Eight Triangle artists and arts organizations were awarded grants from the regional nonprofit South Arts, earlier this week. The grants will help fund new programs ranging from a flamenco dance course for kids in Carrboro to a prominent writer’s residency at NC State.

South Arts, a regional nonprofit headquartered in Atlanta that receives funding from the National Endowment of the Arts, issued the grants. One hundred and three artists and organizations across nine Southern states were awarded grants from South Arts totaling over half a million dollars on Tuesday.

“We often talk anecdotally about the South being underfunded in so many critical areas like education and health care. The truth is that the arts are also incredibly underfunded,” Joy Young, vice president of programs at South Arts, told the INDY. “The arts are a conduit for learning and for understanding and for building bridges across communities. So funding the arts is funding an investment in people.”

In Durham, the American Dance Festival, Durham Central Park, and The Beautiful Project were each awarded “Presentation Grants” to be put toward collaborations with specific artists: ShaLeigh Dance Works, Sierra Green and the Giants, and Kennedi Carter, respectively. The ArtsCenter in Carrboro also received a presentation grant, to fund a partnership with Carlota Santana Flamenco Vivo, and ARTSPACE, Chamber Music Raleigh, and NC State LIVE in Raleigh received presentation grants to support collaborations with Renzo Ortega, The Vega String Quartet, and Dasan Ahanu, respectively.

Durham scholar and poet Dasan Ahanu. Photo by 8 Bit Photography.

The presentation grant-funded collaborations will all involve a community engagement component and culminate in a public performance or presentation of work, according to Young. NC State, for instance, will be putting its $7,500 grant toward funding a yearlong residence for Dasan Ahanu, a lauded writer and scholar who in 2023 served as the North Carolina Piedmont Poet Laureate.

“He’ll be creating a new, fully realized work,” says Liza Green, associate director of NC State LIVE. “What’s really exciting about being an arts presenter at a university is that we already have partners that are interested in working with him, and they’re unusual—like, the Data Science Academy wants Dasan to create a poetry workshop for their data conference—so we have these opportunities where Dasan can really get to know our different communities, and I feel like that will feed its way into the work that he’ll create.”

“With everything that’s happening in the world right now, it can feel almost impossible to go on. This sort of apocalypse is upon us,” Green adds. “I think artists [like Ahanu] can hold these really hard truths about the world next to love and light and kind of give us all a communal release, as well as a way to build resilience.”

Munsie Davis, venue relations manager at The ArtsCenter, says that the organization’s collaboration with Carlota Santana Flamenco Vivo—a world-renowned dance company that Davis says has received a “stamp of approval” from the King and Queen of Spain—will involve a weeklong afterschool dance program for children and a “big huge public performance.”

“It’s going to allow us to do some community engagement with the Hispanic Latino community that we’ve been wanting to cultivate more of a relationship with,” Davis says. “The Art Center has had a history of being successful at bringing in world music and diverse programming, but we haven’t focused as specifically before on this particular segment of the Orange County population.”

Beyond presentation grants, South Arts also issued two other types of grants on Tuesday: traditional arts touring grants, which “support in-person or live virtual multi-day residencies” by artists; and jazz road tour grants, which “help jazz artists tour across the nation with fees and expenses, as well as non-musician personnel like tour managers and childcare,” according to a release.

The Triangle-based Latin fusion ensemble ¡Tumbao! was awarded a jazz road tour grant of $15,000 to help cover expenses for a tour through North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. 

 ¡Tumbao! was formed in 2019. When the pandemic hit, the group succeeded in being able to figure out how to keep momentum going, says ¡Tumbao! frontman Diego Avilez. “It was really a time of learning and a time of redefining productivity,” Avilez says. When things opened back up, he adds, they hit the ground running with shows at places like Jazz in the Garden at the National Gallery in D.C.  ¡Tumbao! just got back from its first international tour in Peru. 

Avilez says the group is looking forward to “going a little further into the South with our music” on the grant-funded tour, which has not yet been scheduled. 

“When we first started this band, there wasn’t a lot of attention in main spaces, or on main stages, for Latin music,” Avilez says. “It’s really special to be able to take this show on the road to places that perhaps haven’t had the chance to experience this type of music.” 

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Lena Geller is a reporter for INDY, covering food, housing, and politics. She joined the staff in 2018 and previously ran a custom cake business.