The Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has announced the winners of its annual Joyce Awards, which recognize collaborations between Black, Indigenous, and people of color artists and organizations in the Great Lakes region.

This year, five awardees—up from four recipients in past years—will each receive $75,000 to produce and present a commissioned work in collaboration with community members in Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis/St. Paul, while exploring how the visual and performing arts can uplift local histories and traditional knowledge, deepen understanding of immigrant experiences, foster inclusivity, and encourage greater community cohesion. Since 2004, the foundation has awarded more than $4 million to 77 artists of color and their community-based projects.

This year’s recipients include Nancy García Loza and the National Museum of Mexican Art to explore bicultural identity and the myths and realities of ancestral homelands in collaboration with immigrant communities and communities of color in Chicago; Nabil Ince and the Harrison Center in a songwriting residency with residents from three historically Black Indianapolis neighborhoods, using art to combat cultural erasure and gentrification; Michael Manson and Living Arts, which will engage with Detroit’s Black and Latinx communities to create a concert-length dance production as well as family-oriented workshops and events centering on Detroit Jit, a 1970s street dance style; Aram Han Sifuentes and the HANA Center to connect with Asian and multi-ethnic communities in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood through collective storytelling and artistic co-creation that incorporates traditional Korean NongGi flag-making as a form of artists’ protest and self-narrative; and Pramila Vasudevan and Public Art Saint Paul to develop dance and movement workshops and events on Dakota land in public parks and encourage community members to engage with each other and the natural world.

“The 2022 Joyce Awards support interactive and collaborative projects spanning a broad range of creative media and artists who are inspired community leaders in our region,” said Joyce Foundation culture program director Mia Khimm. “This year’s wide range of projects and artists uplift immigrant voices and experiences, bring past cultural forms and traditions into the present, and strengthen community pride across the Great Lakes.”

(Photo credit: Joyce Foundation)