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Trellis Art Fund
37 West 20th Street Ste. 610
New York, New York 10011

+1 (646) 476-4144
info@trellisartfund.org
@trellisartfund

Our mission is to support the creative work of individual artists through unrestricted grants, professional support, and community.

Nao Bustamante

2025 Milestone Grantee

Bio

Nao Bustamante is a legendary artist, born in the Central Valley of California, who now resides in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture, painting and writing. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the NY MoMA, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, The Park Avenue Armory and El Museo del Barrio. Bustamante has influenced a generation of artists. The late scholar Jose E. Muñoz wrote, “I want to call attention to the ways in which Bustamante's performance practice engages and re-imagines what has been a history of violence, degradation, and compulsory performance. For a female artist of color to engage this field is not only historically loaded, but it is also extremely vulnerable making.”

Brown Disco, 2023Mixed mediaInstallation dimensions vary

  • Art installation resembling a disco-ball with projections from all sides of the dark space. Projected are two men's faces and torso.
  • Scene from a performance. Woman appearing figure in white gown and sheer white gloves with a mask on emoting from dripping crimson colored liquid from head. Figure is wearing a box with a knife through it and flowers on head.
  • Performance still with figure wearing black gown with yellow device and mask, holding a grey concrete cone-like object. Figure is wearing a steel bucket on hte head and is holding a long wooden spoon. The image is taken in a grass field with trees in a cemetry and audience looking at the figure in the background.
  • Woman with curly and brown hair expressing emotions holding various puppet objects under a gown in a theatre setting.
© 2025 Trellis Art Fund Spevack Loeb