LACE ANNOUNCES $70,000 IN AWARDED ARTIST GRANTS THROUGH THE LIGHTNING FUND AND JACKI APPLE AWARD FOR PERFORMANCE AND ARTIST PROJECTS

LACE is thrilled to announce the selected artists receiving the Lightning Fund Artist Grant and the recipient of the Jacki Apple Award for Performance and Artist Projects! We are grateful to have received over 200 applications from artists in LA County. This year, ten LA County-based artists are awarded a $6,000 grant for the creation and completion of a project, and one artist is awarded with a $10,000 grant.

This year’s Lightning Fund and Jacki Apple Award panelists were Taylor Bythewood-Porter (Curator, History at the Museum of Riverside), Marcela Guerrero (DeMartini Family Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art), Kimi Kitada (Gallery and Programs Manager, Charlotte Street), Louise Martorano (Executive and Artistic Director, RedLine), Devon Tsuno (Associate Professor, California State University Dominguez Hills), and Rosha Yaghmai (LA-based artist). The panelists were deeply impressed with the creativity and ambition of the submitted proposals. “Working with LACE on the Lightning Fund 2025 selection panel was truly inspiring, as the scope of artist-driven projects was incredibly varied.” Kitada said. “The selected projects speak to the urgent concerns of artists working today in Los Angeles, responding to colonial histories, the health care system, issues of labor and production, and hyper-local neighborhood histories, to name a few.”

The awardee of the Jacki Apple Award for Performance and Artist Projects is LA-based performance artist Jennifer Moon. “I am incredibly honored to be the second recipient for the Jacki Apple Fund award,” Moon writes. “Thank you for believing not only in me but in collectives and collaboratives. Building futures for the liberation of all can never be a solo venture and we are thrilled for the recognition, support, and encouragement!”

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.

***UPDATE: In response to the profoundly destructive fires in Los Angeles, and the effect on a disproportionate number of artists, the Jacki Apple Fund is bringing emergency assistance to LA-based artists suffering directly from the effects of the Winter 2025 fires, through loss of housing, studio/storage space, transportation, employment, and exhibition opportunities.

The Fund provided $20,000 to LACE to administer grants of $4,000 each to five local artists impacted by the fires, chosen by the Fund in consultation with LACE. The Fund also provided $5,000 to the existing Grief & Hope project, administered by The Brick, in support of their efforts to assist local artists impacted by this recent disaster.

Jacki Apple Award for Performance and Artist Projects

Jennifer Moon
In 🌈 RevCon 2025 ☄️: An Open Space UNconference on Revolution, Moon asks, “What does revolution mean to you? How do we envision abundance and realize liberation for all?” The Revolution School, initiated by Moon in 2020, will host RevCon 2025, a participant-driven unconference. Using open space technology, Revolution School and attendees will co-create an unconventional experience for co-emergence. No speakers, no fixed schedule—only those who gather to collaboratively shape the day. Anyone can lead a session or request to learn alongside the Revolution School collective, moving freely between discussions. Revolution for the liberation of ALL cannot happen unless we co-world it TOGETHER from abundance.

2025 Lightning Fund Awards

Jeny Amaya
Los Angeles Against the Mountains (tentative title inspired by John McPhee’s 1988 essay) is an experimental documentary reimagining the San Gabriel Valley’s ecological future through mythmaking. Since Spanish colonization in the 18th century, the SGV has been transformed by settlers’ attempts to control nature. Research involving archival work, walking dérives, field interviews, eco-processing techniques, and audiovisual recordings, will be translated to speculative narratives. This film will examine the SGV’s material history, subverting the region’s colonial legacy and envisioning an alternative ecological and magical world.

Carmen Argote
A Mano (by hand) (working title) proposes a series of four semi-transparent jumpsuits adorned with pockets containing hand-held figures. Each jumpsuit will carry approximately 40 sculptures, their collective weight grounding the wearer while the sheer material holds the figures as a single entity. Inspired by the artist’s Mexican family tradition of sewing, this work explores themes of inheritance, healing, and shared burdens. The artist honors her mother’s teaching amid her declining sight, connecting art and legacy. Combining the art of sewing and sculpture, the project embodies emotional and ancestral resilience. Each jumpsuit will rest on a hanger when not worn.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy
Reincarnating the Domain collects and records stories of interest, combining the audio with video and paint-on-glass animation techniques to tell a history of LA grounded in memory, with visuals that reflect magical realism and the transformation of a place. I seek to organize these stories geographically, with a framework loosely pulled from Reyner Banhams Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of ID, Ecology IV, Autopia). Screenings formal and informal will be integrated into the city; a zine will encapsulate this project—plans for human and non-humans and plenty of light-hearted nostalgia to mix with an existential dread.

Sherin Guirguis
For On Transparent Sky, Los Angeles-based Egyptian artist Sherin Guirguis interweaves her interdisciplinary practice with a communal process of transformation through material and cultural reclamation, community engagement, and somatic remembrance. For the Lightning Fund project, Guirguis seeks to address displacement and the resulting cultural erasure investigating the intersection of art, activism and healing. Drawing from ancestral Egyptian traditions of papermaking, Guirguis will transmute accumulated studio remnants into paper pulp as seed material for a collective sculptural installation in the form of an ancestral Egyptian Hetep (ritual offering plinth). The sculpture will be created in part through public workshops that engage co-creators, particularly members of the Coptic and North African communities in LA.

Zara Kuredjian
In Basins, Kuredijian asks, “What is a basin?” The word ‘basin’ can point towards a vessel for holding water or a form used for cleansing or bathing. It can also be used to indicate an enclosed body of water or a deep depression in a celestial body. It can be a surface, volume, or form. It can also be a barrier, a vessel, or a space. The Basins series is an upcoming group of sculptures that are part vessel, water clock, and reflecting pool. Black, semi-porous clay vessels elevated from the ground that sweat, both holding and losing water over time.

Won Ju Lim
Proustian House involves the reconstruction from my memory of all the homes I inhabited since the age of eight (when I immigrated to the US from South Korea). It will be realized as an immersive, multimedia installation comprised of a series of sculptural objects, some as architectural models of my past homes, and multiple video projections. The inconsistent scale and discontinuous materials in the work will create a vertiginous environment that speaks to the dislocation of a subject and articulates the vaporous nature of memory vis-à-vis the home.

noé olivas
For Tire Shop: Where are we going?, noé olivas will fabricate large tire sculptures out of clay to be exhibited in a local tire shop. “Tire Shop: Where are we going?” is composed of two sculptures: the first will be made in terracotta, embracing the beauty and simplicity of the material. In the second sculpture, olivas will incorporate color and text inspired by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and his teachings on mindfulness. In English and Spanish, the tire will read “BREATHE IN” and “BREATHE OUT”. These sculptures are made to encourage the public to take a moment to breathe and practice mindfulness.

Nancy Popp
under°velopment is a series of site-specific actions based within particular land areas and upon our body’s innate reciprocal interdependence with them. Each unique site will be the foundation of durational performance(s) enacted within the landscape they emerge from. Arising out of historical research into each site’s culture, politics and colonization, topography, climate, and wildlife, performances will explore liminal spaces between agrarian and urban communities, encroachment of capitalistic urban development, and a ‘synchronistic immersion’ with each site. The series begins with a return to the land the performer’s body emerged from- the San Fernando Valley, foremost agricultural producer of the pre-World War 2 era. Now unrecognizable under a skin of concrete, the excavations of a body’s origin narratives begin here.

Kyoko Takenaka
I’m here and I love you: がんのお陰で is Kyoko Takenaka’s first interdisciplinary performance work since undergoing chemotherapy. This work combines butoh dance, photography, video and sound art to navigate the emotional landscape of their year during treatment and through recovery, and the profound lessons learned along the journey. The project envelops viewers in an exploration of grief, love, visibility, and power, illustrating how art can transform narratives for those at the intersections of sickness, disability, queerness, and the diaspora. Through experiences and reflections found in community care, the power of nature found on Yakushima Island, and ancestral rituals found in the body, “I’m here and I love you” invites viewers to a space at the convergence of healing and art.

Kiara Walls
Kitchen: Tender Love, the second installment of the “Kitchen” series, continues to archive oral histories surrounding physical spaces, intimacy, and self-care within kitchens and beauty salons, highlighting narratives of resistance. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s quote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Walls shares her mother’s recovery from a 2023 breast cancer diagnosis, reflecting on her bi-weekly appointments at Blessed Hands Salon as a form of treatment. The short film and zine will house a collection of interviews, essays, and portraits, made available in local beauty supply stores.