Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition is pleased to announce the 2025-2026 Thrive Grant recipients. These grantees will create community visual arts projects that will come to life across the state of Oklahoma.
ALEX CRAIN (she/her)
Soft Armor: A Woven Sanctuary for Black Femme Strength
Alex Crain-Hayes is a queer Black textile artist weaving crochet, performance, and storytelling. Her project, Soft Armor, softens the sharp edges of survival with care and intention — creating a sacred space where femmes of color gather, heal, and reclaim softness as power. This work will culminate in a landmark crochet installation and Soft Armor collection unveiling, honoring Black femme strength, vulnerability, and embodied resistance. Through each stitch, Alex creates protection and presence — using crochet as both armor and invocation, a way to bind memory, ritual, and care into tactile form.
AMBER ANDERSEN (she/her)
Expanding the Grand Unseen
The Grand Unseen is an immersive, traveling art installation by Oklahoma artist Amber Andersen. Through large-scale sculpture, hand-painted panels, and sound, the exhibit brings the hidden beauty of insects, fungi, and wild plants to life. Created especially for rural communities with limited access to arts experiences, this “living exhibit” changes and expands with each location it visits. By blending art, science, and storytelling, The Grand Unseen invites viewers to slow down, look closer, and develop empathy through understanding the small beings of our world. Igniting a rediscovery of the wonder that exists all around them, even in their own backyards.
EVAN CLAYBURG (he/him) & EYAKEM GULILAT (he/him)
Brewing Dialogue
Brewing Dialogue is a community-engaged art project that brings the Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony to diverse communities across Oklahoma. Rooted in the rich cultural heritage of Ethiopia, the coffee ceremony is more than a beverage ritual—it is a sacred space for storytelling, hospitality, and reflection. Each ceremony includes a collaborative art-making session using coffee as an artistic medium. Coffee grounds, stains, filters, and related materials are transformed into visual artworks that reflect community stories, memories, and shared reflections. Documentation of the sessions through photography, film, and audio recordings create a living archive of the project.
JANAE S. GRASS (she/her)
Silver Memory: Contemporary Sauk Metalsmithing
In Silver Memory: Sauk Contemporary Metalsmithing, Janae Grass will explore the history of Sac and Fox (Sauk) metalsmithing and jewelry to create and share new works inspired by extant examples at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C.. The works in the exhibition will include cultural adornments as well as contemporary fine jewelry works that give insight to the Sauk community’s history and Janae’s lens as a contemporary artist.
KIRA HAYEN (she/they)
Caddo Child Educational Workbooks
Kira Hayen’s project will utilize both her experience as a visual artist and educator in order to create a series of illustrated workbooks and educational materials for the children of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma.
M. FLORINE DÉMOSTHÈNE (she/her)
The Oracle
This Oracle will initiate conversations about modern approaches to cultural preservation and transmission modalities through a gaming interface. Offering a reminder that these sacred games and objects must be protected even as we integrate newer operating systems. The Oracle is a visceral and spatial tool to venture into the ancient world using modern tools and timeless wisdom. The Oracle will explore concepts that aren’t bound by a particular timeframe, merging objects that become contemporary relics, where the past is mined to propose an alternate future. This will allude to the capacity for traditions to persist and be reimagined through the diaspora.
