The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts announced today the recipients of its 2018 Artist Project Grants. In its third year, the initiative will award $400,000 to ten Los Angeles nonprofit organizations. This year’s grantees are the Craft and Folk Art Museum; Fulcrum Arts; the Hammer Museum; JOAN; LA Freewaves; LAXART; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Latin American Art; Self Help Graphics & Art; and the Underground Museum. The 2018 grants mark the largest total sum allotted to recipients by the foundation.

“The grantees this year reflect Los Angeles’s energized and diverse art scene, and underscore the foundation’s commitment to support risk-taking, underseen, and hard-to-fund work,” said Mary Clare Stevens, executive director of the Mike Kelley Foundation. “From a historical examination of printmaking by Latin American, Chicano, and Latino artists in the exhibition Gráfica América, to Rodney McMillian’s powerful videos and performances, to Alison O’Daniel’s use of skateboards as percussive instruments to investigate the experience of sound, this year’s recipients highlight the range and depth of curatorial and artistic practices in Los Angeles.”   

Four grant-supported exhibitions focus on individual artists, including the established artist Andrea Fraser, whose new performance and publication will premiere at the Hammer Museum, and emerging artist Indira Allegra, whose first solo museum exhibition, “No Space Without Tension,” will open at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in September 2019.

The 2018 grantees were selected through a competitive application process by an independent panel that comprised Naomi Beckwith, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; artist and activist Andrea Bowers; Ciara Ennis, director and curator at Pitzer College Art Galleries; Christopher Y. Lew, an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and multimedia artist Bruce Yonemoto.

“Mike Kelley was deeply engaged in the Los Angeles arts community and started his foundation to support artists and arts institutions that were doing meaningful and necessary work,” Stevens said. “In the three years since the grants were established, it has been our great pleasure to echo that commitment and help the grantees realize boundary-pushing work.”