Twice a year RISCA awards grants in a number of categories. Over the course of a few months, we will be profiling the amazing artists and organizations that received grants at our April 1, 2017 deadline, two at a time.
Project Grants for Individuals
Artist: Oliver Arias
Project: This project is an arts based 8 school educational tour of RI public middle and high schools that challenges our drastically different communities to think critically about our state’s history of immigration and segregation by using relevant artistic resources and encouraging youth artistic expression. I, along with my team, will be using a variety of nation wide and RI-specific primary and secondary resources, as well as framing many of the conversations through the lens of Hip Hop arts. Hip Hop’s literary canon addresses segregation and the inequitable distribution of resources in an accessible, relevant way that meets students where they are. We’ll visit
each school at least twice in the 2017/18 school year, and create an arts based video curriculum to be used by all schools after the tour is finished.
Artist Bio: Oliver ‘SydeSho’ Arias is a Hip Hop performer/educator reigning out of Providence, RI. Engaged in the Hip Hop arts for about 6 years, SydeSho specializes in the arts of Emceein’ (Rapping) and Bboyin’ (BreakDancin’). He also is the Program/Performance Director of the Non-Profit, Pushed Learning & Media, where he travels to educate youth on the social injustice, racial injustice, and segregation in the USA while using the culture of Hip Hop to engage in these conversations. SydeSho’s goal is to utilize the culture of Hip Hop in it’s purest form to uplift communities and remain relevant in present day society.
Teaching Artist Roster
Artist: Maryann Ullman
Discipline: Literary Arts
Artist Bio: Maryann Ullmann is fond of blurring the boundaries of genre, mixing realism and fabulism, and encouraging voices that the world needs more of.
She writes mostly fiction but loves to explore genres and multimedia with all age groups, and explore interdisciplinary topics such as science, civics, and language. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University with emphases on Fiction and Pedagogy, and earned the program’s top fellowship for commitment to community leadership.