Celebrating visual artists in the 11385 zip code of Queens, NYC.
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I use drawing to access the storytelling nature of my mind. Drawing often leads me to written stories, new worlds, small anecdotes, observations or on occasion a limerick. These stories often involve several bald men, something Victorian, & something blubbery. The overall narrative doesn’t always read front to back and is held together by some alternative structure or pattern. Recently I’ve been illustrating & writing a three act play. Focusing on the structure & performance of a play rather than a storyline.
Artist Website | https://lillianansell.com/
Artist IG | @lilliansell
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I am an artist and writer. I went to school for philosophy, and that’s how I learned how to make art. Consequently, my works have a structure grounded in discourse with texts. This discursivity means that the things I make can be very promiscuous. But since I get flummoxed when someone asks what media I work in, the most appropriate answer might be: other people’s ideas. When I get to the studio, I work backwards from the artwork as a proposition, and then figure out how to make it. After I’m finished I have a small drink of Old Grand Dad and go home.
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My work is a form of "gleaning" — not of abandoned objects, but of forgotten narratives. I’m a French documentary photographer with a background in Art History and Journalism. Working as a reporter around the world for five years shaped my interest in social themes. Having lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil before moving to New York, I explore questions of race and class across the Americas. My ongoing project "Fordlândia" traces the legacy of Henry Ford’s failed rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon, through portraits of the descendants of Brazilian workers and American foremen.
Artist Website | https://apollineguillerot.wixsite.com/website/e
Artist IG | @unpdeuxailes
The Tallichet Freedman Foundation is proud to share our spring 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 cycle’s grantees.
Spring 2025 Timeline
Apr 30 | Applications closed
Jul 16 | Grantees announced
Jul – Aug | Studio visits
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In my art practice I make an effort to study the margins of life and perception without exploiting them. My recent paintings are about mundane, commonplace spaces and objects, and act as invitations to reinterpret our relationships to and experiences in those objects and spaces. What's there when it seems there's nothing there?
I like to work with what’s available—both in materials and matter. I am most inspired by anything that superficially feels boring, invisible, and even aesthetically repulsive: corporate business parks, the DMV, waiting rooms, domestic interiors, etc. I view these spaces as areas for reclaiming a sense of community, camaraderie, and kindness with and towards the people, animals, and objects that cross our paths. They also give us the opportunity to make cultural and personal reconciliations with our feelings and instincts concerning waiting and patience—something I find challenging to do these days.
Artist Website | ahartworks.org
Artist IG | @linelaundering
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I make choreography that explores states of turbulence. Drawing on my experiences of medical trauma, my training in Kinesiology and exercise science, and postmodern dance history, my practice explores interiority through performance. My dances interrogate inner tensions and become pathways toward catharsis, revelation, and a renewed understanding of the body. The central question in my work is how to create and dissolve tension between myself and the audience. As a performer, I am interested in arousal; attuning to other’s sensitivities to stir them deeply in an emotional, intellectual, or physical way. I create rhythms of anticipation using restraint in timing, physicality, and focus to generate tension. This tension is resolved through the symbiotic exchange of gaze, exploring both seeing and being seen, creating a moment of reciprocity between myself and the audience.
Artist Website | www.ameliakh.com
Artist IG | @annonomus_rex
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I am a Korean-American artist based in Queens, NY. I create ceramic sculptures that explore themes of home, displacement, and cultural identity through the human figure. Drawing from personal history and cultural narratives, my work focuses on women in professional service roles, such as flight attendants. I’m interested in how emotional labor and performance shape experiences within the hospitality industry. Using handbuilding techniques like coiling and slab construction with low-fire terracotta clay, I create modular, stackable forms with interlocking components that come together as figurative sculptures.
website | www.ratxchicks.club
instagram | @michelle.s.im
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In a culture of accelerated oblivion and the dematerialization of the photograph, my work excavates history through images to develop latent historical narratives embedded within our contemporary moment. Rooted in research, travel, and archival inquiry, I use photography, video, and conceptual strategies to retell stories within contemporary moments and geographies. Projects such as 28 Feet 8 Inches and The Klingon Project explore themes of theft, identity, and translation as sites of power and cultural negotiation. My ongoing typology of every Confederate monument in the United States documents a contested historical landscape, confronting cultural amnesia and the persistence of white supremacy in public space. Taken together, these projects operate as interconnected chapters in a broader effort to realign and reorder the archives of U.S. landscapes, imagery, and histories.
Artist Website | tjproechel.com
Artist IG | @tjproechel
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My practice begins with returning to childhood spaces I once tried to forget, offering those memories the gentleness and acceptance I needed to survive. Growing up queer, fat, and gender nonconforming in Washington Heights—within a culture shaped by strict codes of masculinity—I learned to hide parts of myself for safety. Through fiber-based installations, murals, and mixed-media works, I transform those experiences into spaces of healing and reclamation. Drawing from Dominican culture, folkloric traditions, and the geography of Washington Heights, my work explores diasporic identity, cultural hybridity, and the possibility of collective joy.
Artist Website | http://www.devinosorio.com/
Artist IG | @devinosorio
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I have a multidisciplinary practice based in photography, and am curious about photography’s limitations. As a woman, and as a lesbian, my work is about the experience of what it means to occupy an overly sexualized, objectified, and simultaneously underrepresented, invisibilized personhood.
Artist Website | https://jeanettespicer.com/
Artist IG | @jsp_icer
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Working across sculpture, video, and performance, my practice explores play, constraint, and language—often through forms that invite tactile or imagined interaction. I’m particularly interested in affordances—features like handles, zippers, or wheels that both suggest use and shape behavior—as a lens for considering how we navigate the limitations and openings in our lives. Born in Ukraine and raised in the U.S. from the age of nine, my experiences as an immigrant and parent inform my attention to resourcefulness, transformation, displacement, and embodied experience.
website | https://alinatenser.com/
instagram | @alina_tenser