LACE AWARDS $71,500 IN ARTIST GRANTS THROUGH THE LIGHTNING FUND AND JACKI APPLE AWARD
Los Angeles, January 20, 2026 — Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2026 Lightning Fund Artist Grants and the Jacki Apple Award, awarding a total of $71,500 to Los Angeles–based artists.
Our sixth LACE Lightning Fund open call was part of a regional regranting fund made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “Serving Los Angeles’ broad and diverse arts community, the Lightning Fund provides direct support to artists whose work enriches the city’s cultural landscape,” says Khadija Nia Adell, Regional Regranting Program Officer at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, “We are grateful for LACE’s thoughtful stewardship of this fund—championing experimental practices, uplifting diverse voices, and ensuring that risk taking artists have the resources to create meaningful work for their communities.”
This year, LACE received over 270 applications, reflecting the depth and diversity of artistic practices across the city. Nine Los Angeles-based artists were awarded a $6,000 grant, and one collective a $7,500 grant, for the creation and completion of a project through the Lightning Fund. One Los Angeles-based mid-career artist was awarded a $10,000 grant through the Jacki Apple Award.
The 2026 selection panel included Naz Cuguoğlu (Curator of Contemporary Art, Asian Art Museum), Patrisse Cullors (Co-founder, Crenshaw Dairy Mart), Asher Hartman (Director and Founder, Gawdafful National Theater), Kristan Kennedy (Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art), Daniela Lieja Quintanar (Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Programs, REDCAT), and Njeri Rutherford (Program Manager, CultureSource).
The panelists expressed strong enthusiasm for the range and rigor of the application pool. “What struck me most in reviewing the applications was the care and intentionality embedded in so many of the proposals. Artists in Los Angeles are working across disciplines and scales, often collaboratively, engaging social and political realities while still leaving space for speculation, tenderness, and experimentation,” says Cuguoğlu.
Artists awarded with the Lightning Fund and Jacki Apple Awards were selected based on their artistic merit, the potential of their project’s impact on their community, and the capacity of their project to be achieved within the next year.
Visit Lighting Fund for panelist biographies and information about the application. Read below for details on this year’s awarded artist projects.
Jacki Apple Awardee for Performance and Artist Projects
Edgar Arceneaux
Reclaiming Outterbridge invites the people of Los Angeles—especially the Altadena community—to join Arceneaux in a transformative experience that is part performance, part ritual: a communal enactment of his Skinning The Mirror technique. Using paint, mirrors, and canvas, participants will create something together at sundown on the property of the late American artist and activist John Outterbridge. The project reclaims community connections after the Eaton Fires destroyed many homes and local businesses, including Outterbridge’s home, art collection, and archives. Through an act of literally skinning the earth, recovering culture and history through loss, the work reclaims not only the land but also one another. Gathering as neighbors and strangers, we bring back fragments of Outterbridge’s life and work—and reconnect with our own stories and the deeper history of the land.
Lightning Fund Awardees
Lena Chen
Staged in a Chinese banquet hall, Five Flavors weaves firsthand stories from Asian American sex workers with a performance lecture on the history of Chinese American food, immigration exclusion, and labor. Each story is paired with a dish representing a flavor from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM): salty, sour, bitter, sweet, or pungent, which corresponds to an organ and emotion. Salty foods, for instance, treat kidney-related ailments tied to fear. As dishes circulate among participants, the lecture draws connections between Panda Express, American colonialism, Julia Child, racialized pornography, and Western feminism. The performance becomes a potluck of stories,representing Asian American womanhood through the metaphor of consumption and using food to heal fears, anxieties, anger, and resentments in Asian communities —what Cathy Park Hong calls “minor feelings.”
alexandre ali reza dorriz
In the appropriation of water during Gold Rush-era disputes, the legal doctrine in Irwin v. Philips (1855) facilitated the expropriation of land and resources by sanctioning contemporary settlers’ diversion of water for mining ‘claims’, staked land with speculative extractable natural resources. As part of the artist’s fieldwork since 2017, alexandre ali reza dorriz situates a new body of work alongside sites of water precarity using data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Dashboard on California groundwater levels, coinciding with a server aggregating live-data from all USGS monitoring locations in California.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork
Gama 1213-B is a forthcoming sound and sculpture installation by artist Jacquline Kiyomi Gork that connects two geographically distant, yet historically linked sites of confinement: the caves of Okinawa, Japan, used by civilians during the Battle of Okinawa, World War II, and the Tule Lake incarceration camp for Japanese Americans during the same time period. Both sites have profoundly shaped Japanese/Okinawan and Japanese American cultural identities, including Gork’s own family history as a fourth-generation Japanese American of Okinawan descent, yet these experiences remain poorly memorialized in public life. Gama 1213-B substitutes the static symbolism of traditional monuments in favor of a fluid, time based experience that mirrors the fragility and instability of memory itself.
Harmony Holiday
Holiday is building an audio archive and in depth oral histories of Los Angeles jazz musicians and their families, which includes legacy jazz families like the Coltranes and the Minguses and lesser known or overlooked locals like Bobby Bradford. The archive will be open to the public and run by Holiday herself at 2220Arts in Los Angeles. Often the building of it will involve live events that she will host there on site. In the case of the Mingus oral history project and a couple of others, the audio is evolving into documentary and autobiographical film projects that will debut there and show in Los Angeles first.
Huntrezz Janos
Dis-ARMOUR-Machine is Huntrezz Janos’s Afrofuturist biomechanical suit of armor, 3D printed from recycled materials at the off-grid solar microstudio ExtraTerraceTrill. Part sculpture and part exoskeleton, it blooms with metallic thorns, LEDs, and a visor helmet that amplifies the voice into the street. Over one year, Janos will activate the work across Los Angeles at parks, holiday gatherings, and protests, turning public space into a stage for poetry, resistance, and collective imagination. A City Hall beacon performance will anchor the project’s public life. AR try-on, QR posters, and an interactive website invite everyone inside the myth and share it online.
Maria Maea
Maea will produce a water purifying sculpture with the support of the 2026 LACE Lightning Fund. The solar still fountain, Aguas Divinas, purifies ocean water for the purpose of watering a food garden. This sculpture will be a part of a larger public food forest project that she is currently developing in collaboration with LAND. The site is on the Catalina Museum of Art & History lot and will focus on creating food accessibility for the local community and utilities natural on island resources. The space will be accessible to locals and visitors daily during museum open hours in Spring of 2027.
Mims
Marooning Bodies: Prototype and Prophecy is a participatory open studio that transforms collective imagination into a living archive. Rooted in the ongoing Marooning Bodies project, the open studio gathers drawings, writings, ritual objects, sound recordings, and archival materials documenting the creation of the game itself and the evolution of its future relics (art objects). Sketches, prototypes, journals, and test materials sit alongside completed works, revealing the project as an unfolding practice. The archive invites visitors to read, listen, and contribute their own offerings. Presented at Feminist Center for Creative Work, Mims and Moui share an open studio where the archive is alive, participatory, and oriented toward futures of freedom.
Anna Luisa Petrisko
The Body Ether Light Laboratory is an immersive workshop series designed to deepen self-realization and expand consciousness. The laboratory explores a set of poetic scores from the newly founded Body Ether Institute, an artist-run platform for somatic and spiritual research. The laboratory invites participants to slow down, listen, and experiment. Together, we will create a living space for investigating the body’s intelligence and subtle fields, fostering an ecology of care, presence, and renewal.
Secret Server Club (Alice Yuan Zhang, Nat Decker, Shanhuan Manton, Haley Roeser, and Whisper)
Local Area Network is a world in progress. They examine the hidden internet infrastructure of Los Angeles, while also deploying our own alternative networks, protocols, and rituals of digital connection. As technologies like the ‘cloud’ hide their violent impacts by obfuscating their material presence, exploitative labor practices, and ties to genocide, this project calls attention to the very real forms this infrastructure takes in our community, and our power to collectively produce alternatives. Technology, like the world, is not something that happens to us, it is something that we make.
Xiangxi Zhang
Assembly Required is a sculptural project built from the scraps, tools, and tension of Zhang’s day job as a plumber, electrician, and art handler. Zhang will construct five site-specific sculptures—temporary “shrines” for labor—in overlooked places like supply yards, back alleys, and loading docks across Los Angeles. Each piece will be assembled on-site using his hands, tools, and leftover materials, with lighting and recorded audio reflecting on exhaustion, repetition, and survival. This project is a way to honor unseen workers and ask: what does it mean to make something sacred out of what’s left behind?
Supporters
The Lightning Fund is administered with lead support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of the Regional Regranting Network.
About the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Following Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The foundation manages an innovative and dynamic grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the foundation has given over $310 million in cash grants to over 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.
About the Regional Regranting Program
The Regional Regranting Program was established in 2007 to recognize and support the movement of independently organized, public-facing, artist-centered activity that animates local and regional art scenes but that lies beyond the reach of traditional funding sources. The program is administered by non-profit visual art centers across the United States that work in partnership with the Foundation to fund artists’ experimental projects and collaborative undertakings.
About the Jacki Apple Fund
The Jacki Apple Fund was established by her sister, publisher/educator Marjorie Bank, working with performer/writer/educator Jeff McMahon, performer/producer/educator/curator Deborah Oliver, diplomat/editor Stuart Jackson-Hughes, and Emily Waters, as her legacy project to give back to the Los Angeles Art Community she championed since the early 80’s in her writing, teaching, radio shows and artist practice. Matching efforts are established in New York and New York City artists may check for information in 2025 about the Jacki Apple award administered by Franklin Furnace.
About Jacki Apple (1941–2022)
Jacki was an artist, an educator, a critic, an expert on performance art, and a beloved LA art world figure. Her collection of essays, Performance/Media/Art/Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018 edited by Marina LaPalma (Intellect 2019) was celebrated in 2019 at LACE with a book launch and conversation with John Fleck. More about Jacki’s life and work can be found in her obituary in Artillery.
About LACE
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) champions artists, curators, and cultural workers who explore and defy boundaries through socially-engaged projects. We provide platforms within and beyond our space for diverse communities to connect deeply with challenging contemporary art. Uniquely positioned in the heart of Hollywood, LACE amplifies the voices and visions of Los Angeles’ diverse makers. LACE presents free, significant, and timely exhibitions, performances, and public projects, complemented by education initiatives. www.welcometolace.org
