhood of Washington DC, between Martin Luther King Jr. Ave., SE (11th Street Bridge) and 13th Street SE. Honfleur maintains a rigorous schedule of exhibitions and programming focusing on cutting-edge contemporary exhibitions by artists from the USA and abroad.