Creative Capital, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting individual artists, has awarded $2.45 million in grants to creatives working in the visual arts, technology, performing arts, film/moving image, and literary arts. Texas artist Steve Parker and filmmakers Amber Bemak and Dolissa Medina are among the grantees.
Creative Capital 2025 Grantees
In a press release, Christine Kuan, President and Executive Director of Creative Capital, commented, “Creative Capital is proud to support experimental, pathbreaking artists seeking to realize new works at a grassroots level, from rural communities to metropolitan cities. We continue to see trailblazing ideas burgeoning in all disciplines, and this is exactly the time in America when we need these voices to be heard and new works to come to life.”
The organization selected 55 artists to create 49 projects from a pool of 5,653 applications. Project proposals were reviewed through a process that included over 100 industry leaders, programmers, cultural producers, and artists. The projects span a variety of artistic disciplines, including painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, video, installation, dance, theater, jazz, opera, multimedia performance, narrative film, experimental film, documentary film, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Topics addressed include climate emergency, gentrification, queer ecologies, anti-colonialism, mental health, artificial intelligence, immigration, reparations for slavery in the U.S., and personal stories of motherhood, family, and land.
Learn more about the Texas grantees’ projects below, via descriptions provided by Creative Capital. See a full list of grantees via the organization’s website.
Steve Parker — HOUSTON IS SINKING (Public Art; Sculpture; Sound Art)
Austin, TX
HOUSTON IS SINKING uses defunct navigational tools to sonify land loss in Houston, Texas – one of the fastest sinking cities on earth. The project materializes in two parts: as a gallery exhibition of interactive sonic sculptures made from antiquated nautical tools, and as a community performance in Galveston Bay featuring a massive foghorn choir.
The exhibition features an ecosystem of interactive sculptures that sonify accelerating land loss. As visitors enter the gallery, they encounter a constellation of alien contraptions that are suspended from above — as if floating in water. Merging antiquated seafaring devices (astrolabes, sextants, telegraphs) and new sensory technologies (motors, sensors, speakers), the sculptures respond to viewer touch and proximity to produce sound and movement.
The audio played by the sculptures is derived from three Gulf Coast sources: recordings of low-frequency subsurface vibrations, geographic survey data, and geological maps interpreted as musical notation. Viewers activate the sculptures to trigger this audio content in real-time.
Fundamentally, the sculptures are an ensemble that makes the imperceptible heard: they translate subterranean activity into a kinetic musical composition. The exhibition is augmented with screenings, workshops, panels, and new compositions by local youth.
Concurrent with the exhibition, a 100+ member foghorn choir, comprising community members and area boaters, performs a cacophonous, 30-minute musical score. Situated on shore and sea in Galveston Bay, the piece uses intuitive notation so that anyone, regardless of musical skill, can perform in the concert. The work functions like a massive, participatory warning signal.
Amber Bemak — Cosmic Moose and Grizzly Bears Ville (Documentary Film; Experimental Film)
Dallas, TX
Diagnosed at an early age with paranoid schizophrenia but choosing to live his life unmedicated, Peter Valentine lived independently, riding the edge between mental illness and magic. Mr. Valentine was an eccentric, beloved, and respected local legend of the city of Cambridge. He was also the artist’s uncle. The film follows Peter’s unusual journey, weaving around the extraordinary events surrounding his house, MIT, and the city of Cambridge.
In the 1980s, Mr. Valentine was not the owner of his rent-controlled three-story house. It was divided into apartments, and he rented one of them, living on disability payments. When MIT wanted to demolish his neighborhood to develop University Park, Mr. Valentine refused to move, insisting that he could not leave because his apartment was his laboratory for research on Electromagnetic Arts, a psychic defense system he’d created, developed, and taught.
Mr. Valentine’s refusal to leave his house was joined with a longstanding local movement around rent control and tenants’ rights, also invested in blocking the development of University Park. What Mr. Valentine did not know when he moved into his apartment was that his building and the buildings surrounding it had been at the center of the tenants’ rights movement in Cambridge for over a decade, a focal point for conflict between the landlord and urban development practices of MIT and the housing needs of Cambridge.
After seven years of Mr. Valentine’s insistence and many legal hearings, MIT physically moved his house 900 ft to Central Square. They also sold the entire house to Mr. Valentine for a dollar. The rest of the neighborhood was demolished, and MIT moved forward with its development of University Park.
Dolissa Medina — A Light for Ambiguous Loss (Animation; Documentary Film; Experimental Film)
Brownsville, TX
This project is a documentary meditation on the potential of a frozen image to heal frozen grief — what psychologists call “Ambiguous Loss.” In the hot, humid climate of South Texas, where migrants are found drowned in the Rio Grande River, a former Border Patrol Agent has developed a radical new technique to quickly identify the anonymous dead.
The experimental practice combines the innovative use of low-cost drugstore chemicals with extreme closeup photos of human skin — mediated through proper lighting — to reveal a high-resolution image of a “lost” fingerprint. Circumventing the more time-consuming, costly, and not always successful DNA method, investigators send the digital image to databases run by federal agencies and foreign governments. An ID comes back in days, and the family of the missing loved one can at last find peace.
Tom, the inventor of this emerging technique called Forensic Macrophotography, teaches his methods to investigators in an old shopping mall-turned-workforce training campus in Brownsville, TX. There is no other program like this in the country. Only a handful of people in the world currently know how to take these critical pictures.
A Light for Ambiguous Loss is an experimental documentary film about the people, places, and politics behind this experimental forensic practice. Playing with scale, the film tells stories behind the cases through fingerprint-inspired AI animation, liminal twilight shots of subtropical landscapes, and a lone figure creating death poses illuminated by a spotlight. The film asks people connected to the cases about their own experiences with Ambiguous Loss, as the film seeks answers to a paradoxical question — how do we live with people we love whose absence is ever-present?
