Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Announces 2026 Recipients of Infinite Expansion Grants Marking Ten Years of the Foundation's Grant Program
April 14, 2026
Grants
LOS ANGELES, CA. (April 15, 2026)—The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts (MKFA) has announced the recipients of its 2026 Infinite Expansion Grants (IEG), which award funding to nine contemporary arts organizations across Los Angeles County whose projects exemplify risk-taking, critical inquiry, and community engagement. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Foundation’s grant program, which continues to build on a foundational commitment to amplifying the impact of artists and arts organizations on the communities they serve. Six of the nine organizations in the 2026 cohort are first-time recipients of a MKFA grant—Art in the Park Community Cultural Programs; Color Compton; Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN) Foundation on behalf of CSUN Art Galleries; Barnsdall Art Park Foundation on behalf of Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG); Los Angeles Performance Practice; and Monday Evening Concerts—while Clockshop; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA); and the Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation return as grantees, together reflecting the breadth and vitality of the county’s contemporary cultural landscape.
“Ten years of grant-making offers an opportunity to reflect on our grant program’s founding purpose: to support the kind of innovative, provocative, and rigorous work that defined Mike Kelley’s career, and to extend his legacy of giving by keeping that spirit alive in Los Angeles—a testament to his generosity and influence,” said Mary Clare Stevens, Executive Director of MKFA. “The artists projects and nine organizations supported this year embody that spirit, expanding contemporary practice in ways that are generative and grounded in the communities they serve.”
“Monday Evening Concerts (MEC) is deeply grateful for the support of the Mike Kelley Foundation in presenting the West Coast premiere of Steven Takasugi’s Piano Concerto (Sinfonietta Version). This generous grant enables us to undertake the kind of ambitious, challenging, and deeply rewarding work that has been our organization’s raison d’être since 1939. This work pushes the boundaries of the classical music tradition, expanding the horizons of the discipline while engaging and enriching both curious listeners and dedicated new audiences alike,” remarked Jonathan Hepfer, Artistic Director of Monday Evening Concerts.
Spanning performance, installation, sculpture, sound, photography, and print, these projects engage communities across the county, from the San Fernando Valley to South Los Angeles, East L.A., Compton, and Northeast L.A. Many of this year’s grantees explore questions of place, memory, and belonging, with several framing Los Angeles itself as a site of diaspora, migration, and community resilience. CSUN Foundation’s exhibition BETTY: A Sequel to Valley Girl Redefined, for example, celebrates the subcultural histories of the San Fernando Valley through five thematic throughlines and close to 25 artists, while Clockshop’s subterranean convergence, a sculptural installation and performance score by LaRissa Rogers at Los Angeles State Historic Park, draws on the diasporic geographies of the transcontinental railroad between the American South and West to investigate the ways Black and marginalized communities have conceptualized where liberation might be.
Other grantees investigate queer histories and visibility. This includes Los Angeles Performance Practice’s Requiem: por las almas que nacen de la luna, a large-scale, immersive performance installation led by artist San Cha, with rafa esparza and Darian Donovan Thomas, which reimagines the requiem form through a queer Latinx lens, blending music, installation, and collective ritual into an act of mourning and celebration. Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) will present Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck, the first-ever survey of the Los Angeles-based artist’s expansive oeuvre. Through her boundary-pushing practice, Silton engages with the themes of gentrification, political disappointment, lesbian and queer desire, historical documentation, and the concept of “free speech,” and the exhibition will highlight her impact on L.A.’s queer art and literary communities from the mid-1980s onwards.
Anida Yeou Ali’s exhibition and performance The Buddhist Bug at the Vincent Price Art Museum is a creation myth springing from the artist’s interest in hybridity, otherness, and transcendence. Monday Evening Concerts, meanwhile, will present Los Angeles artist Steven Takasugi’s Piano Concerto (Sinfonietta Version), an intricate, multi-layered work that fuses live performance, electronic manipulation, and theatrical staging, whose West Coast premiere restores visibility to a major contribution to contemporary music, a field in which important new works too often disappear after a single performance.
While many of the grantees reflect on the relationship between humans and the natural world, Art in the Park Community Cultural Programs will draw a direct connection with Earth Cycles, a series of exhibitions and programs examining the cycles—carbon, water, rock, and plant—that support the life of the planet. Observing and interpreting these natural rhythms is a survival practice across many cultures, skills that are at risk of disappearing in an era of long work hours and social isolation; as part of Earth Cycles, five artists will express these cycles through different media, reaffirming our crucial connection to the Earth.
“Before news of the Mike Kelley Foundation grant, we were already thinking big, but this support has fundamentally shifted our horizon. It has empowered Los Angeles Performance Practice (LAPP) and me and my collaborators rafa esparza and Darian Donovan Thomas to realize the show of our dreams, a space where everything is truly possible,” said artist San Cha. “As artists, that is an incredibly exciting and liberating place to be; it feels like we are finally living the dream we’ve been building toward.”
This year’s grant cycle was juried by a distinguished panel of five arts professionals: Tiffany Barber, Faculty at UCLA Art History Department; Jibz Cameron, Los Angeles-based artist; Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach at MOCA; Jenny Lin, Faculty at USC Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere and curator; and Rodrigo Valenzuela, Faculty at UCLA Art Department and Los Angeles-based artist. The panelists evaluated proposals based on their community impact, strength of curatorial vision, and operational capacity to execute the projects.
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.