Kurcz Memorial Fund Awardees
Thanks to the generosity of hundreds of supporters, the Katie Kurcz Memorial Fund has created a number of opportunities for our Teaching Artists to deepen their individual artistic practice and bring new knowledge and inspiration into each and every interaction they have with our students.
2023: Kevin Smith
With his Katie Kurcz Memorial Fund project, Kevin Smith is excited and honored to have the time, resources and finances needed this year to purchase and learn the Ableton Push 2 and take that new music knowledge and apply it to all of his future music lessons with SCA students. His project plan involves using elements of electronic music (beat creation, recording, gathering samples, creating samples, creating melodies, creating harmonies, layering sounds, etc.) to enable students to virtually collaborate on songs in a sound collage.
Read more about Kevin’s project on our blog, the Drift.
2022: Gabe Andres
2022 Kurcz Fund awardee Gabe Andres is exploring technology in his own practice and crossover workshops to make media arts more accessible to students. With his award funding, Gabe is building a Multimedia Hub at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, a portable collection of technology and resources including a 3D printer, a sound mixer, a green screen and camera, and more. A typical day for Gabe might include facilitating rotoscoping animation workshops with students, 3D printing student-made digital sculptures, introducing free apps to students to explore new ways of digital art-making, researching new artists for inspiration, and documenting student learning outcomes.
Read more about Gabe on our blog, the Drift.
2021: Monica Acosta
Monica Acosta brings a wide variety of cultural influences to her mindful visual art practice, and shares her multi-disciplinary approach with our students. With her Kurcz award, Monica explored ways for students to respond to music using a variety of visual media. She formalized these response methods by asking students to select their favorite compositions from a range of musical styles—e.g., hip-hop, jazz, or even songs from Frozen—and encouraging them to interpret and express the music using any artistic medium that inspired them, including paint on canvas, gel color and light, stamps, and more.
For Monica, empowering students to create visual compositions based on musical patterns or lyrics that they felt connected with was 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.”
Read more about Monica on our blog, the Drift.
2020: Emmy Bean and Dan Kerr-Hobert
2020 Kurcz Fund grantees Emmy Bean and Dan Kerr-Hobert used their shared award to create a new way to offer live performance opportunities to SCA students. Drawing inspiration from the beloved CAN-TV show Chic-a-go-go, Emmy and Dan helped students create and film a series of short segments showcasing their own artworks. They also collaborated with nationally-renowned puppeteer Noah Ginex to create two customizable puppets for students to use while filming.
Read more about Emmy in the Chicago Sun-Times and more about Dan—who was named Snow City Arts’ Program Director in 2021—on our blog, the Drift.
2020: Lenny Zieben
Teaching Artist Lenny Zieben used his Kurcz award to dig into music-making technology that has developed in recent years—such as loops and synthesizers—and explore how he might further integrate it into his musical and pedagogical practice. Asked what inspired him to want to introduce these technologies to SCA students, Lenny said, “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.”
Read more about Lenny on our blog, the Drift.
Kurcz Fund Project Gallery
From left to right: Rotoscoping animations made by Snow City Arts students in Gabe Andres’ workshops: “New Cinderella” by Aimee, age 14; “Triple Axel” by Victoria, age 10; “Eye Poke Attack” by Yaretzi, age 11.
Some of the student artworks created as part of Monica Acosta’s Kurcz Fund project (in collaboration with Teaching Artist Kevin Smith): “Dragonfly” by Maeda, age 9; “Sneaking into the Fell” by Demarius, age 7; “Bandit” by Faith, age 16.
Watch one of Noah Ginex’s puppets interviewing Emmy Bean about the Kurcz Fund!
Watch Lenny Zieben dig into his research on the Korg Volca Step Sequencer, a powerful tool for student composition, at Gallery Night 2020.