As a non-collecting museum of contemporary art, working with living artists is integral to ICA LA’s mission. Since our founding, artists have continuously played a guiding role in shaping our identity and our future as an institution, not only as the focus of our program, but also as vital participants in museum leadership and across museum staff.
Affirming our institutional commitment to center artists in all that we do and honoring the long history of the Arts District as a neighborhood where artists have lived and worked for decades, ICA LA’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program provides three artists with dedicated studio spaces adjacent to our building in DTLA for one year each. Invited to apply through a process of nomination, selected artists receive a studio; a stipend for materials, research, and production; and an honorarium. The first iteration of the AIR program concentrates on artists working in and around Los Angeles—a city with a vibrant and revered history of nurturing and developing the careers of artists that in recent years has become a challenging landscape in which to develop and sustain a livelihood and artistic career because of the increasing cost of living. The AIR program not only provides working spaces for artists to create, but it is also designed as a residency embedded in the institution, inviting artists to access our building, resources, staff, and community partners; to contribute to the museum’s public programming; and to participate in some of ICA LA’s advisory and governance gatherings.
Since our founding in 1988, ICA LA’s program has maintained a sustained dedication to celebrating the emerging, the overlooked, and the marginalized voices of contemporary art and culture whose expansive practices often elude and resist the conventional limitations of art history and contemporary art discourse. Embracing this history, we see the AIR program as multi-disciplinary and multi-generational, supporting the work of both emerging artists and those who are more established in their career, but who lack the resources of time, studio space, and community and would be energized by the opportunity to be in dynamic relation with an institution like ICA LA.
“ICA LA’s AIR Program feels like a received prayer — a pause between fights and a chance to bring many of my ideas into the world. I’m deeply grateful to ICA LA and everyone who made this possible.”
Mohammad Tayyeb is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist working in performance, visual art, mixed media collage, and community centered projects. Their practice brings fragments into relation, including histories, inheritances, and dispersed ways of knowing. Through ritual and sound, body and voice serve as vessels for memory, proximity, and care, and as portals into states of oneness. Through collage, Tayyeb gathers printed matter, archival fragments, textiles, and found materials into forms where joining is intentional and process remains visible. Drawn to thresholds where absence meets presence, they attend to what lingers just out of frame. The work is a ritual of return and an ongoing attempt to grasp self, the world, and the time they live in, and to move within …
“Alongside a long bond to the “hustle,” an LA studio eluded me. This bounty(!) invites me closer to folks I have worked with and formally opens to those I long to be in dialogue with. Grateful to ICA LA’s gift of time and space.“
Julie Tolentino is an interdisciplinary artist who creates durational movement-based installations using the raced and gendered body as a site of intervention. Permanent faculty at California Institute of the Arts and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, Tolentino has been commissioned and presented solo and group works since 1992, including originating the Clit Club in 1990. Tolentino also led other queer club spaces such as Tattooed Love Child and Dagger and was a member of ACT UP New York, Art Positive, and House of Color collectives.
“We are grateful for the opportunity and space to expand our research, workshops, and performances around hwa byung (fire illness) and pay respects to our past, present, and future ancestors in honor of the Korean diaspora.”
Hwa Records is a collective of Korean diasporic artists and healers—Roger Kim, Saewon Oh, C. Ryu, and Kayla Tange—exploring hwa-byung (fire sickness), a folk syndrome where suppressed anger manifests in the body. While hwa-byung in South Korea occurs primarily in middle-age to older women suffering under a patriarchal society, in the diaspora it can be caused by displacement stresses such as racism and the pressures of navigating dual cultural identities.
The mission of Hwa Records is to create community space for diasporic Koreans to alleviate these stresses. Developed in response to the rise of anti-Asian violence and the lack of cultural frameworks for addressing emotional needs, Hwa Records creates a safe space for particip …
