3Arts, a Chicago-based nonprofit grantmaking organization, announced the recipients of its 3Arts Next Level Awards—$50,000 unrestricted awards given to past 3Arts awardees—during the festive 3Arts Awards Celebration held last night at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance. The 2025 Next Level awardees are teaching artists Ricardo Gamboa, Leyda “Lady Sol” Garcia, and Andrés Lemus-Spont, and visual artists Maria Gaspar, Janhavi Khemka, and Lan Tuazon. Across its various grantmaking initiatives, 3Arts granted over one million dollars to more than 100 artists this year, marking a $400,000 increase from years past, to support artists navigating the shifting funding landscape. This significant increase reflects 3Arts’ deep belief that investing in artists is investing in the health and vibrancy of Illinois communities.
"Great artists often reach a moment when the next step in their creative journey feels both just within reach and just beyond it. We have created the Next Level Awards for exactly that moment, to provide the boost that allows the artist to stretch, to take a risk, to reimagine what’s possible,” said 3Arts Executive Director Cat Tager. She added, “We know that when so much around us feels uncertain, artists hold the imagination and creativity we all need to build something better, and the fire necessary to bring it into being. This year’s awardees embody that spirit. They continue to grow, to question, and to shape the world around them with persistence and vision. Supporting them now moves all of us forward.”
Adding to this year’s increase in financial support, a new initiative, Beyond Bodies of Work, was announced; a six month residency partnership with the Hyde Park Art Center for artists with disabilities who have previously completed a 3Arts/Bodies of Work Residency.
3Arts welcomed over 500 guests to its 18th Annual 3Arts Awards Celebration, including leadership from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, Illinois Arts Council, Driehaus Foundation, Joyce Foundation, and Logan Foundation. During the joyous event, 3Arts also recognized 17 previously announced 3Arts Awards recipients with $30,000 unrestricted grants and 40 artists who were selected by past 3Arts awardees to receive $2,000 unrestricted Make a Wave awards.
Guests were treated to powerful performances by three past 3Arts awardees, including music from The Chicago Immigrant Orchestra (with 2024 3Arts Awardee Wanees Zarour); D-Composed (with 2021 3Arts Awardee Caitlin Edwards) and JUNTOS; and an aerial dance by Michel Rodriguez (2013 3Arts Awardee) and (2021 Make A Wave Awardee) with choreography by Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi (2014 3Arts Awardee).
3Arts has distributed more than $8.2 million in grants to over 2,500 Chicagoland artists since 2007. 3Arts awardees reflect 66% women artists, 74% artists of color, and 17% Deaf or disabled artists.
NEXT LEVEL TEACHING ARTISTS
Andrés Lemus-Spont (he/him) is an artist, designer, educator, and fabricator whose work centers on community empowerment, equity, and creative exploration. He co-founded ¡Anímate! Studio with Marya Spont-Lemus, a community arts practice offering playful, intergenerational workshops in public spaces. From 2015–2019, this work included the FrankenToyMobile, a pedal-powered makerspace providing free workshops where participants repurposed toys into imaginative creations. Through ¡Anímate!, Lemus-Spont also helped establish the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, which uses bicycle-based makerspaces to deliver accessible arts programming across Chicago’s South and Southwest Sides, activating spaces through arts-based organizing and critical dialogue. In 2016, Lemus-Spont founded Building Brown Workshop, a design and fabrication studio serving artists, architects, and communities. He is also a co-founder of Cooperation Racine, an alternative worker cooperative led by Black and Brown artists and makers. Planned to open in Englewood by 2027, this hub will include a gallery, multimedia studios, and live-work apartments, offering affordable spaces and workshops in woodworking, photography, writing, and visual arts. Anchored in cooperative economics, Cooperation Racine seeks to counter histories of redlining and disinvestment while fostering social change. The initiative is currently in residence at Douglass Park. Beyond his community-based practice, Lemus-Spont has taught art, architecture, and related subjects to learners from kindergarten through adulthood, through organizations such as Marwen, CAPE, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Illinois Humanities. Committed to mentorship, he has supported youth and emerging designers through Big Brothers Big Sisters and informal apprenticeships. Lemus-Spont studied architecture at College of DuPage and Illinois Institute of Technology and lives in Chicago’s McKinley Park neighborhood.
Leyda “Lady Sol” Garcia (she/her/ella) known professionally as Lady Sol, is a Mexican-American street dance artist, educator, and cultural advocate from Chicago’s Humboldt Park. Trained in Chicago and New York’s Black Dance communities, she studied under influential figures such as Mama Efé McWorter, Baba Idy Ciss, Leslie “Big Lez” Segar, and global Dancehall leaders. Garcia has built an international reputation as a teaching artist and creative director, recently named a Hip-Hop Diplomat for the Meridian Center for Cultural Diplomacy’s Next Level USA Cohort 10. Her accolades include a 3Arts Award in Teaching Arts (2018) and a Chicago Music Award for choreography contributions to the Caribbean music scene. Garcia’s choreography and creative work have appeared on BET, MTV, NBC, and TBS, alongside artists including Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Damian Marley, and Busta Rhymes. From 2006–2015, she played a pivotal role in elevating Chicago’s Footwork/Juke culture globally through her leadership with FootworKINGz (FWK), producing performances for Nike, Red Bull, and Will.I.Am, and staging dance theater shows at the Apollo Theater, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. Since 1997, Garcia has served as an independent teaching artist and youth development worker with organizations such as Urban Gateways, After School Matters, and Kuumba Lynx, which she co-founded. She has taught Afro-Caribbean-Hip-Hop fusion workshops at Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, and Columbia College Chicago. Currently, Garcia is part of Healing Arts Chicago, designing arts-based wellness programs for mental health clinics, and offers free weekly movement and breathwork sessions through 2025 in partnership with Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs. In 2020, Garcia premiered Lady Sol’s Dance Diary, an autobiographical solo show exploring identity and self-love, later adapted into digital monologues. Guided by her mentors and community, Garcia remains committed to advocating for street culture through teaching, performance, and cultural diplomacy.
Ricardo Gamboa (they/them), PhD, is an award-winning artist, activist, and scholar based in their native Chicago. For over 20 years, Gamboa has created art, media, and theater that is radically produced, presented, and politicized, and aims to provide radical pedagogical interventions at the grassroots level. Examples include BRUJOS, viral web series about gay Latino doctoral students that are also witches fighting white supremacy; The Hoodoisie, an underground talk show spotlighting revolutionary activism throughout the Americas that draws hundreds of Chicagoans every episode; and, Meet Juan(ito) Doe, a play devised by an ensemble of Chicago Latino residents and based on Chicago Mexican American stories collected over a decade. Gamboa's focuses their current work on endeavors with Concrete Content, an autonomous theater company they found that mobilizes theater as a means of placemaking and popular education and entertainment. Concrete Content produced recent Chicago hit plays The Pillowman, Ruth on the Rocks, and The Wizards. In just a few years of existence, Concrete Content has garnered a substantial following for producing some of the city's most cutting-edge and socially potent theater. In 2019, Gamboa began working as a screenwriter in Hollywood and since then has written for Amazon Prime, FX, HBOMax, and Showtime. Ricardo has won several awards including a Joyce Foundation Award and an International Connections Award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Gamboa has a doctorate degree from New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and M.A. in Arts Politics from the Tisch School of the Arts. They have worked with hundreds of young people using art as means for political education and self-determination.
NEXT LEVEL VISUAL ARTISTS
Maria Gaspar (she/her) is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall and the 96 Acres Project include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood. Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. The Art for Justice Fund has supported Gaspar’s projects, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, FL. Gaspar received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Born in 1993 in Varanasi, India, Chicago-based artist Janhavi Khemka (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Faculty of Visual Art, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi in 2015. She studied MFA in Graphics from Kala Bhavana Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan in 2017, and later, she pursued an MFA in Studio Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. Khemka explores acoustics through woodcut printmaking and experimental installations incorporating animation, sound, performance, and vibratory materials. She has exhibited her artwork in regional, national, and international galleries and institutions throughout the United States, India, Norway, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Khemka's recent exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center's Biennial, Comfort Station, and SITE Student Galleries in Chicago have received recognition. She has been awarded prestigious fellowships, including the KALA Art Institute Residency in Berkeley, California, and the 3Arts/Body of Work Residency in collaboration with the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Khemka has also worked closely with renowned Japanese printmaker Paul Furneaux in Edinburgh, UK. She was honored with the UC Berkeley South Asia Artist Prize (2024) and the Lalit Kala Akademi Award (2022) for her installation Sapna.
Born 1976 in Mabalacat, Philippines, Lan Tuazon (she/her) is a Chicago based sculptor making tools, sculptures, and installations as test-sites for collectivity, resilience, and a reimagination of the present. Tuazon's current “test-site” projects are five chances to test and transform aesthetic practice with ecological imperatives - making art with the instinct of survival in our changing social and planetary conditions. For the inaugural 2025 Public Art Boston Triennial, Tuazon's third test-site project will test what happens when life and our needs enter art and become the very subject of monumentality. Her "test-sites" are designed to stage a set of actions and behaviors that amount to belief where the individual and collective become the change agents in the term, climate change. Tuazon is the 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in the Terra Foundation Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, Headlands Art Center Civitelli Ranieri and Scloss Solitude. Solo exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Visual Arts Center, Hyde Park Art Center and with group exhibitions including the Hammer Museum, Bucharest Biennale, Redcat, Sculpture Center, and Artist Space. She is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
As previously announced, the 2025 recipients of 3Arts Awards ($30,000 per artist):
The 2025 recipients of the unrestricted $30,000 awards are dance artists Wendy Clinard, Chih-Jou Cheng (程之柔), and Torrence “Tea Buggz” Griffin; musicians Tommy Carroll, Ariella Granados, Kara Jackson, and Maxwell Senteney; teaching artists ebere agwuncha, Victoria Boateng, and Tom Lee; theater artists Rammel Chan, Nina Castillo-D’Angier, and Kristin Idaszak; and visual artists Jess Atieno, Leasho Johnson, Fern Logan, and Odette Stout.
About 3Arts
Founded in 1912, with a history centered on women artists, 3Arts is a nonprofit organization that supports artists working in the performing, teaching, and visual arts in the Chicago metropolitan area, including women artists, artists of color, and Deaf or disabled artists. The 3Arts Awards were launched in 2007 to provide unrestricted awards, project funding, residencies, professional development, and promotion to help artists take risks, experiment, and build momentum in their careers over time.
3Arts extends special thanks to the 2025 Award Partners: The HMS Fund, The SIF Fund at The Chicago Community Foundation, Stan Lipkin & Evelyn Appell Lipkin, MSUFCU, The Reva & David Logan Foundation, and the estate of Alison Zehr.
One of the 10 3Arts Awards, the 2025 3Arts/MSUFCU Community Award, is named in honor of the 75 community donors who contributed to a crowdfunding campaign to fund the award.
3Arts also recognizes support for the Next Level Awards from an anonymous donor at The Chicago Community Foundation, Good Chaos, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and from The Siragusa Family Foundation, the Make a Wave Partner.
3Arts gratefully acknowledges the generous support of its 2025 sponsors: Presenting Partner: Allstate Insurance Company; Lead Sponsors: Morningstar, Comcast, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, and the Old Town School of Folk Music; Corporate Friend Sponsor: Center for Advanced Emotional Intelligence; and Artist Pass Sponsor: Graziano and Robyn Berto.
For more information about 3Arts, please visit www.3arts.org.