MAP Fund grant supports project by Tri-C JazzFest artist-in-residence Terence Blanchard

May 25, 2017

The MAP Fund recently announced a grant to the Cuyahoga Community College Foundation to support the commission of a new jazz work by Grammy Award-winning trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard.

Blanchard is in the midst of a two-year artist residency at the College as part of Tri-C JazzFest. The musician is creating a new work inspired by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and titled OUR VOICES: DEMOCRACY RE:visited.

The piece will reflect the conditions, events and individuals that have produced political change and impacted public policy. Blanchard recently participated in a panel discussion at Tri-C’s Metropolitan Campus to gather information for his work.

MAP is among the longest-running grant programs in national arts philanthropy, having supported more than a thousand new works of performance with a total of $29 million since 1988.

The 2017 list of grantees included the Blanchard project and 39 other live performance works that will receive $1.2 million. MAP considered more than 900 applications during this year’s grant selection process.

MAP is primarily supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF), with additional funds from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“This latest group of MAP grantees wonderfully illustrates the way artists are working today — across disciplines and genres, and with communities,” said Maurine Knighton, program director for the arts at DDCF. “The diverse array of emergent voices, aesthetic inquiry and new forms among the grantees reflects society’s deep and abiding desire for connection and meaning more broadly. We are excited to see how their exploration and experimentation will tap into and inform the zeitgeist in important ways.”

The MAP Fund joins a growing group supporting Blanchard’s project.