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HAF+WRCF is proud to announce that five Humboldt County artists are winners of the 2022 Victor Thomas Jacoby award for artistic vision and creativity. Winners receive $10,000 each to support their work.
Each fall, local artists apply through HAF+WRCF for the Victor Thomas Jacoby Award by submitting examples of their work and vision for innovating and pushing their art to the next level.
“Victor was a gifted artist who wanted to recognize the excellence of fellow artists and enable them to broaden their horizons" says Craig Woods, Director of Grantmaking. "HAF+WRCF is honored to carry out Victor’s charitable vision by supporting Humboldt County visual artists and craftspeople each year.”
This year’s recipients are:
Annette Makino: An award-winning haiku poet and artist based in Arcata, California, who combines paintings and collages with her poems. Her work regularly appears in the leading haiku journals and anthologies. Through her business, Makino Studios, she shares her art, cards, calendars, and books. www.makinostudios.com
Zak Shea: A McKinleyville-based woodworker, painter, sculptor, and carpenter who creates functional and ornamental pieces of art furniture, sculpture, objects such as bowls, trays, carved paintings and countless wall hangings. Pieces of shell, rock, sand, bark, seaweed, as well as junk metal and other scrap materials often find their way into his art. www.instagram.com/zaksheaart
Claire MacKenzie: A visual artist in Eureka, Claire has been painting since childhood and loves exploring and combing media. She is currently working in oil, watercolor, encaustic and wool fiber. She often displays artwork publicly, offers private art instruction, and has worked as a graphic designer for more than 20 years. www.claireastra.com
Daniel Willson: Doing art again in 2017 after a 30-year hiatus, this multi-talented Humboldt artist started ceramics under the guidance of George Lee at Heartwood Mountain Sanctuary. Willson soon became a studio artist and instructor at Blue Ox Millworks and Historic Village, where he does slip cast sculpture work. He plans to launch his own business, Humboldt Ceramic Designs, in 2023. www.instagram.com/humboldtceramicdesigns
Steph Thomas: This black, trans, non-binary multimedia artist brings the culture, power, and beauty of the 415 to the 707. While born and raised in San Francisco, Steph has lived and created in Arcata for more than six years. Their influence is a combination of lived experience and a reflection of the resilience of the black people who live within and around them.
Their recent works have been digital paintings focused on the ever-expanding notion of Black Femininity, as well as the multi-faceted existence of Black Women and Femmes occupying space under capitalism. https://www.instagram.com/spicyprincezuko/
About Victor Thomas Jacoby
Victor Jacoby, an internationally recognized Eureka visual artist whose chosen medium was French tapestry, established the Victor Thomas Jacoby Fund with HAF+WRCF before his death in 1997 at age 52. Victor’s vision inspired his friend Dr. Rosalind Novick to make an additional gift to the fund and expand his dream of supporting local artists. This trust fund is dedicated to supporting Humboldt County visual artists and craftspeople and encourages exploring new ideas, materials, techniques, and mediums. In addition, the fund distributes annual cash awards to artists or craftspeople selected by a review panel of leading arts representatives.
Three Eureka artists are winners of the 2021 Victor Thomas Jacoby award for artistic vision and creativity. Winners receive $10,000 each to support their work.
This year’s recipients are Shawn Gould, an award-winning scientific illustrator, and painter with an arresting life-mimicking style; Mo Harper-Desir, a multimedia artist who centers free speech, inclusion/equity education, and Black Joy in her work; and Marceau Verdiere, an educator, photographer and experimental painter whose work has been enjoyed throughout Humboldt County and abroad in Europe.
Victor Jacoby, an internationally-recognized Eureka visual artist whose chosen medium was French tapestry, established the Victor Thomas Jacoby Fund with Humboldt Area Foundation before his death in 1997 at age 52. Victor’s vision inspired his friend Dr. Rosalind Novick to make an additional gift to the fund and expand his dream of supporting local artists. This trust fund is dedicated to supporting Humboldt County visual artists and craftspeople and encourages exploring new ideas, materials, techniques, and mediums. In addition, the fund distributes annual cash awards to artists or craftspeople selected by a review panel of leading arts representatives.
Each fall, local artists apply through Humboldt Area Foundation for the Victor Thomas Jacoby Award by submitting ten examples of their work and vision for innovating and pushing their art to the next level.
Into the Wind by Shawn Gould / Courtesy the Artist
Shawn Gould
Art and nature have always been important parts of Shawn’s life. Growing up, he spent many days outdoors exploring the streams and woodlands near his home. These formative experiences first established his deep love of nature and his unending curiosity to see more. Along the way, he learned to follow the path less traveled, a path that he continues to explore today.
Shawn began his art career as an illustrator, creating award-winning science and natural history illustrations for clients like the National Geographic Society, Smithsonian Institute, and National Audubon Society. This was an important time to hone his skills and learn to be professional in a creative environment. After working as an illustrator for a decade, he was able to turn his attention to creating his own paintings full time.
Shawn’s work has received national recognition in American Art Collector, Western Art Collector, and American Artist Magazines. His paintings have been exhibited in the Buffalo Bill Art Show, Birds in Art, the Society of Animal Artists’ Art of the Animal, as well as galleries and museums across the nation. He has been awarded First Place in the Artists Magazine Annual Competition, First Place in the Richeson 75 Animals, Birds, and Wildlife Competition, and an Award of Excellence at the NatureWorks Art Show. Shawn is a Signature Member of the Society of Animal Artists.
See more at http://shawngould.com/
Video Courtesy the Artist
Mo is a first-generation, Queer arts activist from Western Massachusetts, working across the country to provide arts-based creation, education, and services for community growth. Mo is a mother to two free brown boys and considers herself a caretaker to her community.
Currently, Mo follows a career in Digital Media and Education/ Community Outreach and works as an artist and consultant through her micro-business Mo HD Creates. As an artist, Mo actively creates using multimedia visual arts, hip-hop, hip hop theater, dance, and poetry. You may also recognize Mo from her work with Humboldt County organizations Black Humboldt and Access Humboldt. Mo’s ideas were birthed out of a love of mixed media, social justice, and implementing change into the world. As a media worker, Mo is actively working to create safe spaces for radical media creation and sharing, while addressing the issues and structures of inequalities surrounding race, gender, class, poverty, and more.
Mo values free speech, inclusion/equity, education, open communication, and Black Joy! Mo’s goals are to produce and support radical, free art to create inclusive and truthful messaging that is accessible to everyone; create uplifting and positive entertainment that is available from a wide array of artists; to educate communities on social justice issues, art skills, art creation and more; and to create a self-liberated future generation.
See more at https://www.mohdcreates.com/ and https://youtu.be/2qnntuePZtI
Photograph courtesy Marceau Verdiere
His work, primarily in paintings and in photography, is deeply influenced by the Japanese aesthetic philosophy of Wabi-Sabi. In his paintings, Verdiere explores how memories might be visualized as traces left on one’s soul, the patina that defines our unicity. Verdiere is especially interested in the seemingly inconsequential instants—doubt, silences, daydreams—that are the fabric of our daily lives. To translate these ideas into paintings, he experiments with both the application and removal of pigments, creating marred and injured surfaces, rich as life itself, revealing traces and scars, like faded memories too stubborn to be forgotten. In his photographic work, Verdiere seeks out the worn-out, decaying, and thus overlooked surfaces around us. Aesthetically these images are often a visual inspiration for the paintings.
His work has been extensively shown in Humboldt and in Europe with several exhibits in France, Barcelona, and this past summer in Vienna. He has collaborated with the French Catholic church on a large-scale exhibition on the theme of doubt in the bible at a Cathedral in Wissembourg and worked on video-art projects in Prague with filmmakers and artists at FAMU and the Cerny Meet Factory. Verdiere has been an artist in residence in Spain, Sweden, and France. His work is present in collections around the world.
Currently, Verdiere is completing a master’s in art education at the University of Strasbourg, France, and is an IB Visual Arts and IB Art History teacher at Northcoast Preparatory and Performing Arts Academy.
See more at https://marceauverdiere.com/
The 2022 Victor Thomas Jacoby Award application will launch in the fall and will be open to all visual artists and craftspeople in Humboldt County.
About the Humboldt Area Foundation
Vera Vietor established the Humboldt Area Foundation in 1972. Since then, more than $70 million in grants and scholarships have been awarded in Humboldt, Del Norte, Curry, and Trinity Counties. Humboldt Area Foundation promotes and encourages generosity, leadership and inclusion to strengthen our communities.
For more information on services provided by the Foundation, please visit the Humboldt Area Foundation website at hafoundation.org or call (707) 442-2993.
Kindly note that the Foundation offices will be closed for the Winter holidays Thursday December 23rd to Friday December 31st.
Humboldt Botanical Garden, a nonprofit organization, has established a new fund at Humboldt Area Foundation. The Humboldt Botanical Garden Foundation Fund is another way for people and businesses to contribute through HAF in supporting this local outdoor jewel, with its variety of local plant species, as well as educational and family programs.
The Garden began with a small group of volunteers in 1991, who built and manage the 44.5 acre site south of Eureka, near Humboldt Bay and adjacent to the College of the Redwoods. It currently features 10 different gardens, a Butterfly House and an earth sculpture designed and constructed by Eureka artist Peter Santino that features two non-intersecting quarter mile meditative walking circles.
The Garden is supported by more than 1,100 individual, family and business members, over 100 active volunteers, three paid staff and curators and a ten-member volunteer board of directors.
“Our board felt a fund invested with a trusted local partner like Humboldt Area Foundation would help us attract annual and planned gifts as we look to the future,” said Board President Evelyn Giddings.
The nonprofit started its fund with $10,000 that it will work to grow through contributions. The fund will be invested for long-term growth. HAF will administer the fund and manage all donor and IRS reporting. HAF staff is also available to advise and help the volunteer-led organization with estate and planned gifts.
Tax-deductible contributions to the fund can be made online at www.hafoundation.org/HBGF or by calling (707) 442-2993. Learn more about Humboldt Botanical Garden at https://www.hbgf.org/.
The program supports a broad spectrum of wellness efforts, from culture and family support to food and housing security, mental health, and more.
“These grants are especially meaningful during a pandemic, where community members more vividly experience challenges and barriers to health,” says Amy Jester, Program Director for Health & Nonprofit Resources for the Humboldt Area Foundation, which oversees the operations of the Humboldt Health Foundation.
The Humboldt Health Foundation seeks to fund projects that help reduce or eliminate structural barriers to wellness. This year, the majority of funding will be designated to programs that support the health and wellbeing of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other People of Color. “We recognize that BIPOC individuals are disproportionately affected by the pandemic and that racism is a critical public health issue impacting our region,” says Jester.
"The grant program is there to support organizations and groups that are creating opportunities for people to live healthier lives. There are so many awesome ways communities are supporting wellbeing. We're interested in partnering with organizations to make that happen" says Amy Jester, Program Director of the Humboldt Health Foundation.
In March, the Humboldt Area Foundation announced its new 10-year strategic vision, which explores how a community foundation can help grow a thriving, just, healthy, and equitable region. The Foundation has also laid out four goals to support that vision, with resources and programs being developed to address these areas over a 10-year period. The goals are racial equity; healthy ecosystems; thriving youth and families; and a just economy and economic development.
Community health grants from the Humboldt Health Foundation represent a 24-year legacy of supporting our community through investment and grantmaking and underscore the Foundation’s commitment to our region’s health and wellbeing.
To learn more about the criteria and download an application, please visit the HHF website at humhealth.org.
Humboldt Health Foundation was founded in 1997 and is an affiliate of the Humboldt Area Foundation. Since its founding, Humboldt Health Foundation has distributed nearly $4.7 million in grants. Over the past year, the Foundation has given grants for program and general operating support for organizations like HC Black Music and Arts Association, English Express, COVID-19 direct relief for Spanish-speaking and undocumented individuals from the McKinleyville Family Resource Center, as well as the Native Women’s Collective.
BAYSIDE, CA (APRIL 3, 2020) – The first grants from the COVID-19 Regional Response Fund, totaling $195,920, are going to eighteen organizations in Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte and Curry counties to help our communities deal with the effects of the coronavirus.
The COVID-19 Fund was launched on March 20, by Humboldt Area Foundation and its affiliate the Wild Rivers Community Foundation in Del Norte County. With additional support from The California Endowment and The California Wellness Foundation, the fund started with $150,000. During the first two weeks, over 55 individual contributions and donor pledges have grown the fund to more than $285,000.
“Every one of our board members has given to the fund,” said CEO Bryna Lipper. “We live in a generous community and think $1 million is within our reach. It will help thousands of people,” Lipper said.
To encourage giving to the fund, HAF is taking no administrative fees, with 100% of every gift going to grants.
HAF’s areas of focus in awarding grants from the fund includes seniors, people with compromised immune systems, homeless, first-responders and Native communities.
In making the grants, HAF is using a streamlined review process that does not burden area nonprofits during this difficult time with a lengthy application process.
Sara Dronkers, Director of Grantmaking and Nonprofit Resources said, “Our team is reaching out daily to area nonprofits, public agencies, businesses, civic leaders and Native communities from Garberville to Weaverville to Hoopa, Crescent City and Brookings, Oregon to help us target our grants to charitable organizations on the front lines of service.”
Grants from the COVID-19 Fund are just one tool HAF is utilizing to meet the current crisis. Other resources being mobilized include loans to nonprofits, grants from other funds, fundraising from partner foundations and community leadership activities to bring partners together for action.
The first grants made from the fund (as of April 2) are:
· United Indian Health Services, $18,200, to get food and meals to 1,300 elders in local Native communities during the coronavirus and during a gap in federal funding.
· The Wiyot Tribe, $1,000, for extra hygiene, cleaning and pet supplies for elders.
· The Yurok Tribe, $20,000, to provide additional hygiene packages, food delivery and firewood to tribal members, including 900 elders and 500 at-risk youth.
· 211 Humboldt, $2,000, to the Mother Women Rising Support Group for extra help for clients as a result of the coronavirus.
· Affordable Homeless Housing Alternatives, $5,000, for additional general operating support for homeless services resulting from the coronavirus.
· Arcata House Partnership, $4,000, for facility improvements to maintain health, safety and physical distancing during the coronavirus.
· Cooperation Humboldt, $5,000, for their COVID-19 Response Coalition and $2,000 for the Humboldt Parent Hive Childcare Co-op.
· Del Norte Mission Possible, $10,000, for increased program and management support needed to address the coronavirus.
· Eureka Rescue Mission, $10,000, to help meet an increased demand for services resulting from the coronavirus.
· Family Resource Center of the Redwoods, $10,000, for its food pantry facing increased demands during the coronavirus.
· Food for People, $18,000, to respond to increased COVID-19 related demands on the organization.
· Gold Beach Senior Center, $10,000, to help with increased food distribution needs in Gold Beach and Port Orford, Oregon due to the coronavirus.
· Healy Senior Center, Redway, $15,000, to maintain and expand program operations and staffing for senior services during the coronavirus.
· Humboldt Bay Firefighters Local 652, $15,300, to purchase reusable medical Personal Protection Equipment jackets for first responders needed to protect them and the public during the coronavirus.
· Humboldt Family Services Center, $6,000, for virtual counseling for struggling families sheltering in place during the coronavirus.
· Southern Humboldt Housing Opportunities, $12,420, for two weeks of motel rooms for homeless people made vulnerable during the coronavirus and additional meals for other homeless individuals.
· Transitional Residential Treatment Facilities, $20,000, to support the shelter in place operations for 25 mentally ill individuals.
· Trinity Community Food Outreach, $10,000, for an additional food storage unit for the county’s food bank in Weaverville, along with funds for seven pantries to purchase perishables not available through government programs.
Contributions, small or large, can be made to the COVID-19 Regional Response Fund online at hafoundation.org/Giving/COVID19 or by mailing checks to HAF at 363 Indianola Rd, Bayside, CA 95524. For more info call (707) 442-2993.
On Thursday, Nov. 29 2018 members of Humboldt Area Foundation’s Social Justice Donor Circle met and unanimously agreed to make four grants of $40,000 each to: Applied Human Centered Design 2019 Boot Camp & Clinics, McKinleyville Alliance for Racial Equity Leadership Initiative Program, Cooperation Humboldt, and California Kitchen Inherent Food Sovereignty Project. This final decision was met with applause.
“We at Cooperation Humboldt are absolutely thrilled with the generous gift from HAF's Donor Circle. It has already allowed us — just over one month in — to obtain our first physical space, and to establish regular hours,” said Cooperation Humboldt co-founder Tamara McFarland.
The group plans to spend the next year planting fruit trees, installing food gardens, launching a tool library and hosting more events and skill shares.
“The seed money we received from the Donor Circle has truly empowered us to spread our wings in 2019 and we could not be more excited about all the exciting projects we have in store,” added McFarland.
The Social Justice Donor Circle began in the spring of 2017 at the initiative of a donor at the Humboldt Area Foundation. The donor wanted to pull together locals who would commit to building a donor community and pool funds for collective grant making in the region. The Circle, supported by HAF, consists of 17 anonymous donors who have met and learned about social justice philanthropy. Members have expressed optimism about their grantee’s projects and said they are looking forward to the next round of grant making in 2019, as well as learning “the needs in our community and the ways that [they] as donors can positively effect change."
The McKinleyville Alliance for Racial Equity Leadership Initiative will use its grant to develop a leadership cohort to promote racial equity in McKinleyville’s schools and community. California Kitchen Inherent Food Sovereignty will sponsor weekly community meals in Hoopa to build community, revive traditional food uses, and work together on community issues. Applied Human Centered Design, facilitated by HAF Community Strategies Director Jen Rice, will use processes that have proven successful in Del Norte in promoting social health to foster new levels of collaboration amongst child and family agencies in Humboldt.
About Humboldt Area Foundation:
Vera Vietor established the Humboldt Area Foundation in 1972. Since then, more than $80 million in grants and scholarships have been awarded in Humboldt, Del Norte, Curry and Trinity Counties. Humboldt Area Foundation promotes and encourages generosity, leadership and inclusion to strengthen our communities.
For more information on services provided by the Foundation please visit the Humboldt Area Foundation website at hafoundation.org or call (707) 442-2993.
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