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    Willie Ruff, Jazz Missionary and Professor, Dies at 92

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    A master of the French horn, a rarity in jazz, he toured the world with the pianist Dwike Mitchell and taught music at Yale.Willie Ruff, who fashioned an unlikely career in jazz as a French horn player and toured the world as a musical missionary in the acclaimed Mitchell-Ruff Duo while maintaining a parallel career at the Yale School of Music, died on Sunday at his home in Killen, Ala. He was 92.His death was confirmed by his niece Jennifer Green.Mr. Ruff, who was also a bassist, played both bass and French horn in the duo he formed with the pianist Dwike Mitchell in 1955, which lasted until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013. They opened for many jazz luminaries, including Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan; played countless concerts in schools and colleges; and toured foreign countries where jazz was little known or even taboo.In 1959, they flouted edicts against music that the Soviet Union deemed bourgeois, performing an impromptu set in Moscow while on tour with the Yale Russian Chorus. Their concerts in China in 1981 were considered the first jazz performances there since the Cultural Revolution.A globe-trotting musical career, however, seemed a remote possibility when Mr. Ruff was growing up in a small Southern town during the Great Depression.Mr. Ruff, left, and Dwike Mitchell, right, in November 1959 with the classical pianists Lev Vlassenko, second from left, and Van Cliburn. Mr. Ruff and Mr. Mitchell met in the Army and in 1955 formed the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, which stayed together until Mr. Mitchell’s death in 2013.Associated PressHe was born on Sept. 1, 1931, in Sheffield, Ala., the sixth of eight children of Willie and Manie Ruff. “We lived in a house — my mother and eight children — that had no electricity, so there was no radio or music,” he said in a 2017 interview with Yale. “But there was always dancing, to silence. The dances made their own rhythm.”He eventually learned to pound out his own rhythms on piano and drums. At 14, he fudged his way into the Army, on the advice of an older cousin who had enlisted at 17 with his parents’ permission and dismissed Mr. Ruff’s concern that he was too young: “For a musician, you sure are dumb,” Mr. Ruff recalled the cousin saying. “Don’t you know how to write your daddy’s name?”He hoped to leverage his skill with the sticks into a spot in a highly regarded all-Black military band, but, seeing a glut of drummers, he took up the French horn instead. It was in that band that he met Mr. Mitchell, who taught him to play the stand-up bass.After leaving the Army, Mr. Ruff applied to the Yale School of Music, hoping to use his financial windfall from the G.I. Bill of Rights to study with the famed composer Paul Hindemith. “I brought my French horn and played an audition, and by some miracle they let me in,” he said in an interview with the quarterly newspaper The Soul of the American Actor. “So, Uncle Sam put me through my schooling!”He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953 and his master’s degree a year later. In 1955, he was weighing an opportunity to join the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra when he turned on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and saw his old friend Mr. Mitchell at the piano, as a member of Lionel Hampton’s band. He called him at the television studio, and Mr. Mitchell soon recruited Mr. Ruff to play in the band.Playing an instrument associated with classical music in a jazz band was unconventional, but it opened doors for Mr. Ruff, as did the broad musical training he had received at Yale.“Lionel Hampton’s band was the worst-paying, hardest-working band in the world,” he recalled in an interview for Yale’s Oral History of American Music project. “So if a saxophone player quit, I played his part. If a trombone player quit, I played his part, and that would make me valuable because I could transpose all these parts.” With no parts written for the French horn itself, he said, Mr. Hampton “didn’t know what to expect”:“As long as it worked, I was left to invent. It was wonderful training.”From left, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington and Mr. Ruff in 1972, the year Mr. Ruff founded the Ellington Fellowship program at Yale.Reggie Jackson/Yale University Art GalleryMr. Ruff joined the Yale faculty in 1971 and stayed until he retired in 2017. In 1972 he founded the Ellington Fellowship, which is dedicated to expanding the study of African American music and has honored a long list of jazz notables, some of whom performed concerts in New Haven, Conn., and shared their musical knowledge with hundreds of thousands of local public school students.His immediate survivors include a brother, Nathaniel. His wife, Emma, and daughter, Michelle, died before him.Late in his life, Mr. Ruff recalled that his turn to education seemed almost predestined. When he was in second grade, W.C. Handy, the composer and musician known as “the father of the blues,” who was from nearby Florence, Ala., visited his class. He played trumpet for the students and talked to them about “how important it was to continue our education and hold up our heritage and our culture,” Mr. Ruff told Yale in 2017. “He said that it’s not from royalty or from the highborn that music comes, but it is often from those who are the farthest down in society.”“After he finished,” Mr. Ruff added, “all the children who were musically inclined were permitted to shake the hand of the man who wrote ‘The Saint Louis Blues.’”“I was never the same boy again,” he recalled. “I had to be a teacher.” More

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      MacArthur Foundation Announces 25 New ‘Genius’ Grant Winners

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      The 2022 awards are going to artists, activists, scholars, scientists and others who have shown “exceptional creativity.” The grants are a bit bigger than before: $800,000 over five years.The 2022 MacArthur fellows include a sociologist working to understand what drives people to own guns; an astrodynamicist trying to manage “space traffic” and ensure that satellites don’t crash into each other in Earth’s orbit; and a lawyer seeking to expose inequities in the patent system that stifle access to affordable medications.The 25 winners of the fellowship, announced on Wednesday, study things as small as molecular materials and as vast as outer space. They are esteemed in their fields, if not yet all household names. And now, in addition to being publicly celebrated for their work, they will have more funding to keep it going.Known colloquially as the “genius” award — to the sometime annoyance of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation — the MacArthur Fellowship comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $800,000 to be awarded over five years. (Program officials noted that the size of the stipend has increased for the new group of fellows, from $625,000.)The class includes scholars tackling some particularly timely topics. Jennifer Carlson, 40, investigates the motivations and assumptions that shape gun culture in America. The longtime activist Loretta J. Ross teaches a class that works to combat so-called cancel culture. And some of Yejin Choi’s work involves using computational linguistics to help detect everything from fake consumer reviews to fake news.“I didn’t think much of myself,” said Professor Choi, 45. “I thought this award was supposed to be for other people out there — not ever for me.”“Being an immigrant, being a woman — I had to overcome a lot,” she said. “I had impostor syndrome.”The fellowship is meant for those who “show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future,” according to the foundation.The purpose “has always been to provide recipients with unrestricted financial support so that they might further their creative work and their creative inclinations with as much freedom as flexibility as possible,” said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.Few honors carry the prestige — and mystique — of the MacArthurs. Potential fellows cannot apply but are suggested by a network of hundreds of anonymous nominators from across the country and narrowed down by a committee of about a dozen people, whose names are not released.Professor Ross said she was driving when she got a call from the foundation. She assumed, at first, that someone wanted an employment reference: “I told them, kind of rudely, ‘I’m driving right now, I’ve got to teach today, call me back at 4:15.’”She did not give the caller time to explain. “I don’t drive and talk,” she said.The foundation called back at 4:15 p.m., as instructed.“I felt honored and I felt a little bewildered,” Professor Ross said. “The hardest part is that they told me a month ago and I had to keep it all to myself.”Much of the winners’ work feels urgent. Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer, investigates the scale and pathways of plastic pollution and is among the researchers who provided the first estimate of the amount of plastic waste entering the ocean annually (eight million metric tons).Moriba Jah, 51, the astrodynamicist, is an advocate for a different kind of environmentalism: space environmentalism, which calls for treating Earth’s orbit, which now contains almost 30,000 human-made objects, as a finite natural resource.Priti Krishtel, 44, the lawyer, is trying to change the patent system so that pharmaceutical companies can no longer file multiple patents on small changes to existing drugs — a move aimed at increasing access to affordable medications.In some cases, the urgent work is the study of the past. The literary historian P. Gabrielle Foreman founded the Colored Conventions Project, a digital initiative that documents Black organizing efforts between 1830 and the 1890s.“We know about white-led movements for social change in a way that has a tendency, in the public square, to overshadow Black brilliance, Black leadership and Black organizational capacity,” Professor Foreman said.“Why don’t we know about Black-led movements? One reason is because they are saying the same thing we are saying today,” she continued, noting that the conventions dealt not just with ending slavery but also with issues like equal pay, labor rights, voting rights and other issues that remain pressing almost two centuries later.There are multiple artists in the class as well. Among them is Amanda Williams, whose “Embodied Sensations” installation was at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. There are also musicians like Ikue Mori, who, over five decades, transformed the use of percussion in improvised music, and the jazz cellist and composer Tomeka Reid.The youngest fellow is Steven Prohira, 35, a physicist engineering new tools to detect subatomic particles. The oldest, at age 69, are Professor Ross and Robin Wall Kimmerer, a plant ecologist known for environmental stewardship that is grounded in both scientific research and the body of knowledge cultivated by Indigenous peoples.Steven Ruggles, 67, is also among this class of fellows. A historical demographer, he built the world’s largest publicly available database of population statistics.“I’m not the most obvious candidate for something like this,” he said, noting that he is older and has already procured considerable grant money. Still, he, conceded, “It’s a humbling thing.”This year’s fellows also include: the artists Paul Chan, Sky Hopinka and Tavares Strachan; the mathematicians June Huh and Melanie Matchett Wood; the historian Monica Kim; the writer Kiese Laymon; Danna Freedman, a synthetic inorganic chemist; Martha Gonzalez, a musician and scholar; Joseph Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and naturalist; Reuben Jonathan Miller, a sociologist, criminologist and social worker; and Emily Wang, a primary-care physician and researcher.Professor Choi, a computer scientist with expertise in what is known as natural language processing, has focused much of her recent research on common sense knowledge and reasoning — and developing artificial intelligence systems that can reason with that common sense.“People really looked down on me,” she said, recalling that someone had once chased her down at a conference to convince her that attempting to study common sense was a fool’s errand.Getting a MacArthur, she said, has been “enabling” — both financially and mentally, Professor Choi said. The same person who had sought her out at the conference asked her years later to recommend reading for a class the person wanted to teach, she said. The topic of the class? Common sense. More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Announce 2022 Disability Futures Fellows

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      A Broadway actress, documentary filmmaker and DC comic artist are among this year’s recipients. They were selected by fellow disabled artists from a pool of about 60 nominees.Nasreen Alkhateeb, a filmmaker who has documented Kamala Harris on the campaign trail; Antoine Hunter, also known as Purple Fire Crow, a Deaf, Indigenous choreographer whose work has been performed around the world; and Tee Franklin, who is writing new Harley Quinn comics for DC, are among the second class of disability futures fellows, the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations announced on Wednesday.The fellowship provides 20 disabled U.S. artists, filmmakers and journalists with unrestricted $50,000 grants administered by the arts funding group United States Artists. They are chosen by peer advisers who are themselves disabled artists. The fellowship supports people at all stages of their careers, and the class includes emerging and established artists.One grant recipient, Corbett Joan O’Toole, 70, an activist and historian who was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Crip Camp,” said, “I’m really shocked.”“I do a lot of good work, but it’s not necessarily the prominent stuff,” she said. “It’s networking, providing resources for people, filling in the gaps.”This is the second class of fellows in the program, which was established in 2020 as part of an effort to increase the visibility and elevate the voices of disabled artists. Originally conceived as an 18-month initiative, the foundations announced last year that they would commit an additional $5 million to support the program through 2025.About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Dickie Hearts, a Deaf, gay and BIPOC actor and filmmaker known for his recurring role in Netflix’s San Francisco-set series “Tales of the City,” said he hoped to use the funding to produce a live version of an original concept musical in American Sign Language that he had directed remotely on Zoom during the pandemic.“I would love to see more deaf people behind the scenes, as well as onscreen,” he said in a video interview this week, which was conducted with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. “I want to see more creative executives, deaf directors,” executive producers and writers.The grants offer flexible compensation options. The money can be distributed in a lump sum, in payments or even be deferred, depending on what works best for the artist.Also among the recipients are Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actor who recently portrayed the Lady in Purple in the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf”; JJJJJerome Ellis, a composer and poet who has a stutter (the reason for the repeated J’s in his name) and produces work about stuttering and Blackness; and Wendy Lu, a journalist and disability rights advocate who was recently hired as an editor by The New York Times.“I’m working on a book that’s coming out next year, playing concerts again, dancing more — it’s so exciting to be back working live,” said Ellis, 33, who about a year and a half ago moved back to Virginia, where he grew up, from New York.The inaugural class of fellows included the choreographer Alice Sheppard, the filmmaker Jim LeBrecht and the journalist Alice Wong.The Ford and Mellon Foundations are planning to invite people in the philanthropy and cultural sectors to learn from fellows and disability arts leaders at a symposium in New York in 2025, and fellows will be invited to a networking retreat in 2024. More

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      Lorraine Hansberry Statue to Be Unveiled in Times Square

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      A life-size likeness of the pioneering playwright will be unveiled in June as part of a new initiative to honor her legacy.When the Los Angeles-based artist Alison Saar was commissioned a little over four years ago to sculpt a statue of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, she had just one thought: “Am I the right person for the job?”“I don’t really work with likenesses,” said Saar, 66, whose artwork focuses on the African diaspora and Black female identity. “But they said, ‘No, no, we want it to be more of a portrait of her passion and who she was beyond a playwright.’”The request had come from Lynn Nottage, the two-time Pulitzer-winning playwright, as part of an initiative she was developing with Julia Jordan, the executive director of the Lilly Awards, which recognize the work of women in theater. The Lorraine Hansberry Initiative was designed to honor Hansberry, who was the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway.“She’s just part of my foundational DNA as an artist,” Nottage said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Throughout my career, if I needed to look to structure, or storytelling, or inspiration, I could go to ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ this perfect piece of literature.”The statue, a life-size likeness of Hansberry surrounded by five movable bronze chairs that represent aspects of her life, and, Saar said, invites people “to sit and think with her,” will be unveiled in Times Square on June 9. The event will include performances and remarks from Nottage and Hansberry’s 99-year-old older sister, Mamie Hansberry. It will remain in Times Square through June 12, and then begin a tour of the country over the next year or so on its way to its permanent home in Chicago, Hansberry’s birthplace.Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, the year she made history when she became the first Black woman to have a play reach Broadway. David Attie/Getty ImagesBut, Nottage said, they also wanted a more forward-looking way to honor Hansberry, leading to the initiative’s second prong: A scholarship to cover the living expenses for two female or nonbinary graduate student writers of color who create for the stage, television or film. Beginning next year, the $2.5 million scholarship fund will give its first recipients $25,000 per year, generally for up to three years — the typical length of a graduate program. (LaTanya Richardson Jackson, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her role as Lena Younger in the 2014 Broadway revival of “Raisin,” the Dramatists Guild and the National Endowment for the Arts are among the initial donors.)“So many graduate programs for writers at elite institutions like Juilliard, Yale and Brown now offer free tuition,” Nottage said, “but you see people not taking a place because they can’t afford to take three years off to pay for rent, computers, food and travel, which could be, on average, anywhere from $15,000 to $35,000 per year.”“It would’ve made a huge difference for me,” Nottage said of the scholarship fund. “When I was at the Yale School of Drama, one of the actors told me I could get public assistance to pay for groceries and electricity, and when I showed the welfare department in New Haven my financial aid package — I was doing work-study — they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, you’re living below the poverty line.’”Hansberry, who was just 34 when she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, is best known for “Raisin,” a semi-autobiographical family drama that tells the story of an African American family living under racial segregation on the South Side of Chicago. The play, which opened on Broadway in 1959 with Sidney Poitier in the cast, would go on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, making Hansberry, at 29, the youngest American and first Black recipient of the award.The life-size statue shows Hansberry holding a flame. It will be surrounded by five movable bronze chairs that represent aspects of her life and work. Nolwen Cifuentes for The New York TimesHansberry was also active in political and social movements, including the fight for civil rights, regularly writing articles about racial, economic and gender inequality for the Black newspaper Freedom. She also wrote letters signed “L.H.N.” or “L.N.” — for Lorraine Hansberry Nemiroff (her husband’s last name) — to The Ladder, a monthly national lesbian publication. In those letters, she wrestled with issues she faced as a lesbian in a heterosexual marriage and the pressure on some lesbians to conform to a more feminine dress code.Her older sister, Mamie, recalls Lorraine being bookish from a young age. Their parents allowed them to sit out on the sun porch during visits from prominent individuals, such as the poet Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson, the singer, actor and activist. “Daddy wanted us to be able to listen to some of the distinguished people who came by the house,” she said.Lorraine Hansberry would write letters to congressmen — “My mother would find them when she was cleaning her room,” Mamie Hansberry said. “She was free to write to anyone,” Mamie said, “and they would answer!”It is that spirit that Nottage and Jordan said they hope to cultivate in the next generation of playwrights. The statue’s tour will begin with stops at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem (June 13-18) and Brooklyn Bridge Park (June 23-29) before traveling to cities like Atlanta, Detroit and Los Angeles. It is also set to make stops at historically Black colleges and universities, including Spelman College in Atlanta and Howard University in Washington.Jordan said the initiative will also work with local theaters and artists to present Hansberry’s work, as well as the work of contemporary writers of color, in conjunction with the sculpture’s placement. New 42, the nonprofit organization behind the New Victory Theater, has also created a resource guide to teach middle- and high-school students about Hansberry and “Raisin,” which will be free for schools and organizations to use.“I do think that if Hansberry had continued to write and develop as an activist, one of the things she would’ve done was amplified voices of other women of color,” Nottage said.Jordan said she and Nottage had already raised $2.2 million of their $3.5 million goal for the statue construction costs, tour and scholarship fund. By 2025, Jordan said, they expect to support a total of six playwrights per year.“Everyone wants to produce these women,” Nottage said. “But we want to make sure people are prepared — that they’re secure in their voices and secure in their craft — so they don’t fail when they get that opportunity.” More

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      Study Finds Sustained Progress for Female Directors and Filmmakers of Color

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      But women of color are still not getting feature directing jobs in Hollywood, the annual report on top-grossing movies finds.For the first time in a long time, Dr. Stacy L. Smith is feeling optimistic. The director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has been studying the gender and race breakdown of Hollywood’s top-grossing directors since 2007, and finally has some good news to report. For the first time since her work began, Smith has seen sustained progress for women and people of color working behind the camera.Over the 15 years of the study, which analyzed 1,542 directors, only 5.4 percent were women. In 2020, that percentage rose to 15 percent and in 2021, it stood at 12.7 percent. Despite that recent drop, and despite the fact that the proportion is nowhere close to reflecting the American population, which is 51 percent female, Smith is encouraged that the numbers have stayed in the double digits for a sustained period of time.“I think that the people that are running these large companies that are largely responsible for about 90 percent of the market share are finally starting to diversify,” Smith said in a phone interview. “And we’re not only seeing this with gender, we’re also seeing big gains with race/ethnicity in the second year of the pandemic. Despite the uncertainty around the box office, there seems to be a concerted effort to correct the biases of the past.”The news comes the day after “The Power of the Dog” director Jane Campion made history, becoming the first woman to be nominated twice in the best director category for the Academy Awards. (She was previously nominated in 1994 for “The Piano.”)When it comes to underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, which includes Black and Latino filmmakers, the percentage of directors reached a 15-year high: 27.3 percent. The group with the least amount of traction directing features are women of color, who still make up only 2 percent of the total.“When Hollywood thinks of a woman director, they’re thinking of a Caucasian woman, and when they think of a person of color directing, they’re thinking about a male,” Smith said, pointing to the fact that female directors of color earn the highest reviews according to Metacritic yet most often are given lower production budgets and fewer marketing dollars from their studio beneficiaries.To address this disparity head on, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative is starting a $25,000 scholarship program for a woman of color during her senior year at an American film school. In addition to the financial aid, the winning student will be advised by a group of Hollywood executives and talent, including Donna Langley, the chairman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, and Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, among others.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      $50 Million Gift to Juilliard Targets Racial Disparities in Music

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      The renowned conservatory will use a grant from a California foundation to expand a training program focused largely on Black and Latino schoolchildren.For three decades, the Juilliard School has sought to bring more diversity to classical music by offering a weekend training program aimed largely at Black and Latino schoolchildren.Now the renowned conservatory is planning a major expansion of the initiative, known as the Music Advancement Program: Juilliard announced on Thursday that it had received a $50 million gift that it would use to increase enrollment in the program by 40 percent and to provide full scholarships to all participants.“This will be transformational,” Damian Woetzel, Juilliard’s president, said in an interview. “It will broaden the pathway to the highest level of classical music education in such a significant way.”The gift is from Crankstart, a foundation in California backed by the venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman, a writer, who are longtime supporters of the program.Heyman, in announcing the gift, pointed to the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in American orchestras, where only about 4 percent of musicians are Black or Hispanic. The Music Advancement Program’s “commitment to recruiting underrepresented minorities will help bring new spirit, as well as superb young musicians, to orchestras, concert halls and theaters everywhere,” Heyman said in a statement.Juilliard aims to expand enrollment to 100 students, up from 70. The initiative will also broaden its reach to include younger students. (It currently serves children ages 8 through 18.) And in addition to full scholarships for all students, the gift will be used to create a fund to help them buy instruments.The program includes ear training, instrument lessons and theory classes for its students, who largely come from New York City public schools. Students can enroll for four years. The program costs $3,400 per year, though many students receive full or partial scholarships, currently funded from a variety of sources.While just seven Music Advancement Program students since 2010 have ended up in Juilliard’s undergraduate program, more have entered other prestigious institutions, including the Manhattan School of Music, Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory. And 61 of the students have gained admission to Juilliard’s prestigious pre-college division.Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinet and the artistic director of the program, said the gift would allow Juilliard to reach students who might have been reluctant to apply because of financial considerations.“We needed to make sure there were no barriers to getting more of the students we want into our program,” McGill said in an interview. “We wanted to open the doors, the pathways, to their success.”The program was founded in 1991 as a way of providing rigorous training for promising young musicians at a time when many New York schools were cutting music education classes. The initiative has at times faced financial difficulties. Juilliard almost suspended it in 2009, citing budget cuts and problems raising money. A group of donors, including Moritz and Heyman, eventually came to the rescue. In 2013, the couple stepped up again, giving $5 million.The program’s expansion comes amid a broader push by artists and cultural institutions to address longstanding inequities in classical music. Weston Sprott, who helps oversee the program as dean of Juilliard’s preparatory division, said being a musician of color was too often a lonely experience, and that ensembles should better reflect the diversity of their communities.“Oftentimes, as musicians of color, the reward that we get for our success is isolation,” Sprott, who is Black, said in an interview. “Classical music can’t be the best it can be without these young people that we’re bringing into our programs.” More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Expand Initiative for Disabled Artists

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      The foundations are adding $5 million to the Disability Futures program, which will continue through 2025 with two more classes of 20 fellows each.The Disability Futures initiative, a fellowship established by the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations last fall to support disabled artists, is expanding. The foundations announced on Friday that they will commit an additional $5 million to support the initiative through 2025, which will include support for two more cohorts of 20 fellows.The fellowship, which was created by and for disabled individuals, was conceived as an 18-month initiative. It provided 20 disabled artists, filmmakers and journalists, selected from across the United States, with unrestricted $50,000 grants administered by the arts funding group United States Artists.But Margaret Morton, the director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, said it was clear from the beginning that it couldn’t just be a one-off venture.Projects undertaken by members of the first cohort will be showcased at the first Disability Futures virtual festival, on Monday and Tuesday, with programming from some of the country’s leading disabled artists, writers, thinkers and designers. It is free and open to the public.Among the highlights: A session on disability portraiture with the filmmakers Jim LeBrecht and Rodney Evans, the painter Riva Lehrer and the journalist Alice Wong; a conversation exploring the connections between climate justice and disability justice led by Patty Berne; and a virtual dance party hosted by the garment maker Sky Cubacub, with music by DJ Who Girl (Kevin Gotkin). Evening runway performances from models wearing items from Cubacub’s Rebirth Garments and a meditation experience with the initiative Black Power Naps, featuring Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa, are also on tap.“It’s been really profound for me to see how much the fellows chosen in the first cohort were interested in elevating others in the community,” Emil J. Kang, the program director for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation, said in an interview on Thursday.The next class of fellows will be announced in 2022. They are chosen by peer advisers who are themselves disabled artists.But the feedback from the first class, Morton said, was frank: Do even better in the selection process.“One of the fellows challenged us,” she said, about there being only one Native American fellow. “And we appreciated that and were challenged to get it right and make sure we have a deeper pool.”The grants offer flexible compensation options. The money can be distributed in a lump sum, in payments or even be deferred, depending on what works best for the artist.The fellowship “has made an incredible difference in my life and career,” the writer and photographer Jen Deerinwater said in an email. “It’s allowed me more financial freedom, without the risk of losing my disability and health care services, to pursue more artistic pursuits such as music.”The pandemic has made foundation leaders “deeply aware” of the challenges disabled professionals face, Morton said. About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.“We gained a deeper impression and perspective about what it’s like to navigate through the world,” she said.The program’s overarching goal is to help the artists make connections, Morton said.“Our biggest dream is visibility,” she said. For audiences to see the artists and for funders to see that “they should start investing in disabled practitioners.” More