Rhizome executive director Zachary Kaplan made three big announcements Tuesday on the Rhizome blog: The digital art organization and New Museum affiliate-in-residence is the recipient of a $200,000 grant; it has added two new members to its board; and hired three new staff members.
The grant comes from the Knight Foundation, which was founded in 1940 by newspaper publisher brothers John S. and James L. Knight, and funds innovative projects in the arts, technology, communities, and journalism.
The $200,000 grant from the foundation will help Rhizome to continue developing its new Webrecorder project, a tool designed to preserve ephemeral digital information, such as personalized, embedded, or interactive content.
Webrecorder was initially funded by a $600,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to build infrastructure and programming. The new grant will go towards using the tool to archive the personal online experiences of organizations, social media users, journalists, and artists, among others; to develop best practices; and to support public events at the New Museum.
On behalf of the Rhizome board, Kaplan writes of the election of two new members, Martine Syms and Josh Wolfe. Syms, a self-described “conceptual entrepreneur,” participated in Rhizome’s 2015 Seven on Seven conference, and her work appeared in the 2015 New Museum Triennial. Wolfe is co-founder of Lux, a venture capital firm that invests in cutting-edge technology and science.
Lastly, Rhizome hired three new staff members; Lyndsey Jane Moulds as software curator, Mark Beasley as a developer for Webrecorder, and researcher Lozana Rossenova, a PhD student at London South Bank University, who is “articulating best practices in digital art curation.” This follows the two hires the organization announced earlier this year, of assistant curator Aria Dean, and Ilya Kreymer, lead developer of Webrecorder.
Rhizome celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, and all this good news of continued expansion shows the organization is heading into its third decade stronger than ever.