September 24, 1982 – May 12, 2017

“Katie dedicated her career to building awareness for arts organizations and cared deeply about the role of artists in our world. We are so happy in this moment to be able to honor her memory by supporting the work of four amazing Snow City Arts Teaching Artists who are making a difference in the lives of young patients in Chicago.”

~Alex Cohan and Allison Green, on behalf of the Katie Kurcz Memorial Fund

When the Katie Kurcz Fund was established in 2019, no one could have imagined what 2020 would bring. As we continue to navigate this unprecedented time, all of us at Snow City Arts have never been prouder of our Teaching Artists, who continue to reimagine our programs to create meaningful, engaging learning experiences with our students every day.

We have also never been more grateful to the donors to the Katie Kurcz Memorial Fund. Thanks to the generosity of hundreds of supporters, the Fund has been able to support new opportunities for our Teaching Artists to deepen their individual artistic practice, encouraging them to bring new knowledge and inspiration into each and every interaction they have with our students.

Today, we are delighted to introduce Snow City Arts’ 2021 Katie Kurcz Memorial Fund grantee, Teaching Artist Monica Acosta. Monica has been with Snow City Arts since 2018, bringing a wide variety of cultural influences to her mindful visual art practice, and sharing her multi-disciplinary approach with our students. With her Kurcz Fund project, she will further that work by exploring ways for students to respond to music using a variety of visual media.

“What I experienced when I first started teaching was a student with limited mobility who was able to use their eyes to make decisions about color,” says Monica. “I also observed a teacher in New Jersey that did laser painting with similarly challenged students.”

Avenger by Ja’Tares, Age, 10

Interested in diving into this idea further, she began encouraging her own students to respond to music using colors and shapes. She has been collecting ideas and inspiration for this unique approach for the past couple of years.

“I’m Filipino, and in the Philippines, there are provinces known for their tapestry and weaving. A lot of these weavings are based on music. The music, based on folklore, creates a weaving pattern,” she says. “What if a student who responds to music in any capacity — certain patterns, a melody, or parts of the song that they’ve chosen — then could make, from that pattern, a visual pattern? It would look something like a tapestry.”

The grant from the Kurcz Fund is enabling Monica to explore and formalize methods for this project using a variety of musical styles, including hip-hop, jazz, or even a lyric from Frozen — interpreted and expressed using any artistic medium that inspires the student, including paint on canvas, gel color and light, stamps, and more.

For Monica, the opportunity to empower students to create visual compositions based on musical patterns or lyrics that they feel connected with is extremely powerful.

“A person can choose a lyric that really resonates with who they are, and now create a visual pattern and proudly claim their identity based on this. This is what this lyric looks like as a visual piece…Now we have a way of taking that favorite lyric and making a visual composition.”

As her project evolves over the next year, she sees the potential for creating a digital app for students to play with. “If I keep it simple on this end, then perhaps it could be developed to a grander scale!”

2020 grantees Emmy Bean and Dan Kerr-Hobert have been using their shared grant to create a new way for SCA students to have live performance opportunities.

“Film and TV are a big part of what Snow City does with its students,” says Emmy. “What Dan and I really wanted to do was put together a tv show that was a vehicle for student artwork.”

Drawing inspiration from the beloved CAN-TV show Chic-a-go-go, Emmy and Dan are working to create and film a series of short segments — a bit like a news broadcast, but entirely about art. The segments, each 3-5 minutes long, will provide an opportunity for SCA students to show their work while also participating in the production of the show.

The student-created segments will include original songs or theatre pieces, interviews with artists and hospital personnel about all things Snow City — and of course, puppets! Emmy and Dan have used a portion of their Kurcz Fund grant to collaborate with nationally-renowned puppeteer Noah Ginex to create two customizable puppets for students to use while filming. The puppets’ features are moveable and removable, providing another opportunity for students to express themselves using a variety of facial expressions and accessories. Students may use the puppets as “reporters” in their segments, or interact with them in whatever ways their imaginations dictate. “The puppets will really make this project exist in the creative, colorful, funny universe we want it to be in,” says Emmy.

Creating a new TV show during COVID hasn’t been easy, but Emmy and Dan are preparing to film a short promotional segment in the next few weeks. They hope to have three full segments completed by August, and to begin sharing them with other students via Lurie’s own Skylight TV Network. Ultimately, their hope is to be able to share them more widely with students in other hospitals or programming partners.

Technology For All

Teaching Artist Lenny Zieben, also a 2020 Kurcz Fund grantee, is using his grant to explore music-making technology that has developed in recent years to see how he might further integrate it into his musical and pedagogical practice. He already uses many of these tools in his professional performance work, but his hope is to explore new ways to create something really bespoke.

“We use a lot of loops and synthesizers, but I had this really powerful feeling that I wasn’t just going to press play on something and let that be the bed of something we create live. We need to be creating our own loops — the entire idea is to create it in real time — a more traditional sense of music making.”

Asked what inspired him to want to further integrate these technologies into his interactions with SCA students, Lenny says, “Part of it was the visual reaction to the hardware. A girl who had not made music before was very quickly creating rhythms and sequences and bleeps and turning knobs to turn a basic rhythm into ambient sounds. There was this really powerful gratification of creating rhythm — it was a very quick sense of accomplishment for the student.”

As familiar as he already is with digital music technology, Lenny is eager to have the opportunity to explore newer platforms. “I play guitar and bass, that was my introduction to music. It took a lot to get me into the digital world, but once I got here, I realized all the stuff you can do! It’s a sense of integrating the two, that’s my real goal for the music that I make.”

The Kurcz Fund is providing the opportunity for Lenny to explore, create and build using some of these new tools, ultimately deciding which of them might provide the most engaging experiences for students. “Everything is developing and changing so quickly, I have to stop myself because I’m feeling really comfy with a tool and then something else comes out!”

Katie Kurcz cared deeply about the role of art and artists in our world, and we believe she would be proud of how Snow City Arts has transformed in response to the challenges of the pandemic. We are proud to honor her memory with these incredible projects that will, each in their own unique way, enrich the lives of both Teaching Artists and students.