More than $750,000 awarded to Miami-based Artists to create experimental new work in non-traditional spaces since 2015 Supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Regional Regranting Program

Locust Projects, Miami’s longest running incubator of new art and ideas, announces the recipients of its 2026 WaveMaker Grants made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Regional Regranting Program. Twelve Miami-based artists/collectives will each receive up to $6,000 in three categories: New Work / Projects, Long-Haul Projects, and Research & Development + Implementation.

The 2026 WaveMakers are: New Work / Projects: larí garcía and Sue Montoya | Lisa Kusanagi | Bex McCharen | Najja Moon | Ọmọlará Williams McCallister | Enrique Villacreses | Luka Gotsiridze; Long-Haul Projects: Isabella Bru; Research + Development: Nicole Combeau | Orlando Estrada | Oscar Rieveling; Implementation: Teri Watson.

In the spirit of Locust Projects’ artist-centered mission in support of the creation of experimental new work, WaveMaker Grantees take risks to experiment beyond traditional models for presenting art, creating innovative work that is accessible to the public and presented in non-traditional venues across Miami. “Locust Projects exists to advocate for artists,” says Lorie Mertes, Executive Director. “WaveMaker grants are one of the ways how we do it — funding Miami-based artists through grant support from the Warhol Foundation to take risks, experiment, and turn bold ideas into projects that activate dialogue and interaction in unconventional spaces across the city.”

The 2026 WaveMaker grant announcement marks a total of $750,000 in WaveMaker incubator grants awarded to 152 of Miami’s most visionary artists, curators, and collectives since the initiative launched in 2015. Administered by Locust Projects since 2017, WaveMaker Grants provide vital funds at critical moments in the development and implementation of publicly accessible, innovative projects across Miami-Dade County. Over the past 11 years, Wavemaker has helped launch many artist’s careers and supported the launch and long-term sustainability of local, artist-run initiatives such as: Commissioner, Dimensions Variable, EXILE Books, Extra Virgin Press, Women’s Artist Archive Miami, and Third Horizon Film Festival, among others.

This year’s twelve grant recipients were selected from 115 applicants with the criteria that none of the New Work/Projects, Long Haul or R+D applicants had received a Wavemaker grant in the past five years and that all projects met the criteria for conceptual rigor and relevance to the local cultural, geographic, and socio-economic context, impact on the local community, financial feasibility, and the accessibility of the resulting project in an unconventional space to the public for free.

NEW WORKS/PROJECTS – $6,000

Larí García and Sue Montoya | Reasoning and Feeling at Seven Seas Bar
Reasoning and Feeling is a two-person exhibition at Seven Seas Bar in Coral Gables featuring artists larí garcía and Sue Montoya. Rather than treating the site’s environment, architecture, and historical memory as a backdrop, the exhibition positions them as active elements in dialogue with sculpture and photography. This project emerges from an urgency around the disappearance of “third spaces,” informal sites of gathering that hold significant social and cultural memory. The exhibition temporarily holds onto an existing site, activating it as both a container of the past and a lens through which to encounter the present.

 

Lisa Kusanagi | Until My Ocean Dries
Until My Ocean Dries is a site-responsive, durational living sculpture presented at public locations along Miami’s coastline in early 2027. With a monumental calligraphy brush and water drawn directly from the ocean, artist Lisa Kusanagi inscribes mantras, poetry, and messages onto the concrete surfaces of pedestrian pathways, words that Miami’s relentless heat slowly erases as passersby watch. Activated by live choral performance, the work gives voice to what cannot speak for itself: the ocean, animals, plants, and the Mother Earth, addressing the climate crisis through empathic, physical, and visual language. Free and open to all, Until My Ocean Dries is a reminder that this city, built on the edge of water, is slowly losing its relationship to it.

 

Bex McCharen | Queer Atlantics Film
Queer Atlantics is an experimental documentary short film and archive of trans and gender-expansive communities in Miami who gather in and around water as a site of transformation and spiritual renewal. The project expands on a series of collective textile and quilted works, culminating with a public shoreline film screening accompanied by a collective ocean soaking ritual. Through oral histories with Miami-based trans and gender-expansive participants, Queer Atlantics positions South Florida’s queer communities as deeply rooted, resilient, and adaptive within the coastal ecosystems they call home.

 

Najja Moon | Movement Studies
Movement Studies is a public lecture-performance series that approaches art history through the lens of basketball. Presented on outdoor basketball courts across Miami-Dade County, each court is temporarily transformed into a classroom where audiences gather to examine artworks, artistic movements, and key ideas from the history of visual art. Using basketball as a form of art historical literacy, the project offers new pathways into art history for audiences who may not encounter it through traditional institutions, while inviting art audiences to reconsider basketball as a rich cultural and aesthetic framework. Each public course is recorded and edited into an online educational series, extending the project beyond the live audience while preserving its central commitment to free, site-specific public learning.

 

Ọmọlará Williams McCallister | CREAM (Community Rules Everything Around Me)
CREAM ( Community Rules Everything Around Me) is a speculative, physical paper currency that Miami locals will be able to use to meet their needs and meet other Miami locals while keeping more money in their pockets.

 

Enrique Villacreses | NIJI: BLUE
Niji: Blue is a large-scale outdoor visual installation and performance that transforms a sports field into an immersive monochromatic landscape of movement, inflatable sculpture, and aerial cinematography. Audiences are invited onto the field to experience shifting compositions of performers and sculptural forms while a drone livestream reveals the work from above as a living abstract artwork.

 

Luka Gotsirdze | GO TO BED
GO TO BED is an audience-interactive public art project centered on sculptural installations made of paper. Through a series of public encounters, the project asks what it means to have never had a bed of one’s own, and explores the body’s relationship to vigilance, rest, memory, and the possibility of letting go.

 

 

 

 

LONG-HAUL PROJECTS – $6,000

Isabella Bru | We Are Permitted
We Are Permitted is a monthly pop-up art series that
transforms parking lots and transit hubs across Miami-Dade County into free, open-air galleries. Founded by artist Isabella Bru in October 2025, the series has held more than five pop-ups across neighborhoods including Allapattah, Downtown Miami, Medley, Kendall, and Tamiami. We Are Permitted uses open calls to target visual artists, musicians, writers, and performers to participate monthly in the pop-up art shows. Locations are announced by neighborhood in advance, with the exact address revealed the morning of each show; there is no set end time. Artists never pay to participate, and the public never pays to attend.

 

RESEARCH + DEVELOPMENT / IMPLEMENTATION

Nicole Combeau | Ritual Afterlives: A Counter Archive | Research & Development – $2,000
Building upon her upcoming Jay I. Kislak Fellowship at the University of Miami, Ritual Afterlives: A Counter Archive explores how colonial-era texts and images depicted ritual, adornment, and systems of belief across the Americas. Through archival research, Combeau will investigate how these practices were interpreted through a colonial lens while developing a contemporary public counter-archive that responds to these historical records. She will experiment with how this research can be shared beyond institutional spaces and into the public realm.

 

Orlando Estrada | Spirit Radio | Research & Development – $2,000
Spirit Radio: Experimental Frequencies Broadcasting Center and Precarious Culture(s) Repository is an immersive, room-sized installation that combines a speculative radio laboratory with a living archive of biometric and oral histories to explore technology as a conduit for ancestral memory, healing, and cultural preservation. Through sculptural broadcasting systems built from server cages, quartz crystals, antennas, and electromagnetic devices, the project reimagines communication technologies historically associated with surveillance and militarization as tools for empathy, spiritual repair, and collective renewal.

 

Oscar Rieveling | La Diosa de Oro (“The Golden Goddess”) | Research & Development – $2,000
La Diosa de Oro (“The Golden Goddess”) is a multidisciplinary performance inspired by the life and legacy of Peruvian-Chilean bullfighter Conchita Cintrón and the engineered ecology of Miami Beach. Through choreography, projected video, and an original sound score, the immersive work re-imagines the ritual structure of the “corrida” within a coastal landscape shaped by ongoing cycles of erosion and reconstruction.

 

Teri Watson | SEED Erosion Blocks | Implementation – $4,000
SEED Erosion Blocks is a research-driven installation that repurposes invasive sargassum seaweed into modular concrete blocks designed to stabilize shorelines and support coastal plant growth. Developed through interdisciplinary collaboration with engineers and marine scientists, the project combines climate-adaptive design with material science that repurposes waste as infrastructure. Each block integrates planter cavities and solar lighting, forming a scalable prototype for erosion control that doubles as public art. Installed at sites across South Florida’s beaches, SEED Erosion Blocks introduce an experimental model for sustainable coastal design rooted in art, science, and site-specific research.

 

2026 WAVEMAKER REVIEW PANEL

The 2026 WaveMaker selection panel included: Roxana Barba, 2025 WaveMaker Grantee; Shauta Marsh, Co-Founder and Director of Programs & Exhibitions at Big Car Collaborative, administrator of the Andy Warhol Foundation Regional Regranting Partner Power Plant Grants in Indianapolis, Indiana; Marie Vickles, Senior Director of Education at Pérez Art Museum Miami, independent curator, and artist; and Alexis Wilkinson, Curator at MOCA Tucson and Warhol Regional Regranting Partner Night Bloom Grants in Tucson, Arizona.