Where the Currents Take Us: 10 Years of WaveMaker GRANTS (Part 2)
Artist Okwui Okpokwasili featured in And Still I Rise / The Water Dancers by Karen McKinnon and Caecillia Tripp (2023).
Between 2020 and 2024, the context for making art in Miami shifted dramatically. Seemingly overnight, numerous public health crises collided with widespread uprisings for racial justice, ecological emergency, political instability, and the everyday grind of economic uncertainty mixed with growing disparity. Artists once again found themselves struggling without safety nets while residencies collapsed, venues went dark, budgets dried up, and plans all but vanished. And yet, despite the myriad challenges presented by a world entering an era of turbulent flux, WaveMakers persevered.
Some artists took to public libraries and backyards while others reimagined installations as public altars, sound pieces, or remote collaborations with fellow artists or family members. Work emerged slowly, sometimes in fragments, and oftentimes after long periods of waiting, shaped as much by caregiving and grief as by formal intellectual and artistic inquiries. In the absence of institutional timelines and traditional exhibition spaces, artists found new ways of working that upended traditional models typically associated with making art happen.
Created with community-needs in mind, WaveMaker was never designed for large-scale spectacle. WaveMaker Grants support artists at their earliest stages when ideas are still forming, which is also when support is hardest to come by. During these volatile years, these small, flexible grants helped artists sustain their practices, take chances, and deliver bold, ambitious new work for public audiences in nontraditional spaces.
Looking back at this five-year stretch presents an index of new methodologies: artists working in tension with infrastructure, responding in real time to crisis, and generating tools for others to follow. The ripples of these efforts continue to extend outward, shaping the ecosystems artists now move through. As the cultural landscape continues to shift toward a world mediated by technology and shaped by new pressures both at home and abroad, the 2026 WaveMaker Open Call invites Miami-Dade artists to build on the momentum of those who came before and to imagine new worlds of their own.
Applications for a new round of WaveMaker Grant funding supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Regional Regranting Program open February 1 for up to $6,000 in support of unconventional, community-driven, and experimental projects. Learn more at wavemakergrants.org.
2020
Sebastian Duncan-Portuondo, Club EXILE
Long-Haul Projects
Envisioned as a glowing disco-kiosk inside downtown Miami’s 777 Mall, Club EXILE was intended as a communal installation celebrating moments of joy, mourning, and the memories of those lost during the tragic events of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016. Soon after receiving WaveMaker funding, however, the pandemic hit and the 777 Mall was demolished shortly thereafter, leaving the artist in a bind. As programming around the city ground to a halt, Duncan-Portuondo conceded that “without WaveMaker, it would have been hard to continue the project publicly because funds and labor would not have been sustainable.”
But Duncan-Portuondo held onto the idea. When public gatherings resumed in 2021, Club EXILE reemerged at the legendary (and, sadly, recently closed) bar Gramps in Wynwood, timed with the five-year anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting. An altar-building event held in conjunction with Double Stubble invited bar patrons and visitors to honor the victims by contributing toward a participatory memorial. “Everyone said it was a deeply felt, meaningful moment. They urged us to continue the work.”
WaveMaker allowed the project to evolve by covering essentials like documentation and fabrication, as well as creating space for unexpected, sometimes gargantuan challenges. “Each art opportunity brings different circumstances. Letting them shape the work can make it more alive in the world.”
Find the full list of 2020 Grantees here.
2021
Violenta Flores / Juan Carlos Zaldivar, Variety Reinspires
R&D (2020) / Implementation (2021)
When Juan Carlos Zaldivar first imagined how his project, Variety Reinspires, would enter public consciousness, it was a bold proposition: bring VR into senior living spaces to alleviate social isolation and help reframe how we relate to dementia and aging. The idea gained immediate urgency in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic cut seniors off from even basic forms of interaction. “Suddenly, seniors were isolated even more than they already are,” Zaldivar reflected. This abrupt shift in public health and safety meant that the technology required to offer escape—VR headsets in particular—was now rendered unusable and unsafe. In response, the artist turned inward.
Quarantined with his elderly mother, Zaldivar reshaped the project into an intimate snapshot of caregiving for the elderly. WaveMaker support helped him pivot, providing a framework for long-term advocacy as he sought to shift the conversation away from the “losses of aging” toward the wisdom that endures, and the ways intergenerational communities can adapt during prolonged periods of loneliness.
By 2021, the project was gaining traction. Conversations with art therapists at Sylvester Cancer Center opened the door to in-person trials, and Variety Reinspires found a second life as a podcast, amplifying voices of caregivers, dementia researchers, and people living with cognitive change. “This project brought me into an area I’d wanted to explore for years: the intersection of medical technology and art,” Zaldivar shared. “There is no cure, but that doesn’t mean there’s no hope.”
WaveMaker’s early support helped seed a vision that continues to grow as a budding research project at SUNY Buffalo for understanding early-stage dementia, and as a model for how artists can act as cultural caregivers.
Find the full list of 2021 Grantees here.
2022
Terence Price III, Finding Sue
New Work/Projects
In Finding Sue, Terence Price II tells the story of his father reuniting with his biological mother after 53 years apart. The short experimental documentary blends archival photographs and contemporary footage to chart their journey. As a result of this journey, “a lot has been discovered, and a piece of ourselves is whole again.”
After receiving the WaveMaker Grant in 2022, Price flew to New York to film with his father and grandmother. Despite completing the work on time, securing a public venue in Miami proved challenging. “I had a little bit of trouble finding a venue to display it publicly since it is a film,” he noted. “It taught me to think locally.” Eventually, the film premiered at the Miami-Dade Public Library’s downtown branch where a packed room of family, friends, and strangers gathered for what Price called an “incredible” first screening .
The project was not without obstacles. Editing setbacks, emotional weight, and venue scarcity all demanded improvisation. But Price credits being prepared in addition to his WaveMaker Grant with helping him start right away and keep going. “This project has taught me that it’s okay to be experimental, and I will forever carry that into anything else I create in the future.” 
Find the full list of 2022 Grantees here.
2023
Karen McKinnon and Caecillia Tripp, And Still I Rise / The Water Dancers
New Work/Projects
Off the coast of Key West, beneath the surface of its turquoise waters, lie unmarked graves from shipwrecks that once ferried enslaved Africans through the Middle Passage. And Still I Rise / The Water Dancers, an “Afrofuturistic film monument” by Karen McKinnon and Caecilia Tripp, is deeply inspired by these forgotten histories. Instead of rebuilding a narrative, the artists chose to craft a cinematic space that considers the ocean as a metaphorical “burial ground,” as well as an endless source of and space for reflection.
The project began in conversation with Diving With A Purpose, a collective of Black veteran divers conducting archaeological dives to locate remnants of sunken slave ships like The Guerrero, which wrecked off the coast of Florida in 1827. The work evolved in response to contemporary events, including the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. “We want the water dancer in our film to be a fluid being,” the artists shared, “a presence that can travel through these waterways and pop up anywhere, showing her defiance to any kind of trauma.”
Choreographed by Okwui Okpokwasili, who trained with Diving With A Purpose to perform underwater despite not knowing how to swim, the film’s central figure moves with quiet force, a presence shaped by ancestral knowledge. Projected across three channels with immersive sound, the installation engulfs the viewer in a suspended world where gesture carries the weight of history. Instead of presenting a linear, specific story from the wreckage, the choreography conjures the presence of those whose names were never recorded.
WaveMaker support allowed McKinnon and Tripp to begin production, experiment, and deepen community connections, most notably through a screening at Pérez Art Museum Miami during Community Day. “We were able to share this project with the community and open this powerful story that exists on our doorstep to a wider audience,” they said. The grant also helped catalyze their next chapter: selection for the prestigious Wexner Center Film/Video Residency, where the film’s post-production continues.
Find the full list of 2023 Grantees here.
2024
Lee Pivnik, Symbiotic House
Long-Haul Projects
In the Redlands of South Miami-Dade, artist Lee Pivnik is building something unexpected: a house that’s also an artwork, and maybe even a future climate solution. Symbiotic House grew out of a simple question: What if a home could help rather than harm its surroundings? What if it could give back to the land?
Backed early on by WaveMaker, the project began with drawings, workshops, and long conversations with artists, neighbors, scientists, and environmental activists. The grant helped Pivnik take the first steps toward fabrication, while also giving him time to map out a vision shaped by collaboration. “WaveMaker funding helped build confidence for larger grants like Creative Capital to come in,” he wrote. In 2024, Symbiotic House received Creative Capital’s $50,000 award, Florida’s only project to do so that year. Soon after, Pivnik was invited to present the work at MIT’s Max Wasserman Forum on sustainability.
Built to meet the demanding standards of the Living Building Challenge, the structure draws from South Florida’s architectural oddities and ecological urgencies. These houses transcend notions of traditional domesticity, becoming places where people can come together and learn from each other. Over the next two years, Pivnik will work with a team of advisors including Reverend Houston Cypress and climate researcher Alizé Carrère to bring Symbiotic House from prototype to reality, one shaped by Miami’s climate realities and the people living through them.
Find the full list of 2024 Grantees here.
WaveMaker Grants are made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts' Regional Regranting Program.