Celebrating visual artists in the 11385 zip code of Queens, NYC.
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“My photography grows out of my personal journey and the stories of the immigrant community I come from. Through portraiture and documentary-style imagery, I aim to elevate the humanity, resilience, and everyday experiences of people who are often misrepresented or overlooked. My work blends personal storytelling with social awareness, challenging dominant narratives while creating space for more truthful representations. I am also my own harshest critic, but that self-reflection pushes me to grow.
Currently, between my personal practice and my role at a nonprofit, I document collective responses to the harm caused by immigration enforcement. By photographing rallies and public actions, I seek to amplify voices and create a visual record of communities demanding dignity and respect.
I am also a very social and outgoing person, often drawn to nightlife spaces like drag shows and Queer and Latine dance parties, where people gather to find joy and connection.
I strive to highlight not just the struggle, but also pride, love, and the strength that holds our communities together.”
Artist Website | www.ricardoaca.com
Artist IG | @ricardoacanyc
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“My painting practice currently explores themes of earth-based spirituality, queer sexuality, and animal kinship, rendered in a palette that embodies nature at its most heightened. My work is grounded by conversations with queer and trans ancestors, facilitated by archival research of collectives like The Radical Faeries, The Cockettes, and the gay liberation movement of the 1960s-1990s, which used collective living, art making, and experimentation as tools for sustenance and transformation. Drawing together these archival fragments with personal imagery of myself and my friends, my work speaks to a longing for connection across time— a desire to commune with queer ancestors who made survival itself a sacred act of creativity and to continue in their legacy. Increasingly, my practice also explores affinity with non-human animals; I am compelled by how we form bonds with them and believe it can be an extension of queer family building."
Artist Website | www.bambialder.com
Artist IG | @femboy___supremacy
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“By needling felt wool on canvas, I create abstract ‘paintings’ that are steeped in art historical reference and personal experience. The pieces are ambivalent - a fuzzy space where colorful, vaguely recognizable woolen forms and objects float. The works include leftover yarn from the sweaters I knitted, likenesses of characters from my son’s cartoons and allude to anatomy textbook illustrations.
These hyper-tactile fiber pieces feel like joyful spontaneous expressions, but are made by the time intensive process of needle felting wool and yarn onto canvas. Using a special tool with barbed needles, I stab through layers of brightly colored roving and unprimed canvas, tangling the fibers of the wool through the surface.
Felting creates a halo of soft fibers that appear to grow from the substrate.
The density of color in the works is based on the accretion of material applied and holes punched through the surface. The application of wool is done primarily on the back of the piece, setting up a direct dialectic between myself and the work, the final piece is not a mirror, but a projection.
Using a dyeing technique with powdered pigment and snow or ice has been a recent addition to the works on canvas. The washy surface is yet another layer of chance and surprise in the final outcome of the piece.”
Artist Website | www.courtneychildress.com
Artist IG | @courtneychildress
The Tallichet Freedman Foundation is proud to share our Fall 2025 micro grant recipients.
Through our micro grant program, TTFF provides visual artists in Queens’ 11385 zip code with unrestricted funding and increased visibility. By investing locally, the Foundation supports connection, community, and encourages artists to keep making art
Watch the videos to meet this year’s grantees.
FALL 2025 Timeline
Dec 5 2025 | Applications closed
Feb 9 2026 | Grantees announced
Feb - March 2026 | Studio visits
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“In response to climate change events and the dependence on AI, I am exploring the resurgence of anti-intellectualism, the sad attempt at digitizing the human touch, and the environmental consequences of these factors. Revisiting Goya’s “Los Caprichos” series and the concept of the sublime through art history, combined with my ongoing documentation of climate crisis events, these different elements converge in my work through simplistic visualizations. In my experience, simplistic designs make tough themes digestible and conversations more approachable. I center the subject matter in my works in an isolated composition to lead the viewer's focus to confront the topic at hand.”
Artist Website | https://vycziedorado.wixsite.com/vycc
Artist IG | @vyczie
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“I am an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City, active since 2001. My practice spans painting, movement, public art, sound, performance, fiber arts, and lens-based work. I have participated in residencies at The Space (LIC, Queens), WAX (Williamsburg, Brooklyn), Goodbye Blue Monday (Bushwick, Brooklyn), and Greenspace (Queens). My work has been supported by NYFA, Arts in Roundtable, the Legacy Art Project, and the Red Sand Project. I am a 2025 recipient of the Queens Council for the Arts New Work Grant and a BRIC VideoLab 2025–2026 resident.”
Artist Website | www.brainplanrecords.com
Artist IG | @drevilletown
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“My paintings emerge from daydreams, fantasy, and moments of escapism. Through animals and natural forms existing in harmony, I envision interconnected worlds where flora and fauna merge, creating fantastical, off-kilter landscapes. Working primarily on Mylar, I build layered compositions using acrylic, exploring transparency and opacity to evoke shifting, otherworldly spaces. These imagined environments feel both unreal and quietly longed for.”
Artist Website | www.caryhulbert.com
Artist IG | @cary_hulbert
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“Much of my work is guided by the pull of the esoteric and the alien. Through sculpture, sound, video, and performance, I approach worldbuilding as an intuitive and embodied process. I am drawn to mysticism, spiritual technologies, and systems of hidden knowledge for the ways they open pathways to feel, intuit, and listen differently. Influenced by Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, speculative fiction, and post-humanist theory, I’m drawn to the porous boundaries between the human and non-human, and how they might appear or sound within imagined worlds. I approach the alien not as an external figure, but as something immanent: a force that emerges from within, transforming and mutating, reconfiguring our sense of kin, environment, and spirit.”
ArtistWebsite | www.andreammoreno.com
Artist IG | @y0shaang
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“I am interested in making photographs of subjects that are often underrepresented. My approach is intentional, grounded, and rooted in witnessing the beauty that exists in queer and trans people.”
Artist IG | @ojosdealmndras
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“The eyes look out of the body, the hands make. The eyes recognize the hands, how they work at making what the brain wants, understanding a body’s volume to reassemble it toward a point of tension or collapse.
My process pushes materials towards moments of instability, misapplication, excess, and unpredictability to emphasize and create sites of discovery that marry making, meaning, and language through touch.
Resolution emerges when material and language find a satisfying intersection point - specifically, the place where my sculptures and objects can speak fluently to a viewer about their own making and moment. Through the encounter between body and material, my work proposes a way of thinking about objects as sites where action, function, memory, and embodiment intersect without resolving into a single narrative. Pinches, impressions, and bodily force registers presence, not as an act of negation, but as an act of insistence.”
Artist Website | www.barbarasmithart.com
Artist IG | @barbject
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“I am an artist working through sound, performance, and embodiment practices. What is felt in my work is a dialogue with both hyper-sensorial and dissociative dysphorias. What I attempt to make material is the pressurized interior spaces of feeling and being that sensation creates. I work in service to these metaphysical realities by attentively giving form for these experiences to live and communicate autonomously from the visible performing body.
Oriented towards healing actions, I integrate sick time into my collaborations and group work. This means slowing down a moment within a sequence of events and returning to a forgotten sensation. My interest is to embody time as infinite, and to materialize possible ways that sensation, distortion, and pain can become a liberatory force.”
Artist Website | www.lu-yim.com
Artist IG | @lu_yim