SOUTHERN EXPOSURE AWARDS $65,000
TO BAY AREA VISUAL ARTS GROUPS
IN ROUND 6 OF ALTERNATIVE EXPOSURE GRANT PROGRAM

16 Alternative Exposure Grant Recipients Announced

San Francisco, CA, November 26, 2012 - Southern Exposure is proud to announce grants totaling $65,000 to 16 groups in Round 6 of its Alternative Exposure grant program. Alternative Exposure recognizes and supports the independent and self-organized work of artists and small groups that plays a critical and significant role in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community. Alternative Exposure is made possible with major leadership support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts with additional support by Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.

In Round 6 of the program, 146 groups applied and sixteen recipients were selected to receive grants of up to $5,000 each. This year's grant recipients are Art Poem Performance Discourse, Canyon Cinemazine, Colpa Press- Edicola, Et Al., Hacking for Artists, In the Make, The Lecturers, Mission Mini Comix, n/a, Oakland Nights...Live!, Other Cinema, Real Time and Space, San Quentin Prison Report, S.H.E.D. Projects, Sunday Soup, and Will Brown. Full descriptions of the funded projects are listed below.

Since launching the program in 2007, Southern Exposure has awarded $351,000 in direct funds to 104 Bay Area projects. Alternative Exposure was created to serve as a catalyst towards sustaining a vital artist community. This significant investment of support stimulates increased activity and growth, promotes the important and critical work of these ambitious projects, and publically recognizes the important role they play in the existence of a vibrant culture in the Bay Area.

Alternative Exposure awards funds to groups or individuals that create frameworks of support for Bay Area artists. Grants provide direct and accessible contributions to a range of locally grown artist-centered projects, extending SoEx's reach to as many new artists and audiences as possible. Alternative Exposure supports the work of unincorporated groups, burgeoning art and gathering spaces, publications, websites, collectives, events, and independent, artist-centered projects that fall outside the traditional frameworks of support.

Southern Exposure is committed to serving as a resource for the vibrant independent visual arts community through this and its other programs. The Alternative Exposure grant program, launched in 2007, was the first in a national network of regional re-granting programs supported by the Warhol Foundation. Modeled on Southern Exposure's initiative, additional re-granting programs are now facilitated by organizations in Houston, TX; Chicago, IL; and Kansas City, MO.

Full Descriptions of Round 6 2012 Alternative Exposure Grantees:

Art Poem Performance Discourse is an artist-run exhibition space and studio in Oakland. The space fosters a collaborative environment for artists working in poetry, installation, painting, and performance. Upcoming projects include bamboo mazes grown in the gallery, and a dance re-enactment of Occupy protests. http://zachhouston.com/

Canyon Cinemazine commemorates Canyon Cinema's 50th anniversary as the pinnacle of Bay Area experimental film distribution through the creation of a new newsletter. Harkening back to the typewritten correspondence among avant-garde artists of the 1960s, Canyon Cinemazine, distributed quarterly beginning January 2013, seeks to reignite the discussion of underground and independent film media practice and theory. http://canyoncinema.com/

Colpa Press's Edicola is a repurposed Market Street newsstand selling independently produced artists' books, prints, and albums. Colpa Press will continue to support independent publishing by creating a new residency in which commissioned artists will install work in Edicola and adjacent newspaper dispensers, design, print, and distribute publications, create limited edition prints, and continue production of their monthly newspaper Gazzetta. http://colpapress.com/

Et Al. Materials Library was founded in 2012 as a resource for artists in the Bay Area. The library functions as a support to artists' practices, from the research and conceptual stages through the exhibition. Starting with a collection of books, VHS, and vinyl, the library will expand with this grant to include tools to allow artists to produce risky, ambitious, and high quality works and exhibitions. http://et-al-projects.tumblr.com/

Hacking for Artists is a series of collaborative workshops designed to introduce artists to the basics of computer programming and electronics. The workshops will employ a hands-on approach as artists develop their own projects while learning about open source programming and electronics tools. The program will explore various hacking research methodologies that will allow participants to continue to develop their programming skills after the workshops. http://www.nicklally.com/

In the Make is a San Francisco-based online arts journal that offers an intimate look at current art practice by publishing weekly studio visits with Bay Area artists. A collaboration between photographer Klea McKenna and writer Nikki Grattan, the visits reveal the richness and challenges of creative work and provide exposure to emerging Bay Area artists. http://inthemake.com/

The Lecturers is a series of commissioned online seminars and presentations. Focusing on the visual arts as a platform, the seminars and presentations will foster the production and consumption of knowledge. Through a series of online videos, The Lecturers will address aesthetic, social-historical, and cultural issues. All content will be translated into Spanish. http://www.pabloguardiola.com/

Mission Mini Comix is a San Francisco-based cartoonist collective/organization that self-publishes mini comics, both for amusement and as a vehicle for social justice. MMC has been publishing and distributing its work for 15 years in the Bay Area and beyond, and this grant will be used to increase capacity. They will use their grant to increase distribution of hundreds of titles, add work to the website, and pay contributors. http://www.missionminicomix.com/

n/a is a new arts space in North Oakland/Temescal. Its goal is to bring together a community of culturally engaged queers through critical, creative, and casual conversations, and to encourage the queering of the art community at large. The programming will consist of a series of open conversations pairing visual and non-visual artists, and will culminate in new work, exhibitions, events, and catalogs. http://nicksung.com/

Oakland Nights...Live!, a free monthly late-night talk show, features performance, interviews, and spontaneous audience interaction. The project intends to create a community of engaged artists, performers, and audience members, and exposes Oakland-based artists to new audiences. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Oakland-Nights-Live/162889770462069

Other Cinema is a weekly microcinema exhibiting experimental and underground film, video, and performance. The all-volunteer run project has been showcasing contemporary fine-art films, essay, documentary, and other marginalized film genres for 27 years at Artists Television Access in San Francisco's Mission District. http://www.othercinema.com/

Real Time and Space is a residency whose mission is to support emerging artists by providing them with time and space. The RTS residency offers a free space for 1-2 months to artists, designers, and art thinkers of the Bay Area and beyond. Along with studio space, residents receive access to printmaking facilities, a woodshop, and an engaged group of artists. Each resident is commissioned to produce an original document or multiple, and is given the opportunity to present their work to the public during the monthly RTS Talks program.. http://www.realtimeandspace.org/

San Quentin Prison Report expands on two years of artist Nigel Poor working with incarcerated men at San Quentin Prison on photography and radio projects. Through access to an unexplored archive of historic negatives taken at and housed inside San Quentin, selected negatives will be printed and, through collaboration with the members of the San Quentin Prison Report photography group, used to create a new body of work. The work created will be exhibited both inside and outside the prison. http://www.nigelpoor.com/

S.H.E.D. Projects, located in West Oakland, is a temporary workspace for emerging artists and an exhibition/event space for installations, performances, and other visual arts projects headquartered in an outdoor storage bay. S.H.E.D. Projects aims to provide a non-traditional workspace that challenges artists to make work outside of their normal practices, as well as offering an alternative to more traditional gallery settings. Starting in December 2012, S.H.E.D. will begin to accept exhibition and event proposals. http://shedprojects.org/

Sunday Soup is a large micro granting organization that has 80 groups worldwide. This project will start a Sunday Soup chapter in Oakland called "Stock," serving soup and facilitating democratically selected grants to Oakland-based artists, while building community in the Oakland Art Scene. http://lexawalsh.tumblr.com/

Will Brown, a collaborative project that currently takes form as an experimental exhibition and program space in San Francisco's Mission District, will use the grant to produce a new exhibition inspired by the life and work of James Lee Byars, a related public program, and Henry Hopkins' Rolodex, a publication containing the contents of former SFMoMA Director Henry Hopkins' rolodex. http://www.wearewillbrown.com/


An outside panel selected the 2012 grantees. Panelists included Kristan Kennedy, Visual Arts Curator, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Joyce Grimm, curator, consultant and an educator teaching in the MFA program at California College of the Arts; and Eleanor Hanson Wise, the co-founder and director of The Present Group and Arts Micro-Patronage.

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.


ABOUT SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Southern Exposure (SoEx) is an artist-centered non-profit organization that is committed to supporting visual artists. Through our extensive and innovative programming, SoEx strives to experiment, collaborate and further educate while providing an extraordinary resource center and forum for Bay Area and national artists and youth in our Mission District space and off-site, in the public realm. Southern Exposure supports artists through three main program areas including the Exhibitions and Projects Program, Artists in Education Program and Alternative Exposure Grant Program.

Southern Exposure is located at 3030 20th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. Office Hours are Monday through Friday from 10 am to 6 pm and Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 6 pm. Admission is always free. Learn more at www.soex.org.