The tinygrants catalogue is here! If you donated $100 or more, your complementary copy is in the mail. The remaining copies of this very limited edition will be sold for $25. You can buy a copy by donating $25 via PayPal (scroll to the “Online” section). You will be contacted to confirm your mailing address and a copy will be shipped to you!

The catalogue is a 52-page, full colour foray into the tinygrants experiment. It details the process of the project, discusses the larger implications with regard to cultural policy and arts funding, and highlights the artists’ projects with interviews and lots of photos.

Digital copies of the catalogue (PDF) can be purchased for $5 using the PayPal donation button as well. Please include a current email address in the comments section.

It is very exciting to finally have the catalogue in my hands–I look forward to sharing it with you!

Saturday, February 27, 2010
Trinity Bellwoods Park, Toronto
12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Cider will be served!
Please check the temperature before you come, and dress appropriately!

Saturday, February 27, 2010
Trinity Bellwoods Park, Toronto
11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Cider will be served!
Please check the temperature before you come, and dress appropriately!

I am SO glad we got some good snow! See you there.

Production of the tinygrants catalogue is underway! The above image is a detail from the cover (for now, anyway). The book will be 7″ x 7″, 64-pages, and mostly colour, and will include a curatorial essay, interviews with the artists, and details about the project logistics (such as how submissions were solicited and how the projects were selected). Don’t forget — you can get a copy of this catalogue as a thanks for donating $100 or more to the project.

It’s pretty exciting to start putting all of this together, even though it’s also an enormous challenge. How do I start thinking about tinygrants as a project that begins and ends? Last semester I was abuzz with a lot of administrative tasks for tinygrants. This semester, I have to shift gears to think about the social and political implications of a microfunding program for the arts. It’s not that these things weren’t on my mind throughout the submissions and selection processes, but now I have to commit to something!

If you have any ideas for what else should be included in the catalogue, please do let me know! I will be posting updates about how the book is coming together, including a working table of contents once that is a little closer to being set in stone.

Just as a footnote, expect more updates about tinygrants soon.

* 02/15/10 – I’ve been meaning to update this post with a correction for some time now. In the interview, I talked about how student-artists are ineligible to apply for funding through municipal, provincial and federal councils. I also mentioned that it was possible for tinygrants to receive funding as non-profit organization. And for some reason I said I would be ineligible to apply for operational funding through this avenue as a student, which is completely false. Registering tinygrants as a non-profit would mean incorporating tinygrants as an entity, thereby making my status as a student irrelevant to the eligibility of tinygrants (as an organization) for funding. Just wanted to clear that up and apologize for the error.

ONSITE
The Pocketology Collective
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2009
12:00 PM – 4:00 PM
FIXT Point Studio
1550 Queen Street West
Toronto (map)

“ONSITE is a performative installation. It is an invitation initiated by The Pocketology Collective to reinvigorate public engagement through investigating and excavating the stories that lay within our pockets.

“ONSITE can be set up in any urban space. It involves a story exchange station where Pocketologist-participants are invited to dig into their pockets, produce a pocket artifact and share a story about the item anonymously. Participants are given the opportunity to write their own narrative based on the contents of their pockets. They will seal the written stories along with the pocket artifact in an envelope, which will be installed on a wall full of other visually stunning envelopes. In exchange, each participant will share another person’s pocket story in an ongoing storytelling circle. It is an evolving gallery of the interactive social landscape of Toronto and a rehearsal for a society in which spontaneous moments of connection occur between strangers.”

The Pocketology Collective is a collaboration of three interdisciplinary artists: Rachel Ellison, Coleen MacPherson and Camille Turner.

My budget for project funding was $900, and because of the nature of the top projects’ budgets, I am actually able to fund four projects. This is good news!

So, without further delay, here are the projects to look out for in the coming months. (Stay tuned to tinygrants.ca for more details as they become available.)

Josh Cleminson’s $36.00/hr

“I use the overlooked devices found in public space as a launching point; things that are seen constantly but discounted or disregarded, emphasizing their social presence. The time it takes to pick up a penny found on the ground is about one second. If one was to pick up a penny every second for an entire hour, they’d be making $36.00/hr which is remarkably higher than the average wage in Canada. I plan to leave 3600 pennies across downtown to employ whomever discovers and decides to pick up these pennies at the rate of $36.00/hr.

“This modern form of gleaning – hand-picking seeds after the harvest has been removed – can be found as subject matter in Millet’s The Gleaners.

“With the recent recession that is occurring, the work becomes socially relevant, more so, connecting the distribution of money and financial need; the wealthy and the poor, the lucky and the unlucky. With that in mind, I feel the major shopping and financial district would be the best stage.”

Leigh Nunan’s Tiny Snowmans

“It’s January. Your feet are cold. Cutting through Trinity-Bellwoods park on your way to meet a friend, you suddenly realize that you’re surrounded. The path is lined with hundreds of tiny snowmans. A smile spreads across your face as you notice that the park is full of gleeful people building more tiny snowmans. One of them comes over to you. She offers a cup of hot cider and invites you to join in, just one tiny snowman before your meeting — it’ll only take a second.

“Winter in Toronto can be a time of grey skies and staring at your boots as you plod through the misery of slush. The goal with Tiny Snowmans is to give you something good to look at down there; to unearth that childlike sense of winter wonder.

“We will wait for the weather and when the snow is that perfect, light, fluffy, sticky consistency, a group of loyal snowmanophiles will converge on the park to spread our delight, one tiny snowman at a time. We will engage passers-by in conversation, offering apple cider or a pair of mittens, drawing them into the fray. Together we will spread a blanket of tiny snowmans over the park and bring a little warmth and whimsy to a dreary winter day.”

The Pocketology Collective’s On Site

“On Site is a site-specific performative installation. It is an invitation initiated by The Pocketology Collective to reinvigorate public engagement through investigating and excavating the stories that lay within our pockets.

“On Site can be set up in any urban space. It involves a story exchange station where Pocketologist-participants are invited to dig into their pockets, produce a pocket artifact and share a story about the item anonymously. Participants are given the opportunity to write their own narrative based on the contents of their pockets. They will seal the written stories along with the pocket artifact in an envelope, which will be installed on a wall full of other visually stunning envelopes. In exchange, each participant will share another person’s pocket story in an ongoing storytelling circle. It is an evolving gallery of the interactive social landscape of Toronto and a rehearsal for a society in which spontaneous moments of connection occur between strangers.”

Cynthia French’s Monster Pole

“There is a hydro pole in our neighbourhood (corner of Dewson St. and Delaware Ave.) that has been home to a few mysterious (anonymously-made) monsters over the last two years. It began with a ghost-like creature sitting on a swing (off of a wire that hangs between the pole and a sign post). That disappeared eventually and shortly after a small, green monster appeared and has since been hanging from its arms off the same wire. This latest monster has been there for more than one year, and sadly, has slowly been deteriorating. I’m afraid we may soon lose him.

“This hydro pole sits at the corner of a small, residential intersection on a street that is a main route to a nearby elementary school. The monsters have brought smiles to many little (and big) faces.

“I would like to collaborate with a group of six children (aged 6 to 9) to create a family of monsters to live on this pole, continuing the ‘tradition’ of the previous artists.”

My very warm thanks to all of the applicants for taking the time to submit their project ideas. I would also like to thank the jury (whom patiently endured my PDF-form ineptitude) for volunteering their time to thoughtfully consider and score each application.

Here are a few things coming up -

• Grant recipient announcement
• Posts about my research (urban intervention, relational practice, microcredit, funding policy)
• Next steps for tinygrants
• December fundraising goal

Thanks for following the project!

The jury is composed of four individuals, all of whom work in or are involved in the arts in some way. They are the first four people who volunteered to be on the jury, and their professional experience is relevant to the task at hand. Their bio information will be available after the grant recipients are announced. The jury members will work independently to ’score’ each application (more on this coming up); there will be no meeting or in-person deliberations. The scores will be tallied, and the strongest projects will emerge at the top, and the top three projects will be funded.

As for the scoring: there are six criteria (that I determined in consultation with others) that will be scored out of ten for each project. They are:

• accordance to tinygrants mission statement,
• creativity/ingenuity/originality,
• reach,
• feasibility,
• clarity of idea, and
• effectiveness of creative intervention.

These criteria are weighted according to what I feel is most important to the tinygrants project. The jury knows that the criteria are weighted, but do not know what the weight scheme is. Once I receive the scoring packages on November 30th, the math will be worked out by a bonafide math whiz (i.e., not me,) and the top projects will be established.

This scoring method is effective should I receive enough donations to be able to fund more projects — I can continue to fund projects as they are ranked without having to reconvene a jury that has already generously donated their time and effort.

I feel that this is a fair–though perhaps unconventional–process. What do you think?

As it stands, the grant recipients will be notified on Monday, December 1, 2009, announcements will follow shortly. If you’d like to hear the news as it’s published, subscribe to email announcements (subscribers will be first to hear!), add tinygrants.ca to your RSS reader, join the Facebook group or follow tinygrants on Twitter. Or, stay tuned to the website, of course.