Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Announces Recipients of Inaugural Infinite Expansion Grants
March 27, 2025
LOS ANGELES, CA. (May 28, 2025) — The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts (MKFA) today announced the recipients of its first Infinite Expansion Grants (IEG), which will support compelling upcoming projects at contemporary arts organizations across Los Angeles County. While previous years saw the Foundation support a larger number of grantees with smaller gifts, this year MKFA has intentionally chosen to focus its resources on ten innovative organizations, awarding larger grants ranging from $32,000 to $45,000. This strategic shift primarily provides increased support for artist projects that push the boundaries of practice in the arts while also allowing a percentage of the grant to be allocated to much-needed operating expenses.
The grant takes its name from Mike Kelley’s Infinite Expansion (1983), a large drawing depicting a tiny central landscape from which increasingly larger psychedelic wood-grain patterns radiate. In a nod to the title, these grants emphasize the resounding impact that arts organizations and artists make in communities they build and the world at large. The grants further the Foundation’s mission of supporting critical thinking, risk-taking, and provocation in the arts through innovative programming and artist projects. This year’s grantees are 18th Street Arts Center, The Brick, CalArts REDCAT, Fulcrum Arts/home LA, Future Roots/Canary Test, Human Resources Los Angeles, JOAN, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Pieter Performance Space, and Self Help Graphics & Art.
“We are excited to support this exceptional group of organizations, whose work continues to challenge paradigms in the arts,” said Mary Clare Stevens, Executive Director. “By offering larger grants, we can better amplify impact and nurture the visionary spirit our Foundation strives to uplift. These gifts reflect our commitment to supporting groundbreaking work by artists that fosters important conversations and deepens community engagement in Los Angeles and beyond.”
“As a non-profit exhibition space for sound-based practices, we are thrilled to be a first-time grant recipient from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Funding like this affirms the important role that sound plays in cultural discourse and is vital to sustaining experimental artist practices,” explained Ben Logan and Kell Yang-Sammataro, Co-Founders, Canary Test. Their project Fugue Zones—sponsored by Future Roots—explores the complex relationship between sound as a tool of the military-industrial complex and as a medium of resistance within marginalized communities. This collaboration between artists DeForrest Brown Jr., Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and Dr. Steve Goodman (Kode9) will include performances as well as installation.
This year’s grantees address the reclamation and reinterpretation of marginalized histories and identities, often through performance, sound, installation, and immersive experiences. Engaging deeply with the complex legacies of race, queerness, displacement, and collective memory, these projects address issues of erasure, visibility, and belonging with a strong emphasis on community, empowerment, healing, resistance, and the celebration of cultural resilience through diverse artistic practices.
18th Street Arts Center will present Revival_ _Revival: A Returning, a processional performance by Sage Ni’Ja Whitson that bridges memories held in the body, land, water, and voice. The procession highlights Black, Queer, and Trans presence as it travels between two churches.
CalArts REDCAT’s newly commissioned project by Guadalupe Maravilla features two performances that will serve as the capstone to his recent performance series (The OG of Undocumented Children, 2018; Walk on Water, 2019; and Disease Thrower, 2020) contending with his history escaping El Salvador and traveling to the United States as an unaccompanied minor, his subsequent cancer diagnosis, and his commitment to healing practices. Building on the exploration of identity and place, homeLA—sponsored by Fulcrum Arts—will host a site-specific installation at the Rowland Mansion, disrupting dominant historical narratives with works by Nao Bustamante, Victoria Marks, Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier, and Eva Aguila.
Human Resources Los Angeles will feature Impaired Erotics, a solo exhibition by Panteha Abareshi examining the duality of the disabled body as both spectacle and site of resistance. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Nomadic Division’s sister dreamer by Lauren Halsey will be a monumental architectural ode to South Central Los Angeles that celebrates Black cultural expression, resists gentrification, and serves as a gathering space that aims to inspire liberation, self-definition, community building, and economic autonomy.
“We are thrilled about the Mike Kelley Foundation’s continued support of risk-taking and experimental projects. This grant will give us the opportunity to work closely with LA-based artist Roksana Pirouzmand to together dream up an ambitious site-specific installation and publication,” said Suzy Halajian, Executive Director, JOAN. In carrying/caring the flame, Pirouzmand expands the dialogue on cultural memory by combining earthenware works, water, and performance. Her use of water—a force that both shapes and erodes—acts as a symbol of diaspora, while her body’s interaction with her exhibition activates and disrupts the fragile equilibrium of the clay-based installation. Pieter Performance Space’s Sissies: Something Perfect between Ourselves, co-curated by choreographer Bernard Brown, will honor Black, Brown, and Indigenous Queer artists who shaped LA’s underground creative heartbeat, while Self Help Graphics & Art’s Between and Before, Angeleno and American will feature serigraphs by multicultural artists exploring Los Angeles as a site of diaspora and memory. Finally, Untitled Stonewall Jackson Project by Kara Walker—part of MONUMENTS, a large-scale exhibition organized by The Brick and The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)—will reimagine a Confederate monument as a transformative sculpture addressing the legacy of slavery and the Civil War.
Panelists for the 2025 grant cycle include Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Faculty at Bard College and Los Angeles–based artist; Rodney McMillian, Chair and Faculty at UCLA Department of Art and Los Angeles–based artist; Edgar Miramontes, Executive and Artistic Director at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance; Ceci Moss, Director and Chief Curator at Mandeville Art Gallery, UCSD; and Alex Sloane, Associate Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
About the Foundation
The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts advances the artist’s spirit of critical thinking, risk-taking, and provocation in the arts. Established by Kelley in 2007, the Foundation seeks to further Kelley’s philanthropic work through grants to arts organizations and artists for innovative projects that reflect his multifaceted artistic practice. The Foundation also preserves the artist’s legacy more broadly and fosters the understanding of his life and creative achievements through educational initiatives including exhibitions, educational events, publications, and the preservation and care of the Foundation’s art collections and archives.
About the Artist
The work of artist Mike Kelley (1954–2012) embraced performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, sound works, and sculpture. Kelley began his career in the late 1970s with solo performances, image/text works, and gallery and site-specific installations. He came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials. The artist’s later work addressed architecture and filmic narratives using the theory of repressed memory syndrome coupled with sustained biographic and pseudo-biographic inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time, Kelley produced a body of deeply innovative work in dialogue with American popular culture as well as both modernist and alternative traditions. Recent exhibitions of Kelley’s work include a major touring survey, Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit (2023–25), organized by Tate Modern in London in collaboration with the Pinault Collection, Paris, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, opening May 10, 2025.