On the Funding Front

• Two Austin visual-arts projects won grants this year from the Idea Fund, a program in which Houston arts organizations Aurora Picture Show, DiverseWorks ArtSpace, and Project Row Houses take funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and reallocate it to artists or artist groups across Texas. Panelists Bill Arning (director, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston), Kate Lorenz (executive director, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago), and Andrea Mellard (assistant curator, Austin Museum of Art) combed through some 200 applications before settling on this year's 10 grantees, each of whom will receive $4,000 to create a project in 2011 ($3,500 for the project and the rest for seed money to develop future work). The lucky Austinites are:

Boozefox (Drew Liverman, Jules Buck Jones, Michael Phalan, Scott Eastwood), for Battleship Earth, an iceberglike sculpture/watercraft that will be "driven" around Lady Bird Lake, and

Andy Rihn, for Texas' Longest Hammer Choir, a short film recording 500 people hitting hammers together across abandoned railroad tracks, with the filmmakers, soundtrack musicians, and propulsionists in a custom-made railroad cart. Also, UT alumnus

Buster Graybill, who created the award-winning 2009 Texas Biennial hit Bait Box, won a grant for The Progeny of Tush Hog (see right), a follow-up to the project he developed during his 2010 residency at San Antonio's Artpace focused on a form of sculpture/hog feeder that he imagines as living creatures, adapting and mutating in the wild, much like feral hogs. For more information, visit www.theideafund.org.

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• Nine area arts groups will receive 2011 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to the previously reported $20,000 for the Vortex Repertory Company to support its production of the new musical Sarah Silver Hands, the following organizations received funding:

Austin Film Society: $30,000 to support the presentation of nine curated film series, including contemporary documentaries; films by directors Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, and Ken Russell; and films from Japan and Hong Kong;

Badgerdog Literary Publishing: $20,000 to support the publication, promotion, and distribution of the quarterly journal American Short Fiction;

Ballet Austin: $20,000 to support the creation and presentation of a new full-length ballet based on Mozart's The Magic Flute, choreographed by Artistic Director Stephen Mills;

Blue Lapis Light: $10,000 to support the creation and presentation of Devotion, a site-specific aerial dance performance over the Colorado River, with dancers performing on the river bank and suspended above the water;

Great Promise: $10,000 to support the American Indian Heritage Festival and Powwow;

Mexic-Arte Museum: $20,000 to support the exhibition "Young Latino Artists 16," to be curated by Alex Freeman of Artpace in San Antonio;

Tapestry Dance Company: $10,000 to support the 11th annual Soul to Sole Tap Festival, with guest artists Jason Samuel-Smith, Jason Janas, Brenda Bufalino, Barbara Phillips, and Linda Sohl-Ellison; and

Zach Theatre: $35,000 to support the second fully staged production of The Book of Grace by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks.