Midway Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the six grant recipients for the 2025 Visual Arts Fund. Established as part of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program, the VAF is aimed at supporting the development of artist organized projects and initiatives that engage the public with visual art happening outside of established arts programming in the Twin Cities metro region.

$10,000 VAF Grants were awarded to:

Artropolis
Chapel of Stonemilkur
Promise Experimental
QOSLAY
Shoreham Collective
WICK

Jurors Lydia Diemer (Artist and Cultural Worker at Public Space One, Iowa City), Taylor Jasper (Susan and Rob White Associate Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis), and Haynes Riley (Artist, Curator, Designer, and the Founder of Good Weather, North Little Rock) selected these six projects to award funding from a competitive pool of applicants.

Artropolis
Lead Organizer: Taoheed Bayo
Artropolis is a cultural symposium that centers the Twin Cities as a backdrop for visual art installations, film screenings, soirees, workshops, and sonic curation. Artropolis is city-making through imagination— celebrating diverse practices while cultivating radical creation, global connectivity, and shared futures.

Chapel of Stonemilkur
Lead Organizer: Calvin Stalvig
The Chapel of Stonemilkur is a large-scale immersive installation where visitors remove their shoes and step onto a 20’x20’ floor of river stones, cushioned by a felt mat. Four massive boulders anchor the space, juxtaposing soft and hard. Ambient lighting and resonant drone music charge the atmosphere and heighten affective experience. Over the exhibition’s duration, a 360-degree mural on primed cloth will be developed, then removed and archived. Handmade beeswax candles will be available for visitors to light and place on a boulder, as offerings or intentions to the greater-than-human spirit, echoing rituals of sacred space.

Promise Experimental
Lead Organizer: Sati Varghese Mac
Promise Experimental is a public art series that engages four emerging artists who have a marginalized relationship to space. Through commissioned artworks/activations, the series will focus on visual and ephemeral interventions that primarily engage the people who live in spaces that are culturally significant to the artists. Providing support through a network of fabricators and producers, the project encourages emerging artists to seek new and experimental forms to engage the public.

QOSLAY
Lead Organizer: Wasima Farah
QOSLAY is an experimental narrative short film/play that follows a young clown who feels out of place in her own home. Blending theatrical performance with cinematic storytelling, this piece explores themes of language barriers, cultural identity, and generational disconnect. As Qoslay journeys through surreal, folklore-inspired acts, she confronts power, fairness, and tradition, learning to find her voicein a world she struggles to understand. Through humor, riddles, and heartfelt curiosity, she attempts to communicate across differences, learning how others have grappled with the very questions she carries. Blending classical Somali folktales with elements of American theater and clownism, Qoslay becomes a playful and poetic journey about belonging.

Shoreham Collective
Lead Organizer: Gudrun Lock
Seven artists will create artwork inspired by a 280 acre intermodal train and truck facility in NE Minneapolis called Shoreham Yards. They will participate in group walks around the site and explore
a living archive that houses six years of content collected by diverse researchers about the industrial
and ecological history of the place. Conversations with researchers and poets involved in the archive’s production will inform their work, which they will share with the public through studio visits, artist talks, and an open house at the Hennepin County Central Library where the archive is housed.

WICK
Lead Organizer: Tessa Wick
WICK is a nomadic gallery, operating in established and transient spaces, focusing on critically curated exhibitions.