The Kentucky Foundation for Women has awarded $100,000 in grants to Kentucky artists. The grants are awarded to feminist artists and organizations to develop their artistic skills, explore new techniques or create new works.
Small grants ranging from $1,000 to $7,500 will support projects ranging from a Lexington music series focused on African American female composers to a nonfiction book and website about life as an active-duty military wife. Of the 36 artist enrichment grants awarded this month, 12 totaling $34,000 will fund Louisville-based artists and their projects.
Louisville native Mitchell L.H. Douglas returns home tonight to read from his new collection of poems, “\blak\ \al-fə bet\,” which won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award from Persea Books. Douglas reads from his new work tonight at the InKY Reading Series, 7-9 p.m. at The Bard's Town on Bardtown Road.
Douglas' first collection, "Cooling Board: a Long-Playing Poem," a finalist for the 2010 NAACP Image Awards, explored the life and death of soul singer Donny Hathaway, but “\blak\ \al-fə bet\” is a more personal collection of poems about Douglas' Southern family after the death of its matriarch.
The strong geometric designs of Gibbs Rounsavall's paintings have made his work among the most recognizable of Louisville's younger guard of visual artists. His work has been widely shown locally, in Zephyr Gallery, Actors Theatre of Louisville and Swanson Reed Gallery, among others, as well as afar, in group shows at Morehead State University and Brooklyn's Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art.
