2024 RUBYS GRANTEES
Photo credit: Aisha Butler Photography
ANNE CLARE ROGERS
To support Daisy Chain, a series of sculptures that explore the building potential of non-native invasive plants harvested from public land in Baltimore while also grappling with themes of love, care, and ecological grief.
ALEXANDRIA “BRINAE ALI” BRADLEY
To support The Baby Laurence Legacy Project, an archival/performative process to create an integrated work of jazz tap dance and jazz music that investigates and celebrates the artistic and social influences that “Baby Laurence” Donald Jackson had on the culture of tap dance and jazz music.
COREY HUGHES
To support Experiencing the Total Environment, a hybrid documentary short film based on an ecological encyclopedia created by the filmmaker’s late grandfather, exploring the intersections between the collapsing climate, spirituality, and emerging technologies.
photo credit: Rebecca Meek
CURRAN HATLEBERG
To support The Family Table, a new series of photographs focusing on a single family living in the American heartland. This latest project will unfold collaboratively, working together with the family in order to explore the meaning and significance of community in the United States today. Together, over the course of a year, we will uncover stories about the country we share.
EDGAR KUNZ
To support The Anachronists, a hybrid creative nonfiction project exploring escapism and class, whiteness, fringe culture, and self-myth through the author’s early life in a pre-17th century anachronistic society.
IAN MADRIGAL
To support A Man (Duh), a documentary feature that uses home videos to trace the artist from a precocious transgender boyhood through slow retreat into the closet as a teen, setting the stage for his present journey of reconnection through music, outrage, and the open road.
photo credit: David Andrews
JESS KEYES
To support Patien(t/ce), a performance composition that explores the experience of chronic illness and disability through music for voice, saxophone, and synthesizer with wearable handmade controllers.
JORDAN CARTER
To support Sermon for a Watermelon Seed, a film that contours the landscape of the black queer interior in an effort to reimagine the meaning of survival for the collective — a reference of living in the context of what we have overcome.
LILIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM
To support Home on the Range, a long-form personal essay that explores intersections of intimate personal relationships, mental health treatment, and firearm ownership.
photo credit: Tamika Galanis
MICHELLE MARIANO
To support The Negative Space, a novel of interlinked stories centering on the character Emelia Ramos, a first-generation Filipina American. The novel spans 40 years, from Emelia’s adolescence through middle age, presenting formative events and relationships in her life from a variety of perspectives.
MICK PRESCOTT
To support Horizons of the Already Not Yet, a compilation of four liturgies that honor trans lives. Written as poems and set to a custom soundtrack, these liturgies will explore the queering of sound and hymns in collaboration with other trans artists to celebrate the ways we hold each other.
RAE HAMPLE
To support Paradise Portals, a multimedia performance and installation that uses movement, livestream video, and green screen technology to create portals between performers bodies and environments that hold significance for them, exploring both the visibility and removal of people, history, and the body from the spaces we occupy.
RASHIDA BUMBRAY
To support How High the Moon, a film that reimagines her mother’s childhood visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the lens of magical realism, as the youngest child in a large Harlem family with a lineage of astral travel.
Photo Credit: Schaun Champion
SHAAWAN FRANCIS KEAHNA
To support No One Gets Out of Here Alive, a novel that follows the queer congregants of an underground Episcopal church, one century and an ocean apart, who reckon with variegated death in the respective sacrifice zones of Dublin during the famine and Baltimore in the midst of the AIDS crisis.
TARIQ RAVELOMANANA
To support Little Black Oxen, a new orchestra collaboration of elite, classically trained, Baltimore musicians, spearheaded by Infinity Knives. The project will culminate in the first full-length album of experimental music by Infinity Knives with Little Black Oxen.
THEA CANLAS
To support Value Studies, a series of sculptural objects, installations, and digital media that explores the entanglements of colonial-era economies, contemporary racial capitalism, postcolonial statecraft, and the curation of cultural value, through the lens of Filipino (trans)national history and identity.
2024 Micro Grantees
HASANI CLAXTON
To support The Chaotic Musings of a Caribbean Immigrant, an Afro-surrealist reimagining of precolonial West African sculpture.
SAMUEL GARRETT
To support God Rot, an experimental opera about an unnamed, unspecified entity of immense power in the twilight of its lifespan. Prone to confusion, irrationality, and great violence, it meanders throughout history and assumes several different archetypal, mythic identities — the avenging angel, the betrayed lover, and a god.
2024 Alumni Grantees
The 2024 Rubys cycle introduces the first award in a separate application process exclusively for Rubys alumni. The new, prestigious award engages with and offers an additional area of support to the over 155 Rubys alumni artists in an annual, single award of $25,000 to be used for the production of new work.
JACKIE MILAD
To support Shabti Gather, a bilingual art book project that intimately chronicles the artist’s visual research into the Egyptian burial dolls held in Western museum collections.