By GINNY VAN ALYEA

On a Monday evening downtown at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, an energetic crowd of around 700 gathered to cheer the announcement of this year's 3Arts Awards. 3Arts, the Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, announced the recipients of its Next Level Awards—$50,000 unrestricted awards given to past 3Arts awardees. The organization also celebrated ten previously announced 3Arts Awards recipients with $30,000 unrestricted grants, and ten artists who were selected by past 3Arts awardees to receive $2,000 unrestricted Make a Wave awards, a pay-it-forward gift that artists are empowered to usher through their own creative community in order to create a rising tide. 

While 3Arts has in the past distributed five Next Level Awards, the roster this year was expanded to include one additional award for teaching artists; at $50,000, this is the largest no-strings-attached award for teaching artists in the world. Honoring the powerful work of local artists and their ripple effects in neighborhoods across Chicago, the 2024 Next Level awardees are teaching artists William Estrada, Emily Hooper Lansana, and Andy Slater, and visual artists Rozalinda Borcilă, Bethany Collins, and Riva Lehrer.

In such a competitive field in which grants and awards for artists are often hard to access, receiving a major award is quite an achievement—but a one-time infusion of support is rarely enough to power artists’ ambitious dreams. Our Next Level Award is a rare second award designed to fuel their work as their careers evolve over time, when they are ready to bring new visionary projects to life,” said 3Arts Executive Director Esther Grimm. She adds, “In 2023, we celebrated three Next Level visual artists and two teaching artists. Last night, we announced the addition of a third Next Level Award for teaching artists, expressing our enduring admiration for the artists who work across generations, in schools, neighborhoods, hospitals, prisons, elder care centers, and more. The six new awardees are truly ‘next level.’”

The night's other big annoucement was about the future of 3Arts. Esther Grimm, who has served as Executive Director for 23 years and who is stepping down in 2025, shared that the organization will always have her heart, even when she's not there in an official role. Leading 3Arts, she said, unexpectedly became the ride of a lifetime. Grimm told the crowd that since the organization started 17 years ago, there has been a dream of reaching artists beyond Chicago in order to bridge divides and connect more artists. Next year 3Arts will partner with Art Space 304 in Carbondale, Illinois to pilot two 2025 3Arts awards, in East St. Louis and in Carbondale, meaning 3Arts will celebrate 12 artists in 2025 – two more than the usual 10.

The jam-packed awards ceremony featured boundary-breaking performances by three past 3Arts awardees, including Rika Lin (2023 awardee) presenting the experimental dance work, Feedback, with collaborator Takashi Shallow. Appearing in what looked like sunset on stage, singer-songwriter Nashon Holloway (2022 awardee) performed the world premiere of Go Awf, an original new song from her forthcoming album. Wearing a pink sparkly ballgown the color of cotton candy, Holloway sang and spoke about doing things in harmony and making it a life style and ethos for treating one another. 

Donnetta “LilBit” Jackson (2023 awardee) performed an excerpt from A M.A.D.D. Mixtape, a piece choreographed by Jackson that explores the African diasporic roots of tap and footwork with a team of energetic dancers from Chicago's M.A.D.D Rhythms. Bright backgrounds and alternating sounds and tempos sustained the energy of the evening. 

Each awardee was part of a video program featuring individual interviews with each artist as they shared their stories of the moment they got the call from 3Arts as well as what they hope to create and give back to Chicago. Each recipient was so positive about Chicago and its artist communities, creating a picture of a community hard at work to keep the city a culturally rich place with people from so many corners of the world.

When it was time for the program to conclude, Co-Chairs Michelle T. Boone, Whitney Hill, and Candace Hunter thanked the Host Committee of arts and civic leaders and noted that its 17-year history, 3Arts has distributed more than $8.1 million to more than 2,300 Chicagoland artists. 3Arts awardees include 68% women artists, 73% artists of color, and 22% Deaf and disabled artists. Boone thanked Grimm for her leadership as her tenure, sharing testimonials from artists, such as Amanda Williams, who credit their 3Arts award with helping them reach new heights in their career. Grimm has tended to this community and nurtured so many artists, and her work will continued for years to come, now that 3Arts has been established as a model for arts best practices in our country. Said Boone, It’s an organization with guts.

More information about this year's awardees may be found at 3arts.org