Grant Recipients
2025
Alexis de Bonis and Elisa Leïla Durand
Curators Alexis de Bonis and Elisa Leïla Durand received a grant to help stage Wet Memories, British artist Ebun Sodipo’s first solo exhibition in France. Presented at Shmorévaz, an independent art space in Paris founded in 2021 in a former shoe store, the exhibition imagined alternative futures, positioning marginality as a site of creation, resistance and autofiction.
"The Jenni Crain Foundation grant was essential to the project, supporting the production of six new site-specific works as well as the development of a dedicated publication, including a conversation with artist and scholar Dahlia Li. The exhibition was a great success for us—it resonated strongly with the space of Shmorévaz, with our curatorial practice, and above all with Ebun’s trajectory, allowing her work to reach new audiences in France."
Jiyeon Paik
Curator Jiyeon Paik received a grant to help organize The Faraway Nearby at Westbeth Gallery. The group exhibition marked the culmination of a five-month-long dialogue project between the eight participating Asian women artists and was influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s writings. In her own words:
The grant made it possible to realize the second round of The Faraway Nearby at Westbeth Gallery, allowing the project to grow with a level of care and visibility that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise. The Foundation’s support offered both practical resources and a sense of encouragement that carried through the entire process. Knowing that Jenni’s legacy is rooted in sustaining artists and artist-driven initiatives added a meaningful dimension to the exhibition’s development.
Diego Villalobos
Curator Diego Villalobos received a grant to complete his research for the exhibition Viaje a la luna (A trip to the moon), that he curated and organized at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Inspired by the only film script written by the renowned Spanish poet, playwright, and artist Federico García Lorca, the group exhibition featured both national and international artists, the exhibition builds upon themes explored in the script, as well as the social and political context of its creation in the late 1920s. Villalobos was born in Cuernavaca, Mexico and is currently based in San Francisco.
2024
Heather Bursch
Heather Bursch received an MFA from CalArts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. From 2010-11, she was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. She has been the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship in Digital and Electronic Arts, an Experimental Television Center Grant, a CCI Investing in Artists Grant, and a MacDowell Fellowship. The Jenni Crain Foundation awarded Heather a grant toward completion of her solo exhibition, Meeting Place, on view at Soldes, Los Angeles from January 13 - February 11, 2024. Meeting Place is a reimagining of a nearly forgotten public fountain through a set of objects that replace its missing ornaments. A poetic exploration of public versus private ownership of art and wealth, Heather’s work engages conversations of ornament and the feminine, as well as absence, memory, and erasure. Further information on Meeting Place can be found here.
Cameron Cameron and Kate Rouhandeh
Staged on the occasion of the summer solstice, Cameron Cameron's Angel Wing, curated by Kate Rouhandeh, featured a new, fully-functional sundial and related clock sculptures—works which continue Cameron Cameron’s practice of composing baroque, layered image transfers featuring meticulously sourced flora and fauna: the winged and wings, the flighty and flightless, the clouded and celestial.
Cameron Cameron (b. 1991) was born in Texas and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Cameron is a contributing and founding member of MATERIAL GIRLS, a flexible and non-hierarchical collective of artists dedicated to building community, fostering collaboration, facilitating exhibitions & educational initiatives, and offering freely available resources. She currently teaches Photography at Campbell Hall, a independent K–12 school in Los Angeles.
Kate Rouhandeh is a writer, editor and independent curator based in Los Angeles. Currently, she is managing editor at X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal and foundation assistant at the Michael Asher Foundation. She has curated exhibitions and programs for the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), Some Clouds, and Now Instant Image Hall, among others. Her writing has appeared in Metrograph Journal and X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal.
Maya Hayda
Maya Hayda was the recipient of a grant for original research during her upcoming curatorial residency at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy. The Foundation's support also helped her to develop her digital project, Internodes, a web-based platform which brings together Ukrainian multidisciplinary artists, filmmakers, writers, and curators to reflect on how kinship is being defined and redefined in the face of war, displacement, and ecocide. Maya’s research explores materiality, poetics, and the confluences of natural and built environments, particularly across Eastern Europe and the Global South. Her practice examines and activates art as an interdisciplinary framework that contends with and catalyzes relations between matter, media, and broader ecologies. She has worked with Artists Space, Canal Projects, Frappant, and PS122 Gallery, and participated as a curator in residence at CASA GIAP. She has written for The Wattis Institute, LA Review of Books, FLAT Journal, Public Parking, and The Drawing Center. She is a member of the curatorial group and research laboratory Collective Rewilding and holds a degree in Art History and English from Wesleyan University.
Alex Ito
Alex Ito (b. 1991) is a visual artist based in Queens, NY. Ito’s interdisciplinary practice reframes visual cultures of violence at the intersection of war, industrialization, and popular culture, proposing how we can recognize precarious frameworks of life in a world of uncertainty and potential. Ito received a grant to aid with the completion of several artworks featured in “Other World/s,” a group exhibition at Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR.
For his presentation at the Schneider Museum of Art, Ito has brought together a selection of works spanning film, sculpture, and assemblage. The exhibited works meditate on the roles of historical archives, social waste, and the inevitability of time and cultural change.
Alan Longino / Fatima Hellberg
The Jenni Crain Foundation was honored to support esteemed curator and scholar Alan Longino's final curatorial opus before his premature passing in July, 2024, which opened posthomously at Bonner Kunstverein in February 2025. Philosopher of her own Ruin and its accompanying publication were realized through the close supervision and efforts of curator Fatima Hellberg, as well as Andrew Christopher Green and Martha Joseph. The exhibition featured Dusti Bongé, Rosemarie Castoro, Anna Bella Geiger, Susan Hiller, Ishiuchi Miyako, Lisa Robertson, Bertram Schmiterlöw, Sydney Schrader, Linda Semadeni and Tokiwa Toyoko.
In the words of Alan Longino, "Works in the exhibition by these artists focus on the space between the violent tumult of this transformation and the peace afforded upon passing to the other side. Loneliness is a virtue of the works, as they operate in the area of invisibility. But their bodies are still recognized, their doubts and sensations still fully lived. These new entities demand more from the lives they lead before, as they offer an alternative interpretation of necessity."
Hyeree Ro
Hyeree Ro is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York and Seoul, working primarily with sculptural objects and multilingual fractured narrative-based performance. Her practice is informed by her experience as a child of an immigrant growing up in California as well as her subsequent returns to Korea as a teenager and then to the US as an international student. As a migrant passing through various immigrant statuses and encountering disparities, Ro interweaves her family history, places, language, body, movement, and stories into her work. The Foundation awarded Ro a grant to help with completion of her solo exhibition, Niro, which was on view at Canal Projects, New York. Niro is an installation that explores themes of loss, mobility, invisibility, and intimacy, centering around a skeletal sculpture of a Kia Niro, the car driven by Ro's late father. Niro activates this framework as an allusion to boundaries between father and daughter, and moments that are physically and metaphorically shared and spent apart in relation to the bounds of the vehicle.
Aïda Sidhoum
Aïda Sidhoum received a grant from the Jenni Crain Foundation while finishing her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She was part of the first cohort of residents at the Artagon Marseille art residency, where she initiated the curatorial platform Hlou, and recently worked for MoMA’s curatorial department of Media and Performance. Aïda is the recipient of a grant that will aid her upcoming publication, An open Anthology of Afro-French songs. Acting as a reader to popular francophone music, the publication assembles newly translated texts by artists, academics, journalists, archivists, listeners and musicians, which illustrate the historically under-acknowledged Afro-diasporic and African contributions to chart-topping genres. The publication was part of her graduate thesis project at CCS Bard, and was be presented alongside the exhibition A song within a song within a song, which was on view from April 6th - May 26, 2024 at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Vadis Turner
Vadis Turner received a grant toward the completion of her sculpture Venus Rising, which debuts at LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, in May 2025. Turner employs the language of abstraction to create textile-driven sculptures and mixed media works that challenge narratives traditionally imposed upon female archetypes. She considers the generational influence of women navigating cultural conventions and expectations within the broader context of women’s history and encourages "the misbehaviors and transcendence of domestic materials".
Marie Warsh / The Rosemary Mayer Estate
Marie Warsh received a grant to support her research and travel to Tuscany in order to explore renowned feminist artist Rosemary Mayer's deep connection to Italian art history, specifically the painters associated with the Mannerist movement. In the mid-1970s, Rosemary made large-scale sculptures, artist books, and numerous works on paper that were in direct dialogue with these artists. She repeatedly emphasized a connection between her period of Post-Minimalism to the time of the Mannerists, discovering parallels between the 15th/16th century Italy and her own time in New York City, both politically and culturally, which she explored in her artist’s book Pontormo’s Diary. With the support of the travel grant, Warsh was able to visit sites that directly influenced Mayer's conceptual works and further study this fascinating connection, with the goal of developing a future exhibition.
Evan Whale
Evan Whale's work centers on the seen and unseen forces that shape his adopted home of Los Angeles, ranging from a seismic study of the Los Angeles landscape to a fantastical take on domestic life during the pandemic. In his own words, "Photographs are, for me, a material starting point toward a more transformational reality, bringing out things that transcriptive photographs themselves sometimes cannot convey. When I make a chromogenic print (using light and chemistry) I am preparing visual elements to then subtract from under the pressure of an abrasive tool in the studio. This allows me to both document and accentuate erasure throughout my work, which presents its own challenges as an artist.
Whale received a grant for to complete his project "The End of Sunset," a photographic series documenting the destruction of his local neighborhood, known as The Forgotten Edge, located between where Echo Park ends and Angelino Heights, Chinatown and Downtown begin, exploring in equal parts the precariousness of a shifting landscape and the possibilities of photographic materiality.
Tamara Wyndham
Tamara Wyndham was the recipient of a grant to support her residency at The Millett Farm Art Colony for Women in upstate New York. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wyndham studied traditional drawing and painting at California State University, Long Beach and experimental drawing, book works, and performance at the University of California at Irvine. She then moved to New York City, where she became active in various feminist, political, spiritual and arts communities. She is particularly known for her body prints which “draw upon images from ancient burial shrouds, mummies, Neolithic cave paintings, Eastern and Western medical charts, Kirlian and x-ray photography.
2023
Charlotte Flint
Curator Charlotte Flint received a grant to support her continued research at the University of Oregon and Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn for her book Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us, published by MACK Books, London. The book charts a route through Corinne’s practice with never-before-seen photographs, slides, contact sheets, and ephemera uncovered from her archive. Showcasing the pioneering work that established Corinne as one of the foremost lesbian photographers of her time, this publication places Corinne alongside friends, fellow artists, writers, and activists who helped define radical counterculture.
