Nine Salt Lake County artists and collectives have been awarded a combined $60,000 through the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA)’s new Assemblage Art Fund — a locally-focused regranting program supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

This is the first year of the Assemblage Fund—and the inaugural round is dedicated exclusively to artists living and working in Salt Lake County. Every funded project will be created in the county and will show up publicly in the county—meaning the dollars are going directly to local artists and local audiences.

The program prioritizes projects that are collaborative, experimental, and intentionally engage new and diverse audiences.

“The inaugural Assemblage awardees reflect the ingenuity and depth of Salt Lake County’s artist community,” said Laura Allred Hurtado, UMOCA Executive Director. “By supporting projects rooted in collaboration, experimentation, and care, the Fund strengthens the foundation for a sustainable and inclusive arts ecosystem in Utah.”

2025–26 Assemblage Art Fund Awardees & Project Descriptions

Process Grants – $5,000 each

Construction Company (Steven Chodoriwsky, Joshua Graham & Chaz Prymek) — An experimental platform for collective making. Combining site‐specific installation, public programming, and mobile education, the project engages with the poetics and politics of the construction site to examine housing, labor, and care in Salt Lake City. Through collaborative artistic action, it asks: How can building become a shared, reparative act? What forms of community emerge through the work of making and maintaining together?

Alexandria “Inez” Garcia — The Monarch Migration is a mobile, site‐responsive project combining sculpture, performance, and community storytelling. Drawing inspiration from the transborder flight of monarch butterflies, Garcia transforms wearable vitrines — each carrying live, ethically raised butterflies — into moving exhibitions through public celebrations. Community members contribute single words reflecting migration and belonging, forming an evolving visual archive. Rooted in Mexican cultural symbolism of the Monarch as both traveler and spirit, the project asks: How can acts of migration — human and animal alike — illuminate resilience, remembrance, and renewal?

A Madden — The Queer Birth Project is a multimedia exploration of queer family building through installation, film, performance, and community dialogue. Drawing from Madden’s own experience as a queer, nonbinary solo parent, the project traces conception, birth, and caregiving as acts of creativity and resistance. Through personal documentation and collective storytelling with queer and trans parents, birth workers, and allies, the element asks: How can reimagining birth and kinship expand our visions of care, liberation, and belonging?

Sophie Nebeker — Ceramic Kiln Firing Craft-Art Experience is a public engagement project combining accessible ceramic workshops with a communal raku kiln firing performance. Participants create clay works while witnessing the transformative firing process, connecting craft, community, and ritual. Drawing from DIY culture and traditional practices, the project asks: How can making together foster resilience, creativity, and shared experience in uncertain times?

Kat Nix + Connor Estes — Sounds of a Life Well-Loved explores pleasure and presence at life’s end through sound. By collecting and weaving participants’ most comforting and meaningful sounds into an immersive “death-nest” installation, the project asks: How can we reclaim what a good death looks like? How does engaging our final sense reshape the way we live, connect, and witness one another?

Sara Serratos — Restaurantes Mexicanos en Salt Lake County is a photographic project documenting the spaces, people, and signage of local Mexican restaurants. Celebrating the labor and presence of the Mexican community, the work transforms these restaurants into sites of art, memory, and cultural dialogue. Presented through pop-up exhibitions and a photo book, the project asks: How can everyday spaces reflect, preserve, and honor community identity?

Project Grants – $10,000 each

Cara Despain — Home Front Doom Town combines installation, oral histories, and activism to confront Salt Lake City’s nuclear legacy. Inspired by 1950s “doom towns” built for atomic testing and her own family history as “Downwinders,” the project reimagines these sites as spaces for reflection and community dialogue. Through reconstructed structures, video projection, and uranium glass displays, Despain asks: How does the fallout of nuclear history shape our present? What forms of collective reckoning and repair might emerge through art today?

Rae Luebbert — Soft Shoulder is a six-hour, interdisciplinary performance-exhibition featuring six artists whose works unfold continuously over time. Centered on the theme of residue — what remains as time passes — the project examines endurance, care, and accessibility as artistic forms. Grounded in Luebbert’s practice as a disabled artist, the exhibition builds flexibility and rest into its structure, inviting audiences to move, pause, and return as they wish. It asks: What emerges when we give art, and each other, the gift of sustained attention?

Punto de Inflexión (led by Stephanie García & Peter Hay) — El Puesto is a long-term participatory performance and installation exploring intergenerational Latinx culture. Set in a market stand over five months, the project collects community stories, rituals and memories, evoking the colors, sounds, and smells of traditional mercados. El Puesto asks: How can shared cultural spaces cultivate connection, memory, and collective identity across generations?

The Assemblage Art Fund is UMOCA’s newest structural program — joining the Warhol Foundation’s national network of regional regranting sites — and is designed to directly strengthen Utah’s cultural infrastructure from within. Rather than bolting new institutions onto the art scene, Assemblage injects resources at the level of the working artist — where new artistic ecosystems actually start.

More information on the program, plus full grantee bios and project images, are available at: https://assemblageartfund.org/#grantees
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