With A Focus On New Work And Underrepresented Artists, Here Are This Year's Live Arts Boston Grant Recipients

The 2019 Live Arts Boston (LAB) grantees include a queer rapper living in Jamaica Plain, a Brighton-based violinist from Turkey and a Roxbury jazz festival — to name but a few.

Sixy-one recipients were awarded a total of $796,293 in grants of up to $15,000 each to create or produce music, theater, opera, dance, spoken word and multidisciplinary work.

Funded by the Boston Foundation in partnership with the Barr Foundation, the LAB program is now in the final year of a three-year pilot. The program was designed to fill a void in grant funding available to Boston-area artists, with a focus on individual artists and small nonprofits working in the performing arts. (Full disclosure: The ARTery is supported by a grant from the Barr Foundation. Also, I sat on the panel to select the second round of LAB grantees.)

“I’m really excited about this group,” said Allyson Esposito, the senior director for arts and culture at the Boston Foundation. “Fifty-one percent of this year’s grantees have never received this grant before, and a similar number have never been grant funded at all. That’s notable to me, in that we’re continuing to reach new folks every single year.”

The Boston Foundation received a total of 268 applications for the 2019 LAB grant program, a slightly smaller applicant pool than last year’s, which topped 350. Esposito said the drop was probably related to a change in eligibility rules requiring applicants to present new work. The aim was to unburden artists of the financial risk involved in creating new projects — risk smaller organizations and individuals are generally less equipped to take on.

As in past years, the program prioritized marginalized artists, with 71 percent of funded projects headed by people of color and almost half involving immigrants and new Americans.

The 2019 cohort was selected through a new, two-step application process. “Most of the applications in Year 1 and 2 fell apart a little bit when looking at the budget,” Esposito said, probably because many applicants lacked experience applying for grants. This year, the first round of applications were evaluated solely on their conceptual strength. The Boston Foundation assisted a group of finalists with budget creation before advancing their applications to the final round.

The revamped application process “helped us to become more clear about our projects in our mind,” said the Boston-based violinist Ceren Turkmenoglu, who received $10,000 to fund a performance exploring the connections between Turkish traditional and Western classical music. “[The budget] was kind of a map for me.”

This is Turkmenoglu’s second LAB grant. She plans to put the money toward promotion, venue rental, rehearsal space, transportation of instruments and most importantly, paying performers. “Sometimes when somebody has an idea, somebody has a dream, it's a lot of expenses to cover to put it together,” Turkmenoglu said. “And without such support, it is sometimes not possible to make it happen.”

Now that the LAB pilot has entered its final year, the Boston Foundation plans to undergo an internal study to determine what shape the program will take in 2020. It could be split into separate programs that target specific groups. “It's been hard to have a one-size-fits-all approach to the program,” Esposito said, because nonprofits, individual artists and independent producers all have slightly different needs. Whatever the case, “the program will absolutely continue.”

Here are the 2019 Live Arts Boston grantees: