The ARTS Foundation offers microgrants to BIPOC artists and cultural workers across Turtle Island to support creative projects in all forms. These small but intentional funds prioritize artists often excluded from institutional support—offering resources without restrictions.
The projects featured here represent a small selection of the artists and cultural workers supported through this program.
Domingos de Barro - Los Ángeles, 2025
Domingos de Barro is a free ceramics workshop held once a month in Huntington Park, Southeast Los Angeles. It is a bilingual workshop where participants connect to this medium, connect to their ancestral culture, and use their senses to connect with the clay and their bodies. It is a holistic approach that is needed for the community at the only space in the area for this free programming: Art Space HP. Participants learn to shape basic pottery forms with guided instruction, then enjoy free play to experiment and create. All materials are provided. This project has received a powerful response from the community, and we want to ensure its sustainability by purchasing materials for everyone.
Hosted by Manu Garcia
Visual Cache - Brooklyn, 2025
Exhibition at an artist-run gallery space, Field of Play Gallery (Brooklyn), features artists whose cultural lineages are informed by heritages beyond Western narratives, yet whose practices have been shaped by living and working in the United States. Each artist engages with the impact of globalization (directly and indirectly), often experienced through Westernization, while tracing, questioning, and rearticulating connections to their own histories.
Curated by Eri King
Unravelling - Toronto, 2025
Unravelling is a multidisciplinary exhibition on Filipino/a/x diasporic self-representations that reveals the intertwined connections between the textile waste of today's fast fashion industry, the resounding consequences of American imperialism and Canadian settler colonialism, and intergenerational matriarchal histories.
Unlearning and rejecting the normalized culture of disposability that promotes excessive consumerism and extreme individualism at the cost of environmental destruction and the invisibility of garment workers, we hold steadfast in our hearts the creative, sustainable habits instilled in us by our Filipino immigrant families—in particular, our mothers, aunts, and grandmothers.
Together as a collective, we practice the Philippine weaving and textile traditions of the basahan, banig, and terno by repurposing and reclaiming discarded, forgotten textiles as a means to detangle grief, to bear witness to varying embodiments of colonial violence, and finally, to ask, "how can we pass on these practices to take care of this land and each other?"
Curated by Habi Habi Po
Tejido Sewing Workshop - Las Vegas, 2025
Monthly communal fibre arts workshop for local artisans and our community.
Hosted by Tejido
Pieces of Pindangan - Los Angeles / Philippines, 2025
In the spring of 2025, artist Nica Aquino was invited to participate in Alfredo F. Tadiar Library's Balay da Judge artist residency program. During her month-long residency, she started a photo essay project entitled Traces of You, the fourth installment of her ongoing photo series, Somnia Memorias (dream memoirs). This newest part of the series explored various streets of San Fernando, La Union, originally known as Pindangan. The work specifically traces back to the former barangays (neighborhoods) her parents lived in together, quietly observing communities they once frequented before immigrating overseas.
As part of Nica's residency, her community engagement event included an artist talk at Puón Books, followed by a lesson on photography basics, and a photo walk. The photo walk led participants to historic landmarks near the bookshop, as well as landmarks personal to the artist, stopping by former streets and homes her parents once lived in together.
