2022 McKnight Community-Engaged Artist Fellows Announced

Pillsbury House Theatre is proud to announce the 2022 recipients of the McKnight Fellowships for Community-Engaged Artists: Douglas R. Ewart and Olivia Levins Holden.

The 2022 McKnight fellows were selected from a group of 26 applicants by a panel of arts professionals of varying backgrounds whose careers intersect with community-engaged artistic practice in different ways. This year's jurors were Carlton Turner, Lead Artist and Director of Mississippi Center for Cultural Production, and Dave Kyu, Artist and Director of Programs Asian Arts Initiative.

DOUGLAS R. EWART (photo credit Chelese L. Ewart), Professor Emeritus at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and immigrated to Chicago in 1963 where he studied music theory at VanderCook College of Music, electronic music at Governors State University, and composition at the School of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Professor Ewart's extremely varied and highly interdisciplinary work encompasses music composition (including graphic and conceptual scores as well as conventionally notated works), painting and kinetic sound sculpture, and multi-instrumental performance on virtually the full range of saxophones, flutes, and woodwinds, including the flutes, pan-pipes, rainsticks and percussion instruments of his own design and construction for which he is known worldwide. Professor Ewart's work as composer, instrument maker and visual artist has long reflected his understanding of the importance of sustainable and natural materials, particularly bamboo, which serves not only as primary physical materials for many of his sculptures and instruments, but also crucial conceptual elements of some of his most important recordings, such as the widely influential Bamboo Meditations at Banff (1993) and Bamboo Forest (1990).

His visual art and kinetic works have been shown at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ojai Festival, Art Institute of Chicago, Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and his work as performing instrumentalist have been presented in the Caribbean (Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti), Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Holland, UK), Japan, Bali, South America, Scandinavia, and Australia, as well as the United States and Puerto Rico, and recorded on numerous labels, including his own Aarawak recording company. Professor Ewart is the leader of such important musical ensembles as the Nyahbingi Drum Choir, Orbit, Quasar, StringNets, and the Clarinet Choir.

Among his many honors, Professor Ewart was awarded the Jamaica Musgrave Silver Medal for Outstanding Merit in the Arts, Education, and Culture 2019, and was personally presented with the Outstanding Artist Award by Chicago's first African American mayor, Harold Washington. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, a U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation, and others.

OLIVIA LEVINS HOLDEN (photo credit Nedahness Rose Greene) is a queer, mixed Boricua muralist, organizer, artist, and educator living on Dakota homeland, Bde Ota Othunwe, Mni Sota Makoce, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Olivia's work explores many ways that the arts can transform and support movements, tell stories, plant seeds, and combat toxic narratives. They center processes of community involvement and collective design, drawing from conversations and people's history to create collaborative murals and public art, believing that the process is as essential as the final artwork. Since 2009, they have created and led the creation of 26 permanent murals in Minneapolis, California, and Puerto Rico, including Minneapolis murals Waves of Change/Oleadas de Cambio (2015), Defend, Nurture, Grown Phillips (2019), Wiidookodaadiwag/They Help Each Other (2019), and Ritmos y Raices de Resistencia (2021). With her artist collective, Studio Thalo, Olivia creates live-painted mobile murals to reflect conversations and events.

Olivia also serves as the Art of Radical Collaboration (ARC) Program Lead at Hope Community, Inc where she has trained artists and led community murals with youth and adults through the Power of Vision (POV) Mural project since 2017 and facilitates the Transformational Creative Strategies Training (TRCSTR). She was a 2015 recipient of the Forecast Public Art project grant and has served as a facilitator and mentor for project-based learning through programs such as Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio (CLUES), Latinx Muralism Apprenticeship, Studio 400, and is a founding member of the Creatives After Curfew collective. She holds a BA in History from Smith College.

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