Platforms Fund Artist Grantees 2025-2026

Culture Bearers Implementation

Trans Queer Youth New Orleans: Coneflower (@transqueeryouth.nola)

Coneflower is a participatory documentation project designed to archive and uplift the mutual aid and creative resistance of queer and trans youth in south Louisiana. \Trans Queer Youth of New Orleans is a youth-led community organization that has autonomously organized workshops, gathering spaces, vigils and community care using the tools laid out by generations of southern queer organizers. The work of TQY speaks for itself, however few are able to witness the magic of this intimate community besides those who volunteer to support the youth vision. Coneflower seeks to make publicly accessible the impact of the work through photo story.

Spy Boy Walter Sandifer III: Spying Below Sea Level (@waltwinner)

My existence as a masking Indian is giving thanks to the Mississippi River through my suits, songs, dances, and gatherings. Who I am today is an active representation of my predecessor’s love for the environment. I use my cultural traditions as a creative way to educate, heal, and support many communities. Masking my kids, nieces and nephews and myself will be a clear representation of what active preservation is as a Black Masking Indian. I love art and appreciate it more when I can uplift the next generation of forward thinkers and honor the environment at once.

Christina Bragg aka Baby Doll Gentilly Lace: Baby Doll regalia for the Mahogany Blue Baby Dolls 2026 Black Masking season (@gentillylace)

Christina Bragg aka Baby Doll Gentilly Lace will design and create handmade, original regalia for the Mahogany Blue Babydolls to wear and strut in on Carnival Day, St. Joseph’s Night, Super Sundays, and cultural events throughout 2026. The unique dresses, umbrellas, and accessories will honor baby doll traditions while being innovative with artistic flair.

Wynoka Boudreaux: Biq Queen Nookie’s New Suit 2026

Big Queen Wynoka Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles will design and create an original Mardi Gras Indian suit for 2026, honoring 15 years of masking and 27 years of cultural craftsmanship. The project includes mentoring emerging queens, teaching oral history, and hosting community workshops on suit-making traditions. The year-long process will culminate with a public debut on Mardi Gras Day and Super Sunday. Through storytelling, intricate beadwork, and cultural education, Queen Wynoka continues the legacy of Big Chief Monk Boudreaux while preserving and celebrating the rich traditions of Black Masking Indian culture in New Orleans.

Big Chief Al Pilote: Big Chief Al Pilote

Big Chief Al Pilote will design and create an original Black Masking Indian suit for Carnival 2026, continuing over 30 years of cultural tradition and artistic excellence. This project includes months of hand-beading, suit construction, and storytelling rooted in African and Native American heritage. With the award, Big Chief Pilote will source high-quality materials—beads, feathers, fabric, and accessories—and document the creative process. The suit will debut publicly on Mardi Gras Day and Super Sunday 2026, serving as a vibrant expression of cultural pride, resistance, and spiritual reverence in New Orleans’ historic Black Masking Indian tradition.

Wardell Lewis Jr: “The GRAND MARSHAL of NEW ORLEANS”

GRAND MARSHAL FOR NEW ORLEANS WARDELL LEWIS JR

Visual Arts Implementation

Caitlin Ezell Waugh: Gulf South Reproductive Autonomy Archive (@caitlinezellwaugh)

Caitlin Ezell Waugh is a sculptor based in New Orleans. She explores decay, vulnerability, growth and time through the treatment of glass, found objects, light, and plant material. Relationships between plants and people, especially in the context of stewardship, ceremony and the body are central to her studio practice, research, and civic engagement. The Platforms grant supports her project, Gulf South Reproductive Autonomy Archive, which is a translation of contemporary data and archival research into workshops, an art book published at Paper Machine, and an ephemeral public monument.

Gallery of the Streets: Radio Outlaw (@galleryofthestreets)
www.galleryofthestreets.org [b]REACH: adventures in heterotopia

Radio Outlaw is a low-frequency, micro-broadcasting radio studio situated inside of reconstructed mobile vehicles. Created by Gallery of the Streets alongside community partners, Radio Outlaw is part public art installation, part guerrilla spectacle, part information hub, and part community gathering space. Hidden in plain view, Radio Outlaw roves the country using humor, music, ritual, and provocation to broadcast topics that impact our communities.

José Torres-Tama: NO PAPERS! NO FEAR! KATRINA @ 20 VISUAL ARTS HISTORY CHRONICLE (@josetorrestama)

Ecuadorian-born immigrant and award-winning visual artist, José Torres-Tama, has created a pictorial chronicle titled “NO PAPERS! NO FEAR! KATRINA @ 20.” Working on this series for a dozen years, the artworks honor the “undocumented” Latin American immigrant reconstruction workers. Caribbean And New Orleanian Arts (CANOA) presents this epic visual history project for a Katrina @ 20 commemoration event, and community activities will be launched to coincide with the three-month art show that runs from August 9 through Oct 24, 2025. During an era of brutal anti-immigrant hysteria, it’s undocumented Latin American workers that resurrected New Orleans from her post-Katrina deathbed.

Iron Rail Collective: Free.99 (@ironrailarchive)

Iron Rail Collective members will continue their work exploring histories of alternative libraries and radical literature in New Orleans, culminating in a publication. They will use materials from The Iron Rail Library, oral histories, and written and visual submissions to animate the tradition of providing radical access to radical lit. Collective members will collaborate to produce an experimental journal, with histories and segments from the archive as well as visual and written responses and engagements with process, the archive, and traditions of radical lit.

Melany Cutno: What About The East

In this poetic short, young filmmaker Melany Cutno dives into the pain of identity tied to her neighborhood, the effects of city officials, and the local news media’s stigmatization of an entire community.

Research + Development

Madeline Horta and Mag Chapman: FemTeXXX (@madeline.horta, @magniunm)

FemteXXX is a collection of small batch, hand-made garments for kink and sex workers designed by local designers Madeline Horta and Mag Chapman. FemteXXX muddles gender norms and challenges heteronormative ideals of sexiness through a queer, fem lens. FemteXXX is currently researching local sex  workers’ apparel needs and developing latex and knitwear textiles.

Celeste Mercadel: Moved by the Spirit: Southern Black Women, Spiritual Traditions, and the Ritual of Movement 

Moved by the Spirit is a dance and research project exploring how Southern Black women express spirituality through movement. Blending archival study, community storytelling, and performance, the project traces connections between Black Christianity, Hoodoo/rootwork, and embodied ritual. Through community workshops, performance installations, and literary reflections, it uplifts spiritual gestures as sacred memory and cultural survival. Drawing from personal experience, historical research, and collective practice, the project celebrates Black women’s sacred labor and the body as a living archive. Led by Celeste Mercadel, the work will culminate in a publication, archival exhibition, and site-specific performances across New Orleans.

Angela R. Russell: Lilies of the Wards

Lilies of the Wards is a collaborative film series that explores the intersections of environmental crisis, labor injustice, and femme resistance in New Orleans. Rooted in community-based research and storytelling, the series centers the voices of women who navigate the complex legacies of Louisiana’s colonial past and the future aftermath of climate apocalypse. Each short film will highlight collective memory, using hybrid documentary and narrative forms to confront the erasure of femme perspectives. The project’s research will be activated through community workshops and public screenings. Ultimately, this work will be grounded in historical associations and cultural accountability.

Chris Leaux and bisu yaw: Clay Cousins (@chris.leaux)

Clay Cousins is a somatic based clay practice that stitches together our ancestral history as Black diasporic creatives playing, loving, and embracing ceramics as a liberatory practice. We aim to elevate and amplify Black ceramicists’ experiences by exploring the history of Southern Black ceramicists and clay’s utility for meaningful play, individual and collective storytelling, and self-expression as both art and artifacts. We support the work of local Black ceramicists and create a supportive environment for people unfamiliar with clay to develop their relationship with the medium.

John Alleyne: A consciousness like a sun (@johnalleyne_) johnalleyne.com 

This project will enable foundational research that will inform the curatorial framework of the forthcoming group exhibition titled “A consciousness like a sun” highlighting the deep historical, cultural, and diasporic ties between New Orleans and the Caribbean. These funds will help cover travel and lodging to facilitate visits to studios of Caribbean and Caribbean-American artists and to select the artworks to be included in the exhibition. Multidisciplinary artworks that explore themes of migration, memory, resistance will be selected. “A consciousness like a sun” seeks to engage and amplify the voices of the Caribbean community living in New Orleans.

Black the Creator: Trance: Identity as Movement Practice (@thecreatorblack)

“Trance: Identity as Movement Practice” is an auto/ethnographic performance research project examining rituals of land, body, and spirit possession.Through a mapping of ancestral healing-ways and freedom movements that travel across time, space, borders, and bodies, this project aims to develop cartographies of Blackqueer embodied wisdom in the struggle towards liberation.

ÌFÉ: Feet First: Creating a New Black EDM (@_ife)

Under the working title of Feet First: Creating a New Black EDM, I will be writing and recording and visually documenting a new electronic music style inspired by traditional 2nd Line dances.