Southern Exposure is pleased to announce the recipients of grants in Round V of our Alternative Exposure Grant Program. In this round Southern Exposure awarded $66,000 to 19 projects. With major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Alternative Exposure offers direct support to Bay Area based unincorporated groups, burgeoning art and gathering spaces, publications, websites, collectives, events, and projects that fall outside the traditional frameworks of support. In the four years since launching Alternative Exposure, SoEx has awarded $286,000 in direct funds to 88 Bay Area projects.

The 2011 Alternative Exposure, Round V Grant Recipients are:

Art for a Democratic Society
Art for a Democratic Society is a democratic arts collaborative that bridges the gap between art and politics. Programs for the next year include collaborative creation of social practice and multimedia art, monthly participatory art projects at Oakland’s First Fridays Art Murmur, and the publication of zines.

Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions (BAASICS)
BAASICS is a series of San Francisco-based evening programs that brings together visual artists, choreographers, scientists, and interdisciplinary thinkers to present engaging multimedia lectures and performances exploring a given theme. BAASICS programs are free and open to the public. The next program will consider technology and notions of “the future.”

The Body is Missing
A queer process-based visual arts exhibition, The Body is Missing represents a community of largely Bay Area artists delving into process-based visual art and the progressive dialogue around “queer art” as it shifts from identity-based work to ideas around queer as a tool and a tactic for investigation and instigation.

Indigenous Arts Coalition
Four Bay Area Native American artists of the Indigenous Arts Coalition will create a multimedia installation, which will represent the reclamation of Bay Area Native American’s voices, concerns, beliefs, activism, and community. In conjunction with the opening of the installation, the IAC will launch a new comprehensive website, which will ultimately serve as a database that Native American artists can use to network and thrive.

Liminal Space
Liminal Space is an artist-run emerging art and technology studio based in Oakland, California. They provide a platform for experimentation and collaboration, and facilitate the production and dissemination of visionary works and practices. The grant will support Feedforward, Liminal Space’s iterative project creation and public events program.

LOOP
LOOP will use this grant to acquire a large format printer in order to provide artists with the equipment necessary to make work for a scheduled exhibition at no cost. Through this printing program, LOOP will also create a collection of Bay Area art by retaining two prints from each artist– one for fundraising purposes, the second for the LOOP Permanent Collection. Access to the printer will be open to Bay Area artists on a rolling deadline, and artists will be selected by outside jurors.

MacArthur B Arthur
MacArthur B Arthur is a project-based art space located in the Temescal District in Oakland. Their mission is to provide North Oakland with a venue to host innovative and inspiring performances, shows, readings, and art-based exhibitions. They support emerging and established artists in the Bay Area and have a history of collaborating with other artist-run spaces through joint curatorial ventures. MacArthur B Arthur is non-commercial so as to enable room for the broadest spectrum of curatorial experimentation.

Martina }{ Johnston Gallery
Martina }{ Johnston, an artist-run house gallery in northwest Berkeley, will continue its ongoing program of presenting work by emerging and mid-career Bay Area artists to the public and supporting the local arts scene through solo and group exhibitions, artist talks, screenings, readings, and class visits. Artists are given the freedom to install recent work in a non-commercial setting where they can experiment with modes of presentation, interaction, and exchange. With this grant, the gallery will also make improvements to their facilities and focus on publications and events that will further encourage public dialogue.

Mattress Talks
Mattress Talks is a series of six interviews with Bay Area artists on the subject of discomfort. The talks will take place at the McRoskey Mattress Company on San Francisco’s Market Street. The project will include: interviews, a website/audio archive, a booklet, guest tweets on Twitter by the artists, a culminating evening with talks, an exhibit and participatory projects.

MicroClimate Collective
MicroClimate Collective is an artist-created curatorial project. Their mission is to provide context for cross-pollination between diverse circles of Bay Area artists, and to foster experimentation, collaboration, and risk-taking in an atmosphere free of commercial pressures. For 2012, they are planning two larger-scale exhibitions addressing attention, communication, and temporality in the digital age.

Owl & Tiger Books
Founded in March 2011, Owl & Tiger Books is a small publishing company, producing thoughtfully handmade art books from today’s young artists. The intended outcome of their book projects and release events is to start a conversation among the local community and fine art photography community at large about the work coming out of Northern California and specifically San Francisco. They are currently working on the book Summer Weather with local photographer Michael Jang.

Parse Gallery
Parse is a new artist-founded and run exhibition and facility space located in the Mission District opening in 2012. Parse will include eight artist studios, a storefront exhibition space, and Parse Press. Programming will focus on media-based experimental installations including sound, light and performance. Parse will serve as a platform for emerging artists in the community to work collectively, and participate in lectures, screenings, and peer learning.

Pied-à-terre
Pied-à-terre is an alternative space in a San Francisco apartment building located in the Inner Richmond District. It presents single works of art as exhibitions and books. The spare display creates the opportunity for a different kind of art-viewing experience and affords the possibility of exhibiting artists whose work otherwise could not be seen in the Bay Area. Pied-à-terre believes internationally relevant work should be seen locally.

Prelinger Library
The Prelinger Library is a library of visually rich materials and unusual research resources, offered to artists, makers, and the general public for appropriative use and research. It offers a desktop scanner for image capture and encourages photography and copying, as well as downloading of digitized materials. The library’s holdings focus on 19th and 20th century American histories of the land, places and regions, as well as society, nature, culture and technology. The holdings are in the form of over 50,000 items: half books and magazine volumes; half printed ephemera, including maps, pamphlets, zines, flyers, and government documents.

Private Eye: Investigating Disability in Contemporary Art
Private Eye is a one-day symposium focusing on disability art that will take place on Saturday, February 18, 2012. The objective of the symposium is to explore work by curators, artists, and art centers in placing disability art on the map, drawing our attention to the experience of the body from a disabled perspective through the art forms of visual art, theater, and dance. The event will be free and open to the public, and will include an opening reception, keynote lecture, three panels, and a performance.

The Roving Archives
The Roving Archives project is a meandering museum that brings creative visibility to artists and to archives through connection to a neighborhood. Artists will create visual interpretations of archives from the GLBT Historical Society in store windows in the Castro. Graduate design majors from CCA will also work with each artist to create a poster for each site.

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival
The 13th annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival will take place in September 2012 with an opening night of tape and fixed media work at SFMOMA, followed by three nights of concerts at Brava Theater. This grant will support the exhibition of sound and media installations at the community arts organization Million Fishes Collective.

Stairwell’s
Stairwell’s is a series of temporary exhibitions accompanied by short publications and off-site group excursions in the Bay Area. The programming aims to create a new model for local audiences to engage with art by shifting exhibitions out of traditional gallery settings and into transitional spaces like stairwells. The project will provide Bay Area artists with opportunities to create new site-specific work and will recognize their participation in this exchange with funding and exposure.

Upgrade! San Francisco
Upgrade! San Francisco is a monthly programming series with speakers and socializing designed to foster community around new media arts in San Francisco. They will present two public workshops with well-respected international artists who operate within social and political spaces of new media in 2012. The artists will focus on imparting both technical skills and conceptual strategies for augmenting and ‘hacking reality’ in public media spaces.

An outside panel selected the 2011 grantees. Panelists included Julie Lazar, independent curator and Director, International Contemporary Arts Network; Jasmine Moorhead, Owner and Director, Krowswork; and Rosten Woo, designer, writer, educator, and co-founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Generous lead support for Alternative Exposure is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.