Announcing the Round 14 awardees of the Precipice Fund
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is proud to announce the Round 14 recipients of the Precipice Fund, an initiative providing critical support to unincorporated visual art collectives, alternative spaces, and collaborative projects in and around Portland, Oregon, since 2013. The Precipice Fund recognizes that informal, experimental, and often anti-institutional projects are integral to the vibrant art ecology of the region. In 2025, $60,000 in grants were distributed across 13 projects, supporting a total of 46 individual artists.
An independent panel selected the Round 14 grantees. As external entities from PICA, this review body consists of visual art professionals and artists who understand the essential contributions that contemporary artists make to their communities. The 2025 panelists are Amber Kay Ball, a Native multi-practice artist and community-based advocate; Emma Broderick, Executive Director of Pu’uhonua Society, Honolulu, Hawai’i; and Donnie Cervantes, Director and Curator of Aupuni Space, Honolulu, Hawai’i. On the panel experience, Broderick said:
“I was inspired by this year’s Precipice Fund awardees, as they affirmed the vital role that artists and cultural practitioners play in caring for, creating with, and working in service to something greater than self. I was humbled to learn about the city of Portland and what came before through the excellence of artistic expression that finds home there. I am changed by the process and will remain an ally across the ocean that connects us.”
We thank the panelists for their time and thoughtful consideration of this year’s project proposals.
The Round 14 awardees embrace a wide range of project formats and concepts, with a general emphasis on togetherness and sharing experiences through art and practice. Below is an alphabetical list of the projects selected, detailing working titles, artist names, and project descriptions (as provided by the artists). This information is also available at precipicefund.org.
PICA congratulates the 2025 grantees, acknowledges all applicants, and extends sincere gratitude to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for continuing to invest in contemporary art and artists nationwide.
Grant Recipients and Project Descriptions
Against the Code
Devin Boss, Martin Van Londen, Brynden McNew, and Dee Juliano Scott
Against the Code is a documentary capturing the high-stakes journey of two Nigerian-American brothers in Portland, creating a breakthrough video game. The project blends cinematic portraiture with vivid reenactments and archival media, using high-end visuals as a critical tool. This visual approach elevates their struggle for representation in tech into a powerful statement on digital identity and cultural self-determination in contemporary art.
Agroecology Film Series
Meech Boakye and Jade Novarino
The Agroecology Film Series presents a series of public, artist-run programs. Hosted at small farms and microcinemas, each program will feature a seasonal meal that responds to film(s). Films will explore the struggle and beauty of being in relationship to the land as shaped by diaspora, Indigeneity, foraging, or cultivation.
Azn Zine Fest
SJ Anderson, Sarah Joy Calpo, A’misa Chiu, Jules Estacio, Julia Kim, and Yoko OK
Azn Zine Fest is a community-oriented one-day zine festival located in the heart of East Portland, organized by a group of local Asian American artists. Hosted in the vacant storefronts and hallways of Fubonn Shopping Center, a commercial hub for Asian immigrant and Asian American communities, Azn Zine Fest will provide shoppers and community members a unique chance to connect with local Asian artists.
Blank < Plank
Katherine Aungier and Andy Slater
“Blank Plank” is a term which comes from a forum trying to come up with a word for when you take an extra step on a staircase, down or up. Blank < Plank will be an exhibition featuring sculptures and a central ruin-like structure, inviting contemplation on renewal and rearrangement. These walking meditations will re-interpret traditional tours, fostering discussions on the environment and safety while addressing disability apprehension within urban landscapes.
The Changing Room
Marilys Ernst, Jordan Isadore, Katherine Longstreth, and Alex Meyer
The Changing Room is an interactive installation that draws a conceptual link between the birth of American democracy and the present threats to civic freedoms. Rooted in the historical metaphor of the “body politic,” The Changing Room interrogates how freedom is enacted and how citizenship is embodied or disembodied. What began as a promise of unalienable rights has curdled into hollow self-absorption, filtered through social media, algorithmic manipulation, and a pervasive culture of surveillance.
FemmeTV: Programming For a New Paradigm
Erin Aquarian and Kathryn Vision
FemmeTV is an emerging media collective founded by queer feminist punks and rooted in those values and traditions. Reimagining what media can be, FemmeTV practices relational, nonhierarchical collaboration to create media in community, for community. Their work challenges traditional industry norms of exclusion and gatekeeping by prioritizing accessibility of tools and programming.
Gathering Clouds
Christian Orellana Bauer and Takaaki Okada
Gathering Clouds is a series of ritualized refuges that will investigate the cityscape that hampers communities from accessing green spaces to lay down in peace, identify refuges, and create temporary pavilions that welcome everyone to gather and ask questions to the clouds.
Orbit Project
Marcelo Fontana and Chris Ticas
Orbit is a curatorial project highlighting film, animation, and moving images. Dedicated to exploring the politics of images in contemporary life, Orbit creates community and visibility by presenting a broad mix of international and local artists to the Portland public.
Seed to Quilt
A Black Art Ecology of Portland, Adriene Cruz, Bridgette Hickey, Mia O’Connor, Ella Ray, and Déy Rivers
Seed to Quilt is an urgent remembering. Black Elders, adults, and youth are invited to create across generations, learning skills and lifeways from a time before a forced forgetting. Historical and modern harm has been enacted through urban planning as erasure, not just of Black landmarks, but of memory itself, dispersing people across time and space and creating isolation. This work is built to create togetherness and repair belonging through traditional craft.
SOCIETY
Katherine Aungier, Eleanor Ford, Sarv Iraji, Tim McCall, Ido Radon, and Lydia Rosenberg
SOCIETY is an artist-run curatorial project space for art, its discourses, and its histories. It hosts exhibitions, talks, screenings, and symposia with internationally-recognized artists, art historians, scholars, and amateurs. SOCIETY has produced a journal of the same name with writing and projects by artists and art historians. On its website, SOCIETY publishes reviews, essays, and other responses to art.
Superorganism
Syon Davis and Jacque Hammond
Syon Davis collaborated with WRK! (an alternative soul trio featuring Jacque Hammond, Amenta Abioto, and Vaughn Kimmons) to produce a song called “Superor-ganism” about Attini leaf cutter ants and what we have to learn from them about community, interdependence, and ecological abundance. This project creates a mixed media/collage/animated music video for the song.
Swim Meet
Madeleine Hanlon-Austin, Clara Harlow, and Teresa O’Loughlin
Swim Meet is a series of five socially-engaged visual art workshops and events that will take place in the swimming pool of North Portland’s historic Matt Dishman Community Center. Amidst citywide budget cuts, these events will be developed in collaboration with local artists and aquatic staff to offer play-based aquatic programming for adults.
Waters We Carry: Portland’s Plastic Quilt
Epiphany Couch, Megita Denton, and Sade DuBoise
Waters We Carry: Portland’s Plastic Quilt confronts the toxic reality of Portland’s rivers. Plastic waste is stitched into a massive quilted map. Painted, collaged, and suspended on a sculptural frame built from reclaimed materials, the work exposes how pollution and displacement have stained Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities, transforming plastic debris into a bold act of collective repair.
About The Precipice Fund
Since 2013, the Precipice Fund has provided critical support to unincorporated visual art collectives, alternative spaces, and collaborative projects in and around Portland, Oregon. Operating outside traditional forms of support, funded projects seek to promote dialogue, cultivate communities, and encourage generative and expansive artistic process while driving culture forward locally and nationally. The Precipice Fund recognizes these informal, experimental, and often anti-institutional projects as integral to the innovative spirit and vibrant art ecology of Metro Portland and surrounding areas.
About Regional Regranting Program
The Precipice Fund is funded through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program. The Regional Regranting Program was established in 2007 to recognize and support the movement of independently organized, public-facing, artist-centered activity that animates local and regional art scenes but that lies beyond the reach of traditional funding sources. The program is administered by non-profit visual art centers across the United States that work in partnership with the Foundation to fund artists’ experimental projects and collaborative undertakings.
The 39 regranting programs provide grants of up to $12,000 for the creation and pre-sentation of new work. Programs are developed and facilitated by organizations in Albuquerque (NM), Atlanta (GA), Baltimore (MD), Boston (MA), Buffalo (NY), Chicago (IL), Cleveland (OH), Denver (CO), Detroit (MI), Houston (TX), Indianapolis (IN), Iowa City (IA), Kansas City (MO), Knoxville (TN), Rapid City (SD), Los Angeles (CA), Miami (FL), Milwaukee (WI), Minneapolis (MN), Mobile (AL), New Orleans (LA), Newark (NJ), O’ahu (HI), Oklahoma City (OK), Omaha (NE), Philadelphia (PA), Tucson (AZ), Portland (ME), Portland (OR), Providence (RI), Raleigh (NC), Saint Louis (MO), Salt Lake City (UT), San Francisco (CA), San Juan (PR), Seattle (WA), and Washington, DC.
For more information, please visit warholfoundation.org/grants/regional-regranting.
About Warhol Foundation
In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the Foundation has given nearly $310 million in cash grants to more than 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.
For more information, please visit warholfoundation.org.
About PICA
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) acknowledges and advances new developments in contemporary art, fostering the explorations of artists and audiences. Since 1995, PICA has championed the practice of contemporary artists from around the world, driving vital conversations about the art and issues of today. PICA presents artists from visual and performance backgrounds and embraces those individuals who exist at the borders of genres and ideas. Through performances, exhibitions, community and public programs, artist residencies, lectures, workshops, and the Time-Based Art Festival, our programs catalyze conversations about contemporary culture.
More information can be found at pica.org.