Introducing : Art Bae Award Winners : Round One
We are blushingly excited to announce the inaugural recipients of the Art Bae Award. Art Bae, in partnership with Safety Net Fund, softly imagined this award as a finishing grant for Bay Area artists, helping bring ambitious projects to completion. Juried by the writer Andrew Berardini, photographer Lucas Foglia, and artist Inga Bard, the awarded artists have works already in motion we were clearly thrilled by: exhibitions nearly built, books on the verge of print, performances ready to cross the threshold.
We’re honored to support each with an award of $3000 as they take these projects to their last, crucial step. We congratulate the Round One Art Bae Award recipients and can’t wait to see these projects come to life.
Artists! Keep an eye out for Round Two applications in early February 2026 on our website.
Introducing the 2025 Art Bae Award Winners:
Catherine Wagner
For decades, Catherine Wagner has snapped our labyrinths with gorgeous, indexical photographs—laboratories, museums, homes, infrastructures, the places built from our ambitions and desires that in turn shape us. From Art & Science: Investigating Matter (1995) to Cross Sections (1998–2001) and Pomegranate Wall (2000), her work frames how knowledge and power settle into form. In Blue Reverie (2025), she gathers those decades into a chromatic meditation: lapis lazuli in winter’s chill, blueberry in Bessie Smith’s throat, blue filters turning the David Ireland House into doubled sight. With this Award, Catherine Wagner will publish the Blue Reverie catalog—the afterimage of a conversation between friends across time.
Yiming Clara Li
Rebar and fruit peels, canary yellow pantyhose parabolas from a fallen sign into plumped memory foam, alongside pressed and hosed performances and scarlet doublings. The sculptural sensoriums of cross-continentalist Yiming Clara Li cinches languages into bodies: synthetics skin, rebar tongues. Beaconed by author Sarah Ahmed, in this work, post-minimalist and feminist art forms fracture but still stand, boldly hanging about galleries with cracks and tears worn with staggering grace. With the Award, Yiming Clara Li will finish a body of work for an upcoming exhibition at Slash in 2026.
Kelley O’Leary
In the sculptures and pictures of Kelley O’Leary, debrise’d technologies rain from the cosmos, images fractal into crystals and celestial geologies masquerade as doors and drawings while data architectures into temples. Here, the geologic, the technologic, and the cosmic pour, fluidly through the spirit of us humans. With this award, O’Leary will complete her Mars ventifact project: turning uncanny rover photographs into aluminum prints as well as 3D-printed sculptures, bringing the full series to exhibition scale.
Jonah Reenders
Jonah Reenders spent eight years moving through dying landscapes and endangered species, learning that the earth doesn’t need saving so much as we need to learn how to listen. A queer person shaped by evangelical childhood and later by his training as a field biologist, Reenders turns to analog and alternative photographic processes to chart where human systems falter and the natural world slips past easy categories. His project Armillaria sprouts from a 10,000-year-old fungus in Eastern Oregon, unfolding into a handmade accordion book. With the Award, Reenders will continue with his searching photos and public encounters to better conduit us with the sprawling, communal, aesthetic beauty of the natural world.