Charlotte: Faculty and alumni receive Creative Mecklenburg Grants

Charlotte: Faculty and alumni receive Creative Mecklenburg Grants

Faculty and alumni from the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte are among 54 artists to receive the 2024 Creative Mecklenburg Grants from the Arts & Science Council.

Grant Details

The grants, open to Mecklenburg County-based artists of all disciplines, provide funding of up to $3,000 each. Grantees represent creative disciplines from visual art and music to dance. The ASC received 116 applications from area creatives.

Artists may use the grants to enhance their skills and abilities, create new work, or improve their business operations and capacity to bring their work to new audiences.

Recipient Highlights

The grant recipients from the College of Arts + Architecture, along with the amount they received and the purpose of the grant, are as follows:

• Professor of Painting Maja Godlewska: $2,965 to support the creation of a new body of work (painting, installation) for a solo exhibition at Toshkova Fine Art in Charlotte.
• Associate Professor of Painting Andrew Leventis: $3,000 to ship four paintings from North Carolina to the Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, Poland, for the exhibition Food in Art.
• Rowe Fabrications Lab Manager Jonathan Pellitteri: $2,209 to purchase equipment to produce “Bloom, Wither, Repeat,” a site-specific kinetic artwork for inclusion in the inaugural L+A+N+D exhibition at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Clermont, Kentucky.
• Professor of Sculpture Marek Ranis: $3,000 for an art residency and creative collaboration with the Nordic Artists’ Center in Norway.
• Assistant Professor of Dance Ashley Tate: $2,750 for a research trip to the Hip-Hop Archive and Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
• Music alumnus and Adjunct Saxophone Professor Benjamin Still ’13: $2,250 to attend the annual Asia Pacific Saxophone Academy in Bangkok, Thailand.
• Art alumna Susan Jedrzejewski ’06: $2,970 to purchase a 17-inch color printer and essential art supplies to advance alternative photography practices.
• Dance alumnus Alex (Montë) Murphy ’23: $3,000 to train with the masters of Silvestre and Afro-Brazilian Technique in Brazil in July 2024.

Photo Exhibit

The article also included three paintings by Andrew Leventis intended for the Food in Art exhibition in Krakow, Poland.