Artadia and Angeles Art Fund have partnered to establish the Angeles Art Fund Artadia Award as we share a common goal of supporting exceptional artists as they build their practice and facilitate socially impactful work.

Kang Seung Lee

2022 Angeles Art Fund Artadia Award Recipient

Lee’s work uncovers submerged queer histories and artistic kinships to poetic effect. His resonant, varied materials—including a plant that stems from one tended to by Harvey Milk, video images of friends’ tattoos and scars, or fabric used for funeral shrouds—maintain a visceral, affective relationship to their subjects, and together constitute something like a group of magical memory objects.” – Juror Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Walker Art Center

Lee’s work frequently engages the legacy of transnational queer histories, particularly as they intersect with art history. It’s focused on the intersection of history and visual culture, centering under-recognized or marginalized narratives. He often researches and repositions various queer archives and collections, connecting distinct geographies and experiences to forge new sites of knowledge.

Paul Sepuya

2021 Angeles Art Fund Artadia Award Recipient

“Paul Sepuya’s consideration of the subject in photography, and his desire to trouble the site of authorship in this canon of capture, is very interesting and necessary, as we continue to rely more and more on tropes of representation. His technical expertise helps to trouble the ruse of visibility, and he is asking questions about portraiture that we should all be considering in this moment.”

– Taylor Renee Aldridge, Visual Arts Curator, California African American Museum

Paul’s photography foregrounds an entangled relationship between artist, subject and viewer moving across traditional portraiture, staging, and abstraction. With a self-conscious play of presentation and concealing, his pictures complicate queer and Black subject positions within surface and reflection, the presence of lens and mirror, and in rendering visible touch and trace. They often question pictorial space but are made strictly in-camera, inspired by what Brian O’Doherty calls the “collage of compressed tenses [within] studio time.”

Suné Woods

2020 Angeles Art Fund Artadia Award Recipient

“Suné Woods’ video works convey cultural memory through the body. Her sensitivity to social stigma, her philosophical engagement, and her expressions of radical love position her as an exemplary LA artist with a commitment to social justice.” – Anuradha Vikram, Independent Curator and writer

Suné Woods’ work takes the form of multi-channel video installations, photographs, and collage. Her work has been presented in exhibitions including Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, When A Heart Scatter, Scatter, Scatter, Everson Museum of Art (2017) and Woods is a recipient of the Visions from the New California initiative, The John Gutmann Fellowship Award, and The Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer. In my videos I work with people in my community to probe questions that deeply concern me. I utilize waterscapes to speak about existence, notions of intimacy, and relationships to aquatic ecology. How language is emoted, guarded, and translated through the absence/presence of a physical body are among my interests. I construct single and multi-channel video installations for people to immerse themselves within.