Meet the winners of the $20,000 SHACK15 Art Prize

SHACK15 and Art Bae Agenda are thrilled to share the inaugural winners of the SHACK15 Art Prize. Designed and curated by Art Bae, the prize awards $20,000 grants to seven SHACK15 Fellows, supporting the creation of new work in San Francisco through fellowships, public programming, and a culminating exhibition at SHACK15 in the Ferry Building during SF Art Week 2026 (January 17-25).

With almost 400 Bay Area applicants, the independent jury of Margot Norton, Chief Curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Andrew Berardini, international writer and editor of Art Bae, witnessed the incredible richness and diversity of local talent alongside the enormous need they face to continue their work. 

The winners of the Inaugural SHACK15 Art Prize are (drum roll please)... Abel Rodriguez, Brontez Purnell, Em Kettner, Joanna Keane Lopez, Terri Friedman, Adrian Burrell, and Keith Boadwee.

Funded by SHACK15 and its members—a community of tech entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers—the prize represents Silicon Valley's commitment to supporting the cultural infrastructure that makes San Francisco vital. The program was brought to life through the inspired leadership of Jørn Lyseggen, founder of SHACK15, and the passionate commitment of SHACK15 members Elle and Ben Black. Along with the strategic support and dedication of artist and Art Bae co-founder Inga Bard, this prize would not have otherwise been possible. In a region where rising costs have displaced many artists, the $20,000 grants provide crucial support for creative development.

“A strong arts community is essential to San Francisco’s recovery,” said Mayor Daniel Lurie. “The artists recognized as part of the SHACK15 Art Prize are contributing to our comeback and adding vibrancy and culture to our communities. Congratulations to all the recipients.”

The soul of the San Francisco Bay depends on its artists. With this award, all involved hoped to bring real resources to help them but also to emphasize to the stakeholders, philanthropists, and leaders, and the people at large of the Bay how important it is we support our artists.

Selected for their bold, insightful work that reflects life in the Bay Area—where we are and where we can go—these artists represent an important part of the cultural fabric of San Francisco. The prize will continue annually, with applications reopening in summer 2026. Additional awards will be presented during SF Art Week 2026, details to be announced.

SHACK15 was founded as a space for entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers to come together to share ideas and shape our future, with the first and fundamental value of service. With this award, and with the inclusion of the awarded artists into the SHACK15 community, these important values find expression.

Art Bae, directed by Berardini, Bard, and artist/photographer Lucas Foglia, was founded to help the people of the Bay better and more easily connect with art through both a calendar and criticism, supporting the ecology and artists of our place. They are deeply honored to have helped SHACK15 deepen their commitment to the culture and artists of the Bay.

In looking over the applications, the jury also felt deep gratitude for the people from gallerists and curators to writers, teachers, and patrons, as well as the commercial galleries, alternative spaces, non-profits, festivals, foundations, schools, and institutions that are already providing crucial resources and support to this complex and delicate art ecology. And most of all, gratitude for the artists whose mutual support and work provide invaluable service to the Bay and to the world.

The list of winners represents a diversity of backgrounds as well as material practices including Sculpture, Painting, Photography, Film and Video, Fiber Art, and Performance from across the Bay Area with artists hailing from Richmond and Oakland, to Vallejo and El Cerrito. With their work, they capture the beauty, power, and potential that the Bay has to offer the world—and what the Bay is creating for its own flourishing.

The Winners of the 2025 SHACK15 Art Prize:

Adrian Burrell is a grandchild of the Great Migration. Third-generation Oaklander, Adrian Burrell grows out of photography into moving image and installation, carrying his family's archive from 1760s Louisiana plantations into the Bay of the present. He conjures worlds where myth binds local and global together, asking what Blackness was before rupture and what it might become after, proving that kinship outlives every structure meant to extinguish it.

Brontez Purnell scrawls lipstick across mirrors, Xeroxes his own image, and writes confessions across nude self-portraits that refuse easy categorization. The celebrated writer, musician, dancer, and performance artist creates visual works that bleed memoir into performance, truth into fiction—kinetic spaces where facile notions of identity shatter and get pieced back together through punk provocation and personal reckoning.

Keith Boadwee channels four decades of transgressive practice into portraits of frogs, poodles, and emo kids who vape, smoke, and clutch bent flowers. Originally from Mississippi but now of the Bay, the artist evolved from 1990s performances that shivered art world conventions into his current explorations of formal grammar: symmetry, flat color planes, breaks in line logic. Here his cartoonish menagerie sidesteps the weight of human portraiture. Rebellion shifts from explosive gesture to quiet subversion along with decades of Bay Area teaching that expanded the language of queer visual culture.

Em Kettner conjures miniature worlds of interdependence from her Richmond studio, where porcelain limbs break and bind together through cotton and silk threads that refuse to let go. Her figurative sculptures and glazed tile drawings celebrate the erotic comedy of care—bodies intertwined in gestures both assistive and desiring, knitted to each other and the furniture that holds them.

Abel Rodriguez returns to the photographs that raised him—hand signs and backyard gatherings where first-generation youth crafted personas to survive an adversarial world. From his Vallejo studio at El Comalito Collective, the Queer Xicano artist transforms personal ephemera from Northern California into subtly framed paintings that refuse erasure, adding a melancholy and tenderness so often lost.

Terri Friedman weaves urgent tapestries that channel Sister Corita through fifth-dimensional space where painted piping meets hemp cords and stained glass fragments embed themselves in naturally dyed wool. The San Francisco Bay artist transforms the meditative rhythm of the loom into compositions that thread words like "heal," "alive," and "refresh" through acid yellows and hot pinks that camouflage meaning while activating the brain's chemistry.

Joanna Keane Lopez arrived in the Bay Area for her Stanford MFA carrying the stories and materials of New Mexico in her hands—adobe, alíz, plant and mineral dyes that bear witness (along with the people) to extraction and colonial rupture. Her sculptures are acts of architectural memory, reimagining landscape through the vernacular wisdom of her multi-generational heritage while confronting these inherited fractures. In galleries and beyond, she transforms ancestral building practices into contemporary forms that seek to heal the severed relationships between land, home, and community.