The Awesome Foundation MIAMI kicked introduced its first batch of grants with a Sunday event that brought together applicants, grant winners, family, friends, and a greater Miami network. It was a fantastic way to continue our introduction to the South Florida community! For photos of the event, see our Facebook album.

Close your eyes. Now, imagine the most intense and exciting performance extravaganza you could possibly conjure up in your most creative of states. Seriously, just picture it: a building filled with rooms bursting with the energy of some of the most talented and crafty folks living in our fair and filthy Baltimore City. Now, imagine that we, here at Awesome Baltimore, threw it $1,000 for its sheer awesomeness and breadth of vision. Well, lucky for you, that is exactly what happened! Ladies and gents of Charm City: we give you Rooms Fall Apart: A Serious Play, our second grant recipient! Awesome Baltimore: How did the idea of Rooms Fall Apart originated? When did you decide that you needed to make it a reality? Rooms Fall Apart: Rooms Fall Apart is a project that was born out of a performance thesis and the resulting model that was produced by the Copycat Theatre in 2010. In the fall of 2012, we put our heads together and conceived of the Rooms Fall Apart performance project. It began with a series of conversations about microaggressions, love, hate, and fear. We visualized how to express the range of human emotions that can and cannot be… read more →

We thought we’d try something new in Chicago this month, so instead of picking our winner in the smokey backroom of an undisclosed location like we usually do, we invited six finalists to pitch their project proposals to a live audience and let the crowd decide on the winner. All six of the projects were certainly worthy of a thousand-dollar grant, but after hearing all the pitches and engaging in 20 minutes of intense deliberation the dedicated crowd at the Next Door Café rose to the challenge of selecting a single winner for the night. Clean Graffiti: positive messages pressure-washed into the grime of the sidewalk. Elizabeth Ortiz & Gilberto Sandoval, two teenagers from Yollocalli Arts Reach, delivered an enthusiastic pitch for their “Clean Graffiti” project that won the audience over. The idea is simple, creative, and compelling: they’re going to make stencils, rent a pressure washer, and blast positive messages into the grime of the city’s sidewalks. In doing so they’re flipping the idea of graffiti on its head, replacing the defacement of public property with an act of civil service (cleaning the sidewalks) and turning the negativity of gang tags into encouraging messages. Congratulations to Elizabeth and Gilberto, and a big nod… read more →

The New York chapter is proud to announce that our April grant has been awarded to Nametag Day, which on June 1, 2013 will distribute 200,000-nametags around New York City. The purpose of the event is to get people to talk to each other. But more than that, it’s about bringing a culture of openness to this sometimes standoffish city. Read more on our April project page!  And don’t forget to follow Awesome NYC on Twitter and Facebook.

Sixteen-year-old music-enthusiast, photographer, and engineer-in-the-making Noah Klein attended Burning Man last year, which filled him with a need to participate and contribute to the odd and unique marriage of music and art for this year’s festival.  His answer: a reworking of Ruben’s Tube, a flaming cylinder that gives musical wavelengths a physical shape with fire (think: propane-fueled iTunes visualizer). To give it his own spin, Noah has rehashed this traditional construction by finding a discarded grand piano, digitizing its keys, and hooking the mechanism up to his own Ruben’s Tube.  His words: “I think it would be quite the spectacle to have someone be able to preform Mozart’s 5th Symphony and have it visualized with fire right in front of them.” Awesome LA, with the consent of Noah’s enthusiastic, patient, and trusting mom, have awarded Noah with an Awesome grant to foster young, analytically minds and add a spark to Burning Man 2013 . Flame on.