Alternative Exposure profoundly impacts our creative community by providing crucial frameworks of support for artists to create and continue their work. These grants help Bay Area artists find new ways to come together and achieve their project dreams. For 2025, we are granting a total of $65,000 to 14 projects.
Alternative Exposure was the first regional regranting program created in partnership with The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to recognize and nurture independently organized, artist-centered activity that animates local art scenes.
The 2025 grantees were selected by an outside panel of three artist organizers and former grantees: writer and curator Elena Gross, artist Thad Higa, and Audrey Molloy, co-administrator of Night Bloom: Grants for Artists, Tucson, Arizona. Congratulations to the recipients!
Round 19 – 2025 Grant Recipients
BAY WINDOWS / VENTANAS EN SALIENTE / 窗花
Bay Windows / Ventanas en saliente / 窗花 is an 11-month social practice project centering working-class immigrant women. The bilingual project team facilitated 6 trilingual workshops for 15 Chinese and Latinx women to create papercuts on social and political issues which impact them. This fall, Christine Wong Yap is adapting the papercuts into wood and steel lanterns, to be displayed in storefronts in San Francisco’s Mission District and Chinatown this winter. She’ll re-engage the cohort to co-host an interactive treasure hunt to activate the lantern sites with dialogue, puzzles, and prizes.
CRIP ECSTASY x ROT
Crip Ecstasy x ROT is an access-focused evening of experimental movement, costume, and visual artistry featuring disabled artists working to expand their artistic practices through the queer cultural lens of Drag performance. This showcase has been selected to be part of the 2026 “Duetrospective” Festival and will be curated by Octavia Rose Hingle and Benjamin Cook at a soon-to-be-announced San Francisco nightlife venue.
GENDER EXPANSIVE FIGURE DRAWING: BODIES AS MAPS OF JOY
Gender Expansive Figure Drawing: Bodies as Maps of Joy is a series of gender-expansive figure drawing workshops centering trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming QTBIPOC bodies. Each 3-hour session features live models, drawing instruction, and dialogue around representation, body autonomy, and radical visibility. Models share personal stories while participants engage in reflective drawing. The series culminates in a community zine and gallery walk. Rooted in collective witnessing and queer joy, this project reclaims figure drawing as a space of affirmation, community-building, and creative resistance outside traditional, cis-normative art spaces.
GENRE
GENRE is an interdisciplinary drag performance series blurring the boundaries between queer nightlife, installation art, and experimental theater performance. This event takes place quarterly at The Stud. Conceived and curated by Robert Andrew Perez aka Phoebe Cakes and Camryn Nichols aka Yayah, GENRE is a response to the ongoing criminalization of queer expression and the erosion of LGBTQ+ gathering spaces. Our inaugural installment, themed Decades on Decades, explored how different eras interpret, imitate, or misremember each other—a meditation on time, legacy, and queer cultural memory
HERMANA/HERMANO/HERMANX
Hermana/Hermano/Hermanx is a curated group exhibition highlighting emerging Latinx artists connected to the Bay Area. Presented at Et al. in San Francisco’s Mission District, the show explores migration, cultural memory, and solidarity through the lens of a new generation reclaiming space and authorship. Organized by Victor Saucedo, it features a public program, multilingual outreach, and fundraising for local immigration services—affirming collective presence, creative resistance, and the urgency of care.
LEAVING TRACES
Leaving Traces is a block-printing workshop series that will bring together an intergenerational cohort of Bay Area community members to create collaborative artwork and build strong community bonds. This project is guided by a group of QT youth artists focused on relationship-building and strengthening care networks between seniors and young people. In a time where we as QT/POC continue to face threats to our survival, this project will center on collective abundance and knowledge as we develop a sacred creative space together.
MAKESHIFT PRESS
Makeshift Press is a multimedia collaboration uplifting art and organizing by our community in a whole variety of print and physical media. We publish Makeshift Magazine, a shareable print home for the musings and makings of community members (printed and bound by Irrelevant Press), and a collection of zines and prints designed and printed in-house. Makeshift is a relational project largely based in Yelamu— mostly advertised via word of mouth and in community, but open to contributions from anywhere. We hope to inspire a revolutionary spirit and a more interconnected, liberated, and beautiful world.
PIGGY INFINITY
Piggy Infinity is a visual arts zine that celebrates, deconstructs, and critically examines the relationship Miss Piggy has to Brown, Black, Indigenous, Queer, and Fat artists. Through the dissemination of memes and self-made graphics on social media no other icon has had more concepts about race, sexuality, gender, body image, and beauty ascribed to them than Miss Piggy. This zine will embrace absurdity and liberation alike in exploring how we see our identities, our bodies, and our politics embodied by her. Featuring the work of over 10 Bay Area visual artists.
TEATRO ALMAS LIBRES
Teatro Almas Libres, a grassroots theatre collective of Latinx immigrant and Indigenous women with three original plays to their name, will create monumental mojigangas—traditional papier-mâché puppets reimagined as tools of cultural memory and resistance. Developed through paid community workshops with local puppet artists, the works will be activated at immigration justice demonstrations, Día de los Muertos actions, and exhibited in Bay Area schools.
THE LAST 7 DAYS
THE LAST 7 DAYS is a performance event that includes original musical compositions, costuming, video installations, lipsync performance, immersive technology, and set design. This new work is being developed by lead artist OBSIDIENNE OBSURD in collaboration with queer and trans artists Jill Hill, Lola Ren, Lisa Frankenstein, Cult Baby, and Sassi Fran as well as accompanying chamber musicians Christopher Costanza and Debra Fong. This multidisciplinary experimental performance aims to queer classical concert conventions by contrasting it with Drag aesthetics.
TIMETIDES COOPERATIVE
The 2025 Jonathan Bernbaum Award Recipient
timetides cooperative is a Bay Area-based group of trans, nonbinary, and women artists who imagine new worlds through reclaiming filmmaking as conversation and collective, relational experience. We propose grant funds that will go towards both finalizing Behind the Horizon Line, a short fiction film about Mt. Tamalpais, borders and their afterlives, and a public screening after the film is finished, hosted at the local worker-owned restaurant cooperative, The Understory. The screening will be accompanied by a buffet-style meal and a post-screening Q&A.
TRANSMISSIONS: QUILTS FOR TRANS PEOPLE
Transmissions makes quilts for individually nominated trans people. Along the way, we record and archive oral histories interviews between trans quilters and quilt recipients. We also offer in person exhibitions, workshops and events for the broader queer and trans community. We gather at these “Quilt Blessings” to recognize and strengthen our web. They’re a chance to see ourselves in a legacy of trans networks of care that have used quilts, textiles and gift-giving as a way of keeping each other alive through all of.
WASTED BOOKS
La Mamelle was a San Francisco-based art periodical published by Contemporary Arts Press and edited by Carl Loeffler. Founded in 1975, La Mamelle produced twelve issues before folding in 1978. Each issue varied in size and page count, featuring reviews, interviews, critiques, photographs, and reportage documenting the vibrant San Francisco art scene of the mid-1970s. Wasted Books will bring together all twelve issues in a single collected volume.
YOUR RIVER DOWNTOWN
Your River, Downtown builds community around the Russian River and its vital role across Sonoma County, demonstrating how artwork can connect audiences to vital ecological issues. The project is community-driven—a collaboration with educational and environmental groups to monitor real-time aspects of the River—and artistically presented, using color, texture and line to depict our shared narrative or river experience through artmaking. We celebrate the River with multiple video screens in public places that bring artistic imagery to everyone. It is Your River, Downtown.
