Jacki Apple in Hearts of Palm, 1978

The Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects 2024-2033

Award Overview: 

  • Recipient: One New York City-based artist working in performance art. 
  • Grant: $10,000 to fund projects in performance, media, exhibition, and/or publication.
  • Requirement: Project must be completed within one year of receiving the award.
  • Eligibility: Required to be a mid or advanced-career artist, including past recipients of the Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art.
  • The selection panel will meet in July, 2026 and the award recipient will be publicly announced in October, 2026.

Application Details:

Franklin Furnace is honored to present the annual Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects, celebrating the enduring impact of Jacki Apple on the New York art scene.

An annual grant of $10,000 will be awarded annually for ten years to reflect Jacki Apple’s commitment to championing artists, demonstrated through her multidisciplinary career as a writer, educator, radio host, and artist since the early 1980s.

The Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects is initiated by Jacki’s sister, Marjorie Bank, along with Jeff McMahon, Deborah Oliver, Stuart Jackson-Hughes and Emily Waters. The Jacki Apple Fund is a tribute to Jacki’s lifelong dedication to NY & LA’s avant-garde art communities. Franklin Furnace and sister organization LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) will each distribute one $10,000 award per year for a total of 20 awards over the coming decade.

Jacki Apple

Jacki was an artist, an educator, a critic, an expert on performance art, and a beloved art world figure. Her collection of essays, Performance/Media/Art/Culture: Selected Essays 1983-2018 edited by Marina LaPalma was published by Intellect in 2019. More about Jacki’s life and work can be found in Artillery. 

Jacki and Franklin Furnace:

 Jacki was Franklin Furnace’s first curator and programs manager from 1976–1980, and one of the earliest staff members. As a feminist performance artist herself, Jacki’s curatorial practice expanded into the spectrum of interdisciplinary and multi-media visual, audio, and written expression.

Read Jackie’s 2005 TDR Article “A Different World: A Personal History of Franklin Furnace“

Franklin Furnace calendar, January-February 1977

The inaugural year of the Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects, administered by Franklin Furnace, recognizes one mid-career New York artist with a $10,000 grant to develop a major performance artwork in the city. This year, a peer panel reviewed 76 applications and selected Yara Travieso as the award recipient.

Project Description 

“May Our Desire For Liberation Be Louder Than Our Fear Of Oppression” (“Que Nuestro Deseo De Liberación Sea Más Fuerte Que Nuestro Miedo A La Opresión”) is a performance and ritual film amplifying practices of embodied collective liberation as a means to open a channel towards our aliveness and our interconnected truth. The work centers a shift into our inextricable bond with each other and nature; absurdly narrated by various singular immigrant breasts (both trans and cis). Additionally, through collective ritual practices, we actively listen to our embodied interconnection––quieting the imposed fears of the punitive & violent systems around us, allowing us to disobey them without fear of retaliation, but instead, with clarity, solidarity, & a sense of deep radical love guiding us.

Artist Biography

Yara Travieso is a Cuban-Venezuelan-American anti-disciplinary artist, working in performance, film, & ritual. She is a 2025-26 Artist-In-Residence with UMD, a 2023/24 Resident Artist with NYC’s Chelsea Factory, a United States Artist Fellow, a Creative Capital recipient, a NYSCA Film & Media grant recipient, a winner of National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures Grant via The Ford Foundation, and an Open Interval Fellow via Gibney & The Simons Foundation. Travieso is faculty at her alma mater, The Juilliard School (Dance BFA 2005), and is the 2023 winner of Juilliard’s John Erskine Faculty prize. Her productions have been featured in NYC’s Park Avenue Armory, Lincoln Center, Performance Space NY, The Public Theater, The Knockdown Center, The High Line Park, Opéra National de Lorraine France, New World Symphony Center, EMPAC in Troy, NY & many more. Her films and visual art have been presented with El Museo, Film at Lincoln Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, PBS, SXSW, NY Latino Film Festival, Museum of The Moving Image, Vizcaya Museum, among others. Travieso has collaborated on numerous large scale community projects with thousands of immigrant/queer/female community members. Travieso co-founded the Borscht Film Festival in 2005 and co-ran it until 2010 when it won the Knights Grant and was named “the weirdest film festival on the planet” by IndieWire. Travieso is the recipient of The YoungArts award and residencies such as: EMPAC, PS122 RAMP, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BRICLab, STREB, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, & The Bessie Schonberg AIR.

The inaugural year of the Jacki Apple Award in Performance and Artist Projects, administered by Franklin Furnace, recognizes one mid-career New York artist with a $10,000 grant to develop a major performance artwork in the city. This year, a peer panel reviewed 101 applications and selected Maria Bauman as the award recipient.

“These are the bodies that have not borne” proposal by Maria Bauman, 2024

Project Description 

Link to the performance: https://vimeo.com/1154044871

These are the bodies that have not borne is a multi-faceted outdoor ritual performance directed by Maria Bauman and enacted by ten Black and Brown, majority queer and transgender creatives to reimagine, heal and celebrate our wombs and the places where our wombs might be. Informed by land art, choreography, movement scores and ritual, the piece is a reckoning and a healing portal, a monument to those of us who are unresolved around not having children through our bodies. The project will premiere in Summer 2025, at Feathertail Farm, in Hudson, NY and then be shown in NYC.

“Outdoor Investigation”, 2023

Artist Biography

Maria Bauman (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL now based in Brooklyn, NY. Bauman makes bold and honest artworks for her company MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and experiments with intimacy. She is also co-founder of undoing racism coalition ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity) and a core trainer with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, helping people on our dismantling racism journeys. The primary question guiding Bauman’s artmaking and the rest of her life is “How can we BE Together, Better?”

Bauman has recently been recognized for choreography and for dancing with two Bessie Awards, an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellowship and two Maggie Allessee National Choreographic Center residencies. She is currently the 2024-25 Alvin Ailey Artist-in-Residence, a Mertz-Gilmore/NYFA dance award recipient and the Queer Art Exchange Network ambassador artist on behalf of BAAD!.

Previously, she danced with Urban Bush Women (UBW), and was UBW’s Director of Education and Community Engagement before becoming the Associate Artistic Director. She has also danced in projects with Saul Williams, Liz Lerman, Makini Poe and Donte Beacham, Tatyana Tenenbaum, and Alethea Pace.