Wherewithal: 2026 Cohort
Washington Project for the Arts is pleased to announce the 10 grant recipients for the 2026 funding cycle of Wherewithal Grants, providing financial support and peer mentorship for DC-area artists in areas of research and projects. Six artists have been awarded with research grants of $5,000 each, and four artists have been awarded with project & presentation grants of $7,500 each, for a total disbursement of $60,000 this cycle.
2026 Research grantees: Gia Harewood, Jackie Hoysted, Brooke Jay & Chrystal Seawood, Christopher Kardambikis, Adriana Monsalve, and Kat Thompson
2026 Project & Presentation grantees: abdu ali mongo & Maleke Glee, Sobia Ahmad & Benny Shaffer, Ama BE, and Shariq Shah
Over the next year, artists from this cohort will organize projects including: a multi-genre publication inspired by the Black queer body in motion; a three-day symposium bringing together a cohort of artists, filmmakers, and poets whose work probes land and film as reciprocal sites of encounter; a performance dinner; and an intergenerational cooking workshop. Others will conduct research around fascinating topics such as: soil memory, mycology, diasporic memories and language, and the history of DIY publishing in the 21st century.
Throughout the yearlong grant cycle, grantees will produce their work independently and in dialogue with one another, convening regularly as a group facilitated by Nathalie von Veh, Wherewithal Regrants Manager.
An independent panel of four artists and curators reviewed 113 applications and are awarding 10 grants. The adjudication panel consisted of: Jenna Crowder, Writer and Editor (Washington, DC); Krista Green, Grit Fund Program Manager, The Peale (Baltimore, MD); Rex Delafkaran, Artist and Wherewithal Alum (Chicago, IL); and Sara O’Keeffe, Senior Curator, Art Omi (Ghent, NY). They evaluated each proposal based on the criteria of Artistic Impact, Context/Audience, Collaboration, Feasibility, and Budget.
Generously funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as part of its Regional Regranting Program and managed by Washington Project for the Arts, Wherewithal Grants are intended to support a wide range of experimental and multidisciplinary practices, particularly those that emphasize collaboration and discourse. Since launching in 2019, Wherewithal Grants has supported 166 visual artists with a total of $460,000 in grants. The 2026 funding cycle is the 7th consecutive cycle of grants distributed by this program.
Learn more about each grantee and their work below.
AWARDED RESEARCH
These $5,000 grants are for artists to further their practices through ideation, research, and experimentation.
Gia Harewood, Soil as Witness: Excavating Land, Memory, and Institutional Power
As a member of the Soil Memory Project collective, Harewood is asking the question: What does soil remember that institutions forget? From Kenilworth Park’s layered history, to Bryan Stevenson’s Legacy Soil Collection Project, to Sarah Lewis’s motif of the “ground,” to recently discovered burial sites—this research project seeks to unearth hidden local histories buried below, while finding ways for visual art to educate, heal, and transform.
Jackie Hoysted, Ancestral Soil, Living Networks
Hoysted’s research explores how art and science can work together to help us better understand fungi. Using DNA imagery and immersive art, she will look at how fungal networks store information, communicate, and make decisions. At the same time, respecting Irish animistic traditions that view fungi and soil as living, aware beings. By connecting this traditional ecological knowledge with modern mycology, the project asks whether new scientific tools can support and affirm older ways of knowing nature, rather than replacing them.
Brooke Jay & Chrystal Seawood, B O D Y P A R T Y
B O D Y P A R T Y is a research project exploring dance as a somatic intervention and embodied inquiry into bodily awareness for Black womxn. Through movement-based research, the project examines how dancers respond somatically and emotionally to different sensory inputs—such as music and lighting—and how those responses shape bodily awareness.
Christopher Kardambikis, Paper Cuts: An oral history of zines and DIY publications in the 21st century
In an effort to better trace the developments of zines and community-driven DIY publication projects in the 21st century, Kardambikis will collect interviews with people who can speak to a variety of local publishing scenes across the country. The important aspects of small-press—local specificity, hand-made and underground production, informal distribution networks, limited availability, limited lifespan—are what define their strengths and also accurately describe why these projects are so difficult to trace over time. These conversations will be archived and published as part of the Paper Cuts project and podcast.
Adriana Monsalve, Mississippi / Magdalena
Mississippi / Magdalena uses revisionist history to explore colonized land and waterways elusive to Black and Brown bodies through the displacement of mixed diasporas. This work requires an investigative collaboration and deep connection with the dead, in a playful and irreverent fable that calls legends to life and ghosts to play.
Monsalve is grappling with what it means to collaborate with the dead through her grandfather’s unpublished stories, whose notebooks of writings were found after his death. To excavate these legacies, she begins by tracing the rivers of her ancestry, from the Mississippi Delta to the Rio Magdalena in Columbia. Both waterways have deep ties to musical traditions including the Blues and Cumbia. Monsalve’s lineage holds the embodiment of two worlds, elusive but embedded in her… two rivers, one sound and diaspora, misplaced on tethered land, in a body between land and sea.
Kat Thompson, Fragments of Memory, Threads of Sound
Thompson’s research investigates how ancestral memory persists through diasporic material, focusing on sound and photographic traces within Caribbean and diasporic communities. Fieldwork will include recording voices, songs, and ambient environments, including Jamaican Patois, and photographing objects, textiles, and spaces that carry intergenerational histories. Combined with archival research and visual documentation, these materials will form a foundation for future photographic and sound-based projects that preserve, activate, and honor the continuity of lineage and memory.
AWARDED PROJECTS & PRESENTATIONS
These $7,500 grants support ongoing or new projects that embrace unconventional or D.I.Y. values and will be presented publicly in the DC-area in 2026.
abdu ali mongo & Maleke Glee, twurl, a literary journal dedicated to Black gay poetics
twurl is an annual multi-genre publication inspired by the Black queer body in motion: how we move through the quotidian; how we navigate visibility and survival; and how dance culture, particularly the vogue scene, offers a language for presence, style, and self-determination. The project publishes contemporary prose, poetry, scholarly writing, and photographic works by queer men and masc-identifying people of the African diaspora. Grounded in the legacy of Black oratory history, the Black radical tradition, and the archives of independent Black queer underground publications, twurl extends these lineages into a contemporary journal that centers the Black queer gaze and insists on the value of Black gay everyday life as a site of intellect, pleasure, community, and record. This grant will partially support the production expenses of twurl’s inaugural issue and underwrite a public launch event slated for Fall 2026.
Sobia Ahmad & Benny Shaffer, Entangled Terrain
Entangled Terrain is a three-day symposium that brings together a cohort of artists, filmmakers, and poets whose work probes land and film as reciprocal sites of encounter. The symposium, which foregrounds film as an embodied medium, will include a screening of celluloid-based experimental films, a live expanded cinema performance by Ahmad and Shaffer, along with sound artist Jessica Fuquay, and a hands-on film-processing workshop. Addressing notions of ecological interconnectedness, the symposium will explore how materially focused moving-image practices can open up various ways of sensing and relating to land. Cultivate, along with other collaborators, will be a key conversation partner in shaping the project.
Ama BE, topophilia africana : haptic membra(i)n(e)
topophilia africana : haptic membra(i)n(e) is a performance dinner that attends to intimacy, saudade, and the entrasensory dimensions of breaking bread to counter longing and fracture inside African immigrant communities. Centering Sudano Sahelian regional cuisines traditionally eaten by hand, the meal foregrounds the shared dexterity of an ecologically unified region that has been actively divided by ethnic difference, and rigid borders, even in the diaspora.
Shariq Shah, Cooking Memory: An Intergenerational Cooking Workshop
Cooking Memory draws inspiration from the ways in which many mothers and grandmothers reveal their memories in fragments while their hands are at work in the kitchen. This intergenerational cooking workshop seeks to stage a space for an impromptu form of archiving, where the shared act of cooking facilitates the preservation of memory through conversation. Here, the table, the ingredient, and the practice of its preparation become the means by which generational memory is passed down.
