Our Artists and Creatives Grants provide financial support - generally up to $2,500 - to independent creatives (including collectives and collaborators) making or presenting creative work relating to or encouraging community engagement. We are committed to helping projects that depart from the routine and present new, distinct and imaginative possibilities. Our fall grants (deadline September) are open to artists living or working in California. Our spring grants (deadline March) are open to artists living or working anywhere in the US. We do not fund projects by artists living outside the United States. We especially encourage applications from those who have been historically excluded from the mainstream art world. This includes, but is not limited to, those who are Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Trans, Deaf, Disabled, Immigrant or Refugee, or Self-Taught.
Spring 2026 Grant Recipients
Angel Archives
2026
PSYCHOSPHERE: A Group Exhibition Exploring Collective Consciousness
Angel Archives’ group exhibition, Psychosphere, is a conscious effort to come together in community to create art. It brings together a group of artists from diverse disciplines (who do not have gallery representation or commercial success) and provides opportunity and space for them to create in community with each other and the greater Brooklyn area. Exhibiting artists are asked to focus on collectivity: in shared ecological and environmental terms, in terms of care and empathy, and in Jungian terms: of the mystic psychic connection shared throughout humanity. The show will explore these themes of connectivity and unity, resisting our current atmosphere of division and difference. Angel Archives will host live performances, performance pieces, and a space for the collective to flourish.
Maasia Si-Asar Apet
2026
Ombré
In a world that often feels black and white, Ombré reminds us that it is not only acceptable but essential to dream in color. Inspired by Jungle’s “Back on 74,” The Wiz’s Emerald City sequence, and the Sinners club dance scene, Ombré weaves six colors, three immersive backdrops, and multiple cultural dance forms into one fluid chromatic journey. The project honors the evolution of Black dance traditions while celebrating their origins, capturing where we are freest: in our dreams. The final work — a still photography collection and a 4-8-minute visual motion study — creates multiple access points for audiences to engage with themes of identity, freedom, movement, and cultural memory.
Hidemi Takagi Bastien
2026
My Home
My Home is a collaborative portraiture and storytelling project featuring first- and second-generation immigrants. Participants wear outfits that reflect their cultural heritage/roots, paired with personal narratives that honor identity, resilience, and belonging. After the portrait sessions, Hidemi Takagi Bastien conducts interviews with participants to capture personal stories, reflections, and cultural context, ensuring that each portrait is accompanied by the participant’s own voice. Through these portraits and interviews, she explores how immigrants visually and narratively express themselves in both personal and public spaces. By documenting immigrant experiences and cultural expression through a collaborative process, My Home creates a visual and narrative archive that honors the diverse ways people maintain identity, heritage, and community in challenging social climates.
Caspar Cendre
2026
The Things We Made in Captivity: Lessons in Art, Survival, and Freedom with Queer/Trans Prisoners
Caspar Cendre’s proposed book, The Things We Made in Captivity: Lessons in Art, Survival, and Freedom with Queer/Trans Prisoners (working title), grows out of nearly 20 years of writing, making art, and building community with incarcerated and trans people, and 10 years of A.B.O. Comix as a collaborative publishing project, archive, and lifeline across prison walls. The book will draw from letters, art publishing files, and personal records to trace the lessons that emerged about chosen family, identity, faith, humor, resistance, boundaries, and what it takes to stay alive inside a system designed to disappear people. This book highlights the creative practices that help people survive another day, and the fragile, stubborn threads of community that endure across distance, cages, and time.
Dancing Through Prison Walls
2026
Dancing Through Prison Walls: Family Time
Dancing Through Prison Walls is a California-based dance and performance project whose mission is to dance with, choreograph with, and tell stories within embodied carceral landscapes and beyond, amplifying voices of incarcerated folks, and addressing mass incarceration. Family Time is a performance and community event that introduces dances from incarcerated kin from Puerto Rico, expanding understanding of what solidarity can look like: multilingual, transnational, and beautifully entangled. Following the performance, Dancing Through Prison Walls community members will share a meal and engage in a group dialogue, bringing decades of combined life experience persisting in the face of incarceration. Family Time will center families and other kin of formerly incarcerated collaborators, highlighting the impact prisons have on millions of individuals across the U.S. and honoring their stories.
Aleina Edwards and Bella Marinos
2026
Voice Mail
Voice Mail is a community archive and serial publication collecting and sharing personal stories of grief and remembrance. Participants across the greater Los Angeles area and beyond are invited to submit voicemail messages from loved ones who have passed and share the meanings behind them, creating an anthology of memories exploring grief as both a personal and communal experience. In its next iteration, Voice Mail will develop a public, web-based archive of anonymized voicemail recordings and transcripts alongside interviews with contributors reflecting on memory, loss, and the rituals that shape how we mourn. In parallel, a quarterly Voice Mail zine will feature excerpts from the voicemail transcriptions, conversations with community members, original artwork, and short epistolary texts.
Daria Faïn
2026
The Kassandra Project
The Kassandra Project (TKP) is an immersive multidisciplinary performance exploring the silencing of feminine and intuitive wisdom through the myth of Kassandra. The project invites audiences on a guided journey through landscape by vocal and instrumental sound that concludes around a shared fire-circle experience where a transgenerational choir collectively develops a living libretto that explores the consequences of denying unconditioned awareness. Rooted in Chinese Five Element theory, the experience is regulated by an “organic clock” designed to align the human experience with the natural world. Through community collaboration, somatic practices, Qigong, poetry, and music, TKP transforms personal reflection into collective expression, fostering deeper connection across generations while exploring how communities can heal through listening, creativity, and shared experience.
Liliana Folta
2026
From Subway to Subsea
From Subway to Subsea is a fiber installation that reimagines a decommissioned subway car as a nascent coral habitat, transforming a symbol of urban transit into a site of ecological renewal. Crocheted entirely from yarn and developed through collaborative studio production, the project translates industrial afterlife into environmental possibility. Inspired by the practice of cleaning and submerging retired train cars to create artificial reefs that support marine biodiversity, the work reframes submersion as an act of collective repair. This collaboration, which brings together neurotypical and neurodiverse artists, members of a synagogue fiber arts club, and local independent artists within a unified framework, invites audiences to reconsider waste and infrastructure as potential sites of renewal.
Dana Kaufman
2026
Sally Ride – New Opera about Queer Love and the First American Woman in Space
Sally Ride is a 90-minute opera exploring the life, love, and scientific achievements of Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and a LGBTQ+ pioneer. With a libretto by Aiden Feltkamp, the work explores Ride’s nearly 30-year relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy while dramatizing her contributions to STEM education and space science. Blending the lyricism of opera with the energy of musical theater, the work offers a joyful, emotionally resonant, and melodically rich experience that expands the cultural conversation about women in science, LGBTQ+ history, and the power of storytelling through music. The project will include workshops, pre-show talks, and interactive sessions for youth and families, particularly those historically underrepresented in STEM fields, including girls, queer youth, and youth of color.
Timo Kuzme
2026
Listening for Something We Haven’t Said Yet
Listening for Something We Haven’t Said Yet is a collaborative performance project by painter and performer Timo Kuzme and musician Ry Noss. The improvised performance is a dynamic exchange between sound and painting, with Noss creating layered sonic textures using brass and woodwind instruments processed through effects and looping devices. Simultaneously, Kuzme paints and writes across a suspended multi-panel canvas while contact microphones capture the tactile sounds of the process and blend them into the evolving soundscape. Creating a new, portable infrastructure will allow the work to move beyond gallery environments into community settings. By placing experimental art in unexpected environments, the project aims to create moments of surprise and attentiveness that shift how audiences perceive both art and one another.
Adebisi Labinjo
2026
Resonant Echoes: A Symphony of Identity
Resonant Echoes: A Symphony of Identity is a multidisciplinary music project that explores identity, resilience, and cultural memory through an innovative fusion of hip hop, R&B, and classical violin. The project centers on the creation of a new body of original music accompanied by immersive live performances that combine sound, visual projection, and storytelling to create a deeply expressive and emotionally engaging audience experience. By placing the violin—an instrument traditionally associated with classical music—within contemporary sonic frameworks, the project reimagines its role as a storytelling voice within modern Black musical expression. Ultimately, Resonant Echoes aims to expand access to meaningful artistic experiences while demonstrating that classical instruments, and the stories they can tell, belong in every community.
Cynthia Lujan
2026
Walking the Line
Walking the Line is a nomadic mural project and workshop designed to make traffic safety a shared community value, while also contributing to cultural equity, spatial justice, and social activation with the Long Beach community. During the free 90-minute workshop, attendees will reclaim public spaces and envision street improvements, working with paints, stencils, and other artistic mediums to portray their utopic themes over a high-visibility chevron–a symbol of California and our roadways. Attendees will take their chevrons out into the public, creating a nomadic mural where they travel the same streets they are intended to reflect. Through engagement they take on new life, used as a shield, a reflective surface, a high-visibility marker, an item of protest and resilience, and a moment of beauty and creation.
Jaclyn Mendez
2026
Art Cart/Art Bus – Mobile Creative Education Hub
Led by Jaclyn Mendez of Fishbear Studios, the Art Cart/Art Bus is a community screen printing activation that centers Indigenous education, collective wellness, and accessible art practices by inviting community members to participate directly in the creation and printing of a culturally sensitive artwork. An original illustration that reflects a community concern becomes the foundation for a public screen-printing demonstration where participants learn the process, pull their own prints, and receive apparel or patches featuring the design. The demonstration is structured in an open, welcoming space where people of all ages can gather, learn, and create together. The outcome is not only a new artwork, but a shared experience that builds relationships, sparks dialogue, and leaves participants with tangible reminders of collective strength.
Veronica Santiago Moniello
2026
a ma, radio: letters to the body
Veronica Santiago Moniello’s performance project, a ma, radio: letters to the body, centers on the figure of the traveler—someone who moves across borders, bodies, and states of change. Through a series of “letters to the body,” it traces how experiences of displacement, survival, and political violence remain stored physically and emotionally. Drawing from Moniello’s experiences returning to Venezuela during a period of crisis, her project examines surveillance, rupture, and resilience while imagining the body as a form of home. Moniello aims to gather personal stories from Venezuelans in New York City and build an archive shaped by their voices, memories and offerings. The collected writings will be translated into the sonic dimension of dance, creating a shared archive of migration and embodied memory.
Kate Mueller
2026
String of Light that Connects All Things (S.O.L.T.C.A.T.)
S.O.L.T.C.A.T. is an ongoing series of temporary, community-driven art installations along the West Coast shoreline. Each month, environmental artist Kate Mueller installs a unique, constellation-inspired steel sculpture directly into the sand, without invasive equipment, working with the ocean tides from early afternoon to dusk. These intentionally small, ephemeral pieces invite viewers to frame and reframe their perspective. The footprint where each piece connects with the sand references a constellation, a choice that honors how early humans measured time and planted crops by the stars, using events like the equinox and solstice. As tides shift and elements change, the portal-like sculptural forms showcase the fleeting nature of time, the preciousness of our deep interdependence and interconnectedness with the environment, and the urgent need for responsible stewardship.
Carolanne Patterson
2026
Chapel Day Sitting Plaza Bench Project
Carolanne Patterson’s youth-centered public art project, located at the Chapel Day Sitting Plaza in downtown New Haven, focuses on transforming neglected public space through permanent, student-designed artwork. In 2025, Patterson held artmaking sessions with students ages 8–17 and their drawings were fabricated, hand-painted into aluminum artworks, and permanently installed in the park. In addition, Patterson designed and fabricated one bench to reintroduce seating into the plaza. The project has expanded to create a second bench, which will be designed in collaboration with local middle school students. By introducing seating and artwork into spaces that were previously uninviting, the project is an invitation to slow down, notice one’s surroundings, and recognize the presence and contributions of young people within the community.
Jon Rubin
2026
The Stolen Dove
In 1995, a sculpture honoring slain Palestinian American civil rights leader Alex Odeh was installed at the Santa Ana Public Library and remains the only public monument dedicated to an Arab American in the U.S. The sculpture’s dove of peace, which was stolen in 2020 and later recovered and reattached, has been removed once more and transformed into a participatory project of memory and justice. Jon Rubin, working with Odeh’s family, the City of Santa Ana, and sculptor Khalil Bendib, invites the public to participate in this living monument project. Hosts will convene community gatherings to share Odeh’s story. When the dove moves on, the previous host will receive a precise replica as a gift, building a decentralized “flock” of 100 monuments and storytellers across the globe.
Elizabeth Smith
2026
Regeneration
Regeneration is a community-engaged art project designed to activate a historically underrepresented neighborhood in Lake Worth Beach, Florida through live music, cultural exchange, and multilingual participation. The project centers around the Unity Wall in the Wingfield Street neighborhood, a structure that once served as a divider during a period of segregation and has since been reclaimed by the community as a symbol of cultural pride and resilience. Through a series of four public gatherings, the project will transform the surrounding space into a cultural meeting ground with live performance from local artists, a Haitian drum circle, and Latin social dancing. Through music, movement, and storytelling, Regeneration seeks to demonstrate how community-engaged art can transform historically divided spaces into places of connection and cultural celebration.