3Arts Awards 20 Chicago Artists with Unrestricted Cash Grants

3Arts, the Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, is honored to award 20 Chicago artists with unrestricted grants at the 11th annual 3Arts Awards Celebration, taking place Monday, November 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The celebration will honor the ten annual 3Arts Awards recipients along with ten recipients of Make a Wave-an unprecedented artist-to-artist giving initiative.

The 3Arts Awards celebration honors ten artists with $25,000 cash grants and ten additional artists with $1,000 grants as part of the peer-to-peer giving program, Make A Wave. 3Arts has distributed more than $3 million in total funding to more than 600 Chicago artists over the past eleven years and will award $260,000 on November 5th alone.

"Championing Chicago artists is a privilege like no other. We are thrilled to present our awardees with opportunities that they profoundly deserve," said Esther Grisham Grimm, Executive Director of 3Arts. "Last year's launch of Make a Wave made it abundantly clear that there is nothing quite as exciting as witnessing artists offering support to other artists by paying it forward and encouraging them to dream big."

The 2018 recipients of $25,000 3Arts Awards are:

Dancers and dance educators T. Ayo Alston and Anna Martine Whitehead; musicians Brittany "BrittanE" Edwards and Ben LaMar Gay; teaching artists Leida "Lady Sol" Garcia and Elgin Bokari T. Smith; playwright and actor Sandra Delgado and costume designer Christine Pascual; and visual artists Dianna Frid and Hýõng Ngô.

3Arts will additionally celebrate the recipients of Make a Wave, a groundbreaking artist-to-artist grant program in which past 3Arts Awards recipients select another ten Chicago artists to receive surprise $1,000 awards, in effect sending a wave of support through our city's brilliant creative core. The recipients of this year's Make a Wave grants were selected by 2017 3Arts awardees and will be announced at the November 5th event.

This year's 3Arts Awards celebration will feature performances by past awardees including wheelchair dancer Kris Lenzo and operatic baritone Will Liverman. The event is led by co-chairs Erryn Cobb (3Arts Board of Directors and CEO of Fetch Integrated Marketing Communications), Remberto Del Real (3Arts Board of Directors and Managing Director of Personal and Business Banking Marketing for BMO Harris Bank), and Jess Godwin (singer/songwriter and 2016 3Arts Award recipient).

For more information about 3Arts, please visit www.3arts.org.