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With the support of George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), CACHE designs and leads the Artists Creative Fund and professional development programming. CACHE’s program, Generate, provides cohort-based professional development throughout the grant period to support the artists and their creative projects. Artists participate in monthly topic-based sessions with expert speakers, one-on-one support from artist mentors, and media training.
The Artists Creative Fund team includes community leaders, artists, foundations, and organizations.
Lisa Marie Evans
Lisa Marie Evans leads the Artists Creative Fund program and is the Director of Creative Development with CACHE where she designs and implements professional development programming, project support and grant-making for artists. Over the past 20+ years, Lisa Marie has mentored hundreds of multidisciplinary artists. Since 2020, she has overseen the distribution of $750K+ dollars to over 175 creatives. She is a co-founder and co-curator of “Collision: When Visions Combine,” an annual performance event at the Momentary.
Lisa Marie co-directed, edited and animated In Her Words: 20th Century Lesbian Fiction. Since April of 2022, the film has reached audiences across Italy, Perú, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, England, Argentina, Mexico, Australia, and the United States. In 2020, In Her Words was the first film to win the Publishing Triangle’s Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award. She is a 2021 recipient of the Arkansas Arts Council’s Fellowship Award in Cinematic Arts.
Brittany jOhnson
Brittany Johnson leads the regional communications for the Artists Creative Fund and is the Director of Communications with CACHE. Brittany is an arts administrator originally from Houston, Texas. She previously held roles on the Communications and Marketing team at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary, at Houston Arts Alliance, Mexic-Arte Museum, and SFMOMA. She holds dual graduate degrees in Arts Management from both SMU in Dallas, USA and HEC Montréal in Montreal, Canada and has a masters in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.
Cheena pAzzo
Cheena Pazzo leads ONE80 Consulting, a Tulsa-based communications firm that also works with George Kaiser Family Foundation and the Artists Creative Fund. ONE80 is supporting press outreach and social media for ACF. An innovator at heart, Cheena cultivates more than 27 years of experience in public relations, integrated marketing and business operations, working with both large and small brands for non-profits, corporations, foundations, retail brands and government organizations.
Anita fiElds
ACF artist mentor, Anita Fields, is a contemporary Native American multi-disciplinary artist of Osage and Muscogee heritage. Her works combine clay and textiles with Osage knowledge systems.
Her sculptures have been featured in many solo and group exhibitions, including the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial, St. Louis, Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, the 2018-2020 Hearts of Our People, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the 2018 Art for A New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950’s to Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Anita is a 2020-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Integrated Arts Grant awardee. She is a 2021 National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Anonymous Was A Woman Award and a 2022 Francis J Greenburger Award.
maRlon hAll
ACF artist mentor, Marlon F. Hall is an artist whose work is rooted in social practice and grown from anthropological listening. His life intention is to cultivate human potential while unearthing beauty from perceived community brokenness. He follows the lineage of Anthropologist and Artist Zora Neale Hurston by actively doing life with and deeply listening to communities he longs to create art with and for. As an art-making storyteller, he was recently named a Fulbright Specialist by the U.S. Department of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is a 2021 Tulsa Artist Fellow, was the Visual Anthropologist and Social Media Archivist for the Greenwood Art Project, a CBS Gayle King Morning Show subject matter expert, and a producing storyteller for the Emmy Award winning Migrant Kitchen. His digital photos and film curation is featured in Google Arts and Culture with a special spotlight of his exhibition linked to the coveted Google search bar. His latest project features one of his carefully curated Amnesia Therapy Salon Dinners in partnership with The British Council and The Kenya Pavilion at the 2022 The Venice Biennial. He is a 2023-2024 Interdisciplinary Artists-in-Residence for the University of Wisconsin.
Today Marlon’s work is rooted in Tulsa where he is tilling the soil with local creatives and community advocates to nourish the harvest of human possibility growing from the ashes of the 1921 Race Massacre. The growth he works to reveal in Tulsa harvests the resilient fruit of the human spirit that is the fire-proof and impenetrable legacy of Black Wall Street.
kAlup Linzy
ACF artist mentor, Kalup Linzy is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tulsa, OK. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, Creative Capital Foundation grant, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, an Art Matters Grant, The Headlands Center for the Arts Alumni Awards Residency, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film and Video and a BAU Institute Travel Grant. Kalup’s best-known work is a series of politically charged videos that satirize the conventions of the television soap opera.
His work is in the public collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, and the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester.
Kalup has worked and collaborated with many well known artists, celebrities, and fashion designers. Among them are James Franco, Chloe Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne, Liya Kebede, Leo Fitzpatrick, James Ransone, and Dan Colen. He is a Tulsa Artist Fellow. In 2021, he founded the Queen Rose Art House in Tulsa.
Michelle Svenson
ACF artist mentor, Michelle Svenson, a Korean and Swedish American film programmer and producer, has been working in film and art for over twenty years, from helping launch reel.com, the first online film rental to managing, programming and consulting on productions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Michelle works directly with artists and filmmakers in producing and marketing their films, such as Britni Harris’ documentary “Goff” and Blackhorse Lowe’s award-winning films, “Shimasani” and “Fukry”. Michelle serves as a programmer for the California Film Institute’s DocLands film festival and is the Artistic Program Producer for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
naThan Young
ACF artist mentor, Nathan Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) is a multidisciplinary artist and composer working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art and experimental and improvised music. Nathan’s work often engages the spiritual and the political and re-imagines indigenous sacred imagery in order to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. Nathan is a founding and former member for the artist collective Postcommodity (2007-2015) and holds an MFA in Music / Sound from Bard College’s Milton-Avery School of the Arts.
George Kaiser Family Foundation is supporting this fund.. GKFF is a charitable organization dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty through investments in early childhood education, community health, social services, and civic enhancement. Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, GKFF works primarily on initiatives developed in collaboration with Tulsa-based direct service organizations.
The Artists Creative Fund operates as and is administered as a charitable component fund of Tulsa Community Foundation. In 1998, TCF was established to assist nonprofit agencies, corporations, individuals and families with flexible charitable giving solutions. TCF is a collection of over 1,500 funds, varying in size from a few thousand to multiple millions of dollars. Each fund has its own identity and philanthropic purpose. Funds benefit from being invested with other funds to create a lasting community resource and benefit to the region.
Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE) designs and leads the Artists Creative Fund, the application process and professional development programming. CACHE was formed in 2019 to connect, support, and develop the Northwest Arkansas region’s arts, culture, and creative communities. CACHE brings cohesive vision and strategy to the region’s organic creative activities, uplifting local artists, the nonprofit sector, municipal leadership, creative industries, and arts philanthropy and investment.
The Thomas K. McKeon Center for Creativity (TCC) generously provides the venue for our in-person professional development sessions with the selected artist cohort. TCC ignites the creative spirit through education, collaboration, and inspiration. It provides creative spaces for workshops, exhibitions, and events, with a guiding vision to uplift marginalized and underrepresented voices. TCC is a community partner of The Moth, and it offers programming in conjunction with TEDx, The Second City, and Pixar/StoryXperiential, among other national and international partners.
ACF artists are encouraged to consider the Center for Creativity for their public-facing projects. Flexible setups and a livestream are available, and free public events can be supported at no cost to the artist. Contact Annina.Collier@tulsacc.edu for more info.
