Lightning Fund Artist Grants

Applications open August 15, 2025 and close Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 11:59 PM PDT on Submittable

LACE is thrilled to announce our sixth LACE Lightning Fund open call, a regional regranting fund made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The LACE Lightning Fund is an annual grant for artists and artist-driven organizations, projects, and publications. In 2020 and 2021, the Lightning Fund provided emergency relief grants to over 100 LA-based artists. In 2022, the Fund pivoted to supporting artist projects.

This year, LACE will award 10 artist project grants in the amount of $6,000. Only applicants that are LA County residents, are at least 18 years of age, and are not currently enrolled in a college program, will be considered. Learn more about the selected projects for the 2025 Lightning Fund and Jacki Apple Award.

LACE is also accepting applicants for the Jacki Apple Fund, supporting one LA-based mid- or advanced-career artist with a $10,000 grant for work resulting in performance, media, exhibition, and/or publication within one year of the award. One artist will be selected through the Lightning Fund application process for this honor. Refer to the Lightning Fund requirements for eligibility. The artist selected for the Jacki Apple Award will have the added requirement of being a mid- or late-career artist. No additional application is required to be considered for this award.

To support applicants, LACE is offering a virtual information session on Thursday, July 31, 2025, 1–2 PM PDT, via Zoom. This session will include an overview of the Lightning Fund and Jacki Apple Award eligibility guidelines, application platform tips, and time for questions from attendees. This session is open to anyone interested in applying to the 2026 Lightning Fund and Jacki Apple programs, and will be recorded and posted on our website.

GUIDELINES

Qualified applicant artists are required to live in Los Angeles County and maintain a visual arts practice. We have an expansive definition of visual art practice: in addition to more traditional forms such as drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and similar mediums, we are also open to artists practicing in film/video, new media, sound art, performance art, and social practice.

Artists whose practices are firmly rooted in dance, theater, music, or industry/feature/documentary filmmaking, and/or nonprofit organizations and LLCs established for commercial enterprise are not eligible to apply.

We are open to innovation, experimentation, and risk-taking in the field and are supportive of diverse approaches to visual art making. Lightning Fund project submissions should be innovative and socially relevant, as well as accessible to the public outside of traditional museum or gallery settings. The review process will prioritize presentations in Los Angeles County. Awarded projects are not intended for presentation at LACE.

Please submit an application through the Submittable portal after creating an account. Applicants must include the following items in their application:

Artist Contact Information – artist teams are welcome to apply, but provide one person’s information as the main contact.
Website and/or social media if available
Brief description about yourself and your artistic practice – include past project experience (300 word max)
Project Title (working title OK) and description of your proposed project – this can be a new project or a continuation of work in your practice. Include information about your timeline and collaborators, materials, location, and any needs you have to make the project happen. (500 word max)
Outline of how a $6,000 grant would be used to fund or offset costs for a project in process. Provide a budget breakdown. The majority of the project should be achievable with the Lightning Fund grant. Artists may pay themselves a fee from the award. (500 word max)
Submit 1-3 strong work samples (images, video, audio, and/or links) that represent the project you are proposing for funding. Optional images can include: audio, video, writing, links, supplemental materials, and/or related information. (Video 2 min max)

Applications will be reviewed by a panel of local and national cultural workers, artists, and members of the LACE Team. Panelists will evaluate applicants based on their proposals and active artistic practice. We encourage applications from artists whose communities are underrepresented in relationship to visual art opportunities, economies, and funding streams. Strong consideration will be given to Black, Indigenous, POC, elder, LGBTQ+, disabled, immuno-compromised, and immigrant artists.

SELECTION CRITERIA

All proposals will be considered based on:

Overall concept, vision, and innovation
Relevance to a local social, cultural, and/or geographic context
Accessibility of the project to the public outside of a museum or gallery
Capacity of the applicant to realize the project on time (within one year maximum) and within estimated budget
Potential impact on the local community, the arts and culture landscape, and/or the artist’s growth

TIMELINE

Applications open Friday, August 15, 2025 at 12PM PDT and close Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 11:59 PM PDT. This deadline is firm. Applicants will be notified of decisions and funds will be issued by the end of January 2026. For questions, please contact lightning@welcometolace.org.

PANELISTS FOR 2026 LIGHTNING FUND SUBMISSIONS

Naz Cuguoğlu works as a curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where her work explores themes of intersectional identities and diasporic experiences. In 2024, she was appointed to co-curate the inaugural American Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale and received the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant and the AAMC Propel Award. Her curatorial experience includes exhibitions and programs at documenta fifteen, 15th Istanbul Biennial, Taiwan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She has previously held roles at institutions such as KADIST, The Wattis Institute, de Young Museum, and SFMOMA. Her writings have appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Hyperallergic, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. As a co-founder of Collective Çukurcuma, she experiments with collaborative curatorial practices through reading groups and international exhibitions.

Patrisse Cullors is a New York Times bestselling author, educator, artist, and abolitionist from Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been featured at The Broad, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, LTD Gallery, Crystal Bridges Museum, Second Home West Hollywood, The Fowler Museum, Frieze LA, The Hammer Museum, Vashon Center for the Arts, Joe’s Pub, Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, and a host of theaters, galleries, and museums across the globe.

Cullors launched a ground-breaking Social and Environmental Arts Practice MFA program at Prescott College where she served as the Founding Director for two years. She is the co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart and has been on the frontlines of abolitionist movement building with Black Lives Matter, Justice LA, Dignity and Power Now and Reform LA jails. Her current work and practice focus on “Abolitionist Aesthetics,” a term she has advanced and popularized to help challenge artists and cultural workers to aestheticize abolition. Patrisse is also the founder of The Center For Art and Abolition—a trailblazing nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering abolitionist artists and leveraging the transformative power of art to catalyze social change.

Patrisse has won numerous awards for her art and activism. In September 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Patrisse’s appointment to serve as one of three Second District Arts Commissioners. Patrisse’s mission is to invite all of us to grow towards abolition through intergenerational healing work that centers love, collective care, and art.

Asher Hartman is a visual artist, writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit strong feeling. Asher Hartman is the director and founder of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of visual artists, actors, and performance artists with whom he has created since 2010.

Kristan Kennedy is a Portland-based artist, curator, and educator. Kennedy is the Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). For the last decade, Kennedy has focused on commissioning new work by international emerging artists in the form of large-scale, site-specific installations and solo projects that exist at the borders of genres. Kennedy takes an expansive view of visual art and also organizes music, performance art, publications, social engagement and new media projects as part of PICA’s year-round programming and for the organization’s annual Time-Based Art Festival. Kennedy serves on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and teaches Contemporary Art and Critical Thinking at the Pacific Northwest College of Art as part of their MFA in Visual Studies department.

Daniela Lieja Quintanar is the Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Programs at the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), and former Chief Curator and Director of Programming at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Her curatorial practice takes inspiration from everyday life, spaces of political struggle, and communal forms of knowledge production. Recent curatorial projects include LACE’s exhibition for PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics (2024–25) presented at LAMAG; REDCAT’s PST ART exhibition All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2024–25); and The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity (2023–24); and Lisa Alvarado: Pulse Meridian Foliation (2023) at REDCAT. In 2018, Lieja Quintanar was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship for the exhibition Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento (2021) at LACE. Lieja Quintanar is member of the Los Angeles Tenants Union, East Side local/Unión de Vecinos.

Njeri Rutherford is a Program Manager at CultureSource in Detroit, Michigan, where she helps facilitate connections between the CultureSource community and ideas, events, and resources about arts and culture. Njeri completed her MFA in dance at the University of Michigan in April 2023. Njeri earned her B.A in Dance and Communication Arts from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC. She is a performer, choreographer, and dance administrator. Njeri has worked for the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, The Yard and Movement Research. She has also choreographed for several festivals and conferences including Charlotte Dance Festival, American College Dance Association, and A.R.T on the Vine.

INFO SESSION RECORDING

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 of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. LACE recognizes our local partners who share the Lightning Fund opportunity with artists in their communities.

ABOUT THE WARHOL REGIONAL REGRANTING PROGRAM

The Regional Re-granting 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.

Since its inception, the Regional Re-granting Program has grown steadily, adding new cities and regions to its national network each year. When COVID-19 hit and it became clear that artists needed a different kind of support, the Foundation’s Board authorized a programmatic pivot; the existing 16 partners in the Regional Re-granting Program swiftly set up COVID-19 emergency relief funds to help artists cover basic living/medical/child-care expenses. Since April 2020, the Foundation’s original 16 Regional Re-granting partners have disbursed over $1 million in emergency grants. When the pandemic entered its 8th month, the Foundation doubled the number of re-granting partners in its network; 16 new programs provided emergency funds to artists in their regions while many of the original 16 programs have already begun a second round of emergency grants.

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 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.