Arts council grants 'expand the possibility' for Piedmont artists

The North Carolina Arts Council’s 2024 Artist Support Grant winners were announced this month. Grants totaling $62,000 were awarded by the Arts Councils of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County and Greater Greensboro. 

In all, 45 artists in a five-county Triad region — Davidson, Forsyth, Davie, Guilford and Randolph counties — will receive funding that supports their artistic development. The grant winners were selected by review panels made up of professionals from across the Piedmont. In addition to assessing the quality of work, judges considered what each artist is trying to achieve, their level of commitment, and whether the money awarded will make a real impact.

Arts Council of Greater Greensboro President Laura Way says since COVID, their focus has shifted towards sustainability.

“Really making sure that they can do what they need to do to develop a business model that makes sense, to have a marketing strategy that works, to think about where they’re investing their resources, and is it driving either their creative practice as an artist or their mission as an organization,” says Way.

Nearly 100 applications were received with awards up to nearly $1,700 for projects including visual arts, dance, music, performing arts, literature, film, and spoken word. In Forsyth County, among the grantees is self-publishing author E’laina Barron. And in Guilford, there's Korean dance choreographer Jiwon Ha, as well as artist Michael Clapp. 

Clapp is exploring how visual representations speak to today’s social dynamics, like technology’s influence on verbal discourse. His multi-media production — to be exhibited in the spring at GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art — has grown to include an inhabitable large-scale structure and smaller plaster casts, and shallow three-dimensional acrylic pieces. He says grants like this are critical for the development of robust creative productions.  

“Without these grants we can be limited to the types of pieces that we’re personally developing over time,” says Clapp. “But a grant like this expands the possibility and really provides space for producing additional and expanded work that can really create a more immersive experience in a show like the one coming up at GreenHill.”

In addition to assessing the quality of work, judges considered what each artist is trying to achieve, their level of commitment, and whether the money awarded will make a real impact on the project at hand.