Urban renewal is a hot topic and the Awesome Foundation is big into supporting into creative minded people who focus on harnessing a community’s energy to complement larger scale bricks and mortar development.  The Boston Chapter awarded it’s February grant to artist and basketball enthusiast Maria Molteni in support of her mission to restore use of local abandoned b-ball courts by crafting DIY nets. This project harnesses the power of shared activity and public space in fostering a bond of trust between artists, athletes, and neighbors. The nets are designed to be colorful, vibrant additions to public spaces that go beyond being strictly functional. Installing unique hand-crafted products sets the stage for individual expression. The MOLTENi NET WORKS project is well underway with a recent exhibit at Cambridge’s MEME Gallery in Central Square that also included workshops where participants were able to hand-crochet basketball nets to be installed on bare hoops. Efforts have begun locally in Allston, MA and there are several local organizations (Boston include Artists for Humanity, Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, Design Studio for Social Intervention, and Massart’s Fibers Department) interested in putting on more workshops. If you’d like to get pitch in, there are a… read more →

Tim Hwang reporting in here for Awesome Foundation San Francisco! We’re thrilled to announce that this months winner of the Awesome Fellowship is Wendy MacNaughton, a brilliant artist and illustrator living here in the Bay Area. She’s been working recently on a series called “Meanwhile” — narrative comics exploring the thicket of awesome microcommunities nestled within San Francisco. Previous comics have explored the Market Street Chess Players, The Dolphin Club Bay Swimmers, Dog Walkers, Farmer’s Market Farmers and Mission Bartenders. They’re all tremendously fun to read, and are worth checking out here. For this month, she’s worked out a partnership with the San Francisco Public Library, and will be spending a month interviewing and drawing the folks who work there, and exploring the people who use the libraries as a community hub. Best of all (and we’re still working out the details) but the SFPL has agreed to either show the outcome of the project in their readers cafe at Fort Mason, or (better yet) help make little books of it that can be on display and for sale at libraries, the cafe and bookstores in SF (with proceeds going to the library!) You can see more of Wendy’s work… read more →

There’s a reason why we are only now, in the middle of April, announcing the Boston January ’11 Awesome Fellows: it’s because they’re super mysterious. The Banditos Misteriosos are a troupe of Bostonians who consider themselves Boston’s mysterious playmate. Since 2007, they’ve been organizing public ruckuses and shenanigans that try to provide answers to the two big questions they’re always asking: “Who are these people we pass in the street?” and “How could we use those big open public spaces?” The Awesome Foundation is very excited to fund one of their future capers, which should be seeing the light of day in the summer. And although we know all the juicy behind-the-scenes plans, our lips are zipped for now when it comes to details: the mystery must linger! Instead, we’ll let them tell you about the basic idea: You see, we’re going to make a puzzle.  And some time in the summer, you’ll get to put it together! Oh… P.S. It’s gonna be GIANT! Want more details beyond that? Patience! Patience! You’ll find out more soon enough!  For now, we just need you to get excited, start boning up on your puzzling skills, and be sure you’ll be privy to… read more →

It’s with great pleasure that we can announce that the first recipient of the Awesome Foundation Sydney grant is the team from Big Fag Press, who submitted an awesome application to us in March. The guys at BFP have at their disposal a huge printing press, which they are going to use to create a unique map of the Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo. Here is an extract from their application, to give you some idea of what it’s all about. Woolloomooloo is awesome. It contains some of the wealthiest bankers, swankiest restaurants, and pristine apartments in Sydney; it also contains a huge population of homeless folks, plenty of public housing, and loads of social services and cultural institutions. Its current urban form was made possible through union Green Bans in the 1970s. For the first time ever, our map will put all this conflicted data on a two dimensional inky collision course. To create the map, the team will print up a ‘first version’ of the suburb map and then walk around the area. They will mark on the map, by hand, anything ‘weird and wonderful and important that we happen to bump into.’ They will then take this information and… read more →

Gruezi* World! Awesome Foundation Zurich has just gone live. Today, we are proud to announce the launch of the Awesome chapter Zurich – only the second one on the European continent (the UK doesn’t count, right?). We have no other motivation than the fact that we see a lot of undiscovered awesomeness in Switzerland. Things are truly bubbling here and it is about time some of the things that are going down in the land of chocolate and cheese get noticed, acknowledged, hellyeah’d and awesomeized. That’s what we are here for. We are ten people from all walks of life aiming to come together four times a year to award 1000 CHF to awesome project ideas, that they may see the light of day. We are accepting first application as of now (we try to communicate in German, but English is no problem either). *Gruezi is how we say “Hello” around here.