The Tank Center for Sonic Arts has been approved for a grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, to produce a film and music event in 2021. The award to The Tank is one of a number of such grants made nationwide.
“These awards demonstrate the resilience of the arts in America,” said Mary Anne Carter, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “We celebrate organizations like The Tank Center for Sonic Arts for providing opportunities for learning and engagement through the arts in these times.”
“We’re so happy to receive this award,” said Tank Executive Director James Paul, “It makes a stellar project possible, and it brings national recognition and resources to Northwest Colorado.”
The grant will support an event at the Tank in May 2021, of music and film by two noted American artists, the guitarist/composer Bill Frisell and the filmmaker Bill Morrison. Frisell will perform an original score and Morrison will project film images on the landscape and sides of the seven-story water tank, telling the tank’s story as an embodiment of the American West. The film will incorporate interview footage of local residents, aged 8 to 80. The event itself will be filmed for a feature documentary to be produced in 2022. This event is also supported by major grants from the Neil D. Karbank Foundation and the William H. Donner Family Foundation.
The Tank Center for Sonic Arts is organized around the huge empty water tank, discovered in the ‘70s to have extraordinary acoustic resonance, including a long and rich reverberation, rivaling the Taj Mahal’s. For decades musicians and sound artists from all over the country have trekked to The Tank to play and record. Now The Tank is a fully-equipped recording venue and concert site, as well as a 501(c)3 nonprofit arts organization.
Since its founding in 2013, the Tank has hosted hundreds of reserved visits, recording sessions and performances by many nationally known artists, including Jessica Meyer, Rinde Eckert, Roomful of Teeth, Ron Miles, and R. Carlos Nakai, among others. The Center also produces local events, like the Colorado Children’s Chorale at Rangely High School, and other off-site concerts by visiting artists at the town park, the local assisted living center and other locations. The Tank’s educational and social impact programming promotes the idea of deep listening and uses The Tank’s meditative and contemplative ambience to address critical issues.
For more information on this National Endowment for the Arts grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news. For more on The Tank, see tanksounds.org.
Special to the Herald Times
Been there, it is unbelievable.