2022-23 CCA Grants

Noah Alpers
The short film Wilford the Drug Elephant involves an actor portraying an anti-drug mascot who returns to his hometown and faces personal demons. The short details Wilford preparing a performance that takes him and his assistant Mike to his Kansas hometown. Here, the two encounter Pete, an addict and friend of Wilford’s, who, unbeknownst to Mike and Pete, inspired Wilford’s anti-drug act. In the ensuing interaction, Wilford grapples with uncomfortable realities about exploiting his friends’ suffering.

Cornell University Department of Art
Each spring, Master of Fine Arts candidates at Cornell University work individually and collectively toward an exhibition in New York City. This is an important point to which
candidates orient themselves throughout the year, functioning as a culmination of the artist’s research and individual studio practices. It is a unique opportunity for Cornell MFA students to show their work together, meet alumni, and gain exposure in a major hub for contemporary art.

Fatma Baytar

Hosted by Xak Bjerken
In 2022, the great American experimental composer, George Crumb, died. Many of his greatest works for piano were written for Gilbert Kalish, and over three concerts, we will celebrate this relationship in works for 1,2, and 2 quarter-tone tuned pianos. Also on the program will be works by Charles Ives, whose complete piano music Kalish has recorded in what is considered definitive accounts. The program will also feature the 2-piano works by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Pianists Christina Dahl and Oksana Ezhokina have studied and subsequently performed with Kalish for almost 30 years, and have recorded the complete 2-piano works of Rachmaninoff.
Andy Colpitts
The Family Copoli is a raucous, dark, silly, all-singing, all-dancing new musical exploring the human race’s desire to carry on and the lengths we will go to for survival.

Kimiyo Bremer

CCCP + María Bulla
Greg Stuart is a widely recognized percussionist and improviser, who has been working closely with composers of experimental music for many years. Although he has a particular style within the world of percussion music, his main interest is in the experimentation process that comes with every piece. The final concert will be a showcase of the diverse styles, interests, and backgrounds of the Cornell composition students, in the hands of a truly creative and experienced artist.

Austin Bunn
A short documentary about a single season in the life of a gay campground in the Endless Mountains region of Pennsylvania, the characters who live there as “perm” residents, and the straight family that owns the property.

CCCP + Michele Cheng
Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players, a graduate student-curated residency series, will feature percussion duo NOMON as one of the guest artists. This multimedia concert will include 7-9 original works by Cornell doctoral composers. NOMON is a percussion duo composed of sisters Shayna and Nava Dunkelman, who often work with electronic music, visuals, and videos. “Born and raised in Tokyo to an Indonesian mother and an American father, the sisters became multi-instrumentalists performing alongside their mother, a musician and composer active in Asia and the Middle East.”

Melissa Conroy

David Costanza
Production of a 15ft diameter collective bench. The bench’s geometry organizes the seating areas into three smaller sections that are socially distanced from one another while belonging to the same closed loop. The bench is made of 6 self-similar components that will be printed independently and assembled on site. The triangular cross-section produces a flat surface for the seating component and then rotates to an inverted triangle to elevate from the ground and divide the seating areas. The research seeks to expand on the developments in 3D printing and to increase the scale of that work by utilizing industrial robotics
Anna Dietzsch

Hosted by Cornell East Asia Program

Anna Evtushenko
This is a work-in-progress concept that interweaves kitchen-sink realism with absurdism through unconventional storytelling techniques.

Gina Goico

Hosted by Rodrigo Guzman Serrano
Mexican artist Maro Pebo will present her work to Cornell and the larger Ithaca community. Through lichens, Winogradsky columns, and mitochondria, Pebo presents a series of sculptural and audiovisual works challenging human timeframes and scales, and confronting historical scientific narratives that are renewed as mythologies of mico-biopolitical ecology.

Giselle Hobbs

Julianne Hunter

Matéa LeBeau
An immersive show that asks its audience to consider permanence and impermanence through the mechanism of the tattoo. In a time of such great instability, erasure, and uncertainty, the creation of a tattoo can bring about tender, vulnerable, and decisive moments of exchange between people. The pieces in this show are an exploration of embracing the present, both alone and with others, through the slow devotional process of the hand-poked tattoo.

Vivian Ludford

Medium Design Collective

Beth Milles