Queens, New York — September 1, 2026 — LiberArte is proud to announce the recipients of its Spring Cycle Liberation Through the Arts Grant: Chicava Tate of New York, New York, and Alexandra Idrobo of Cali, Colombia. These grants provide direct funding to individual artists whose work advances racial, social, and climate justice through the arts, in alignment with LiberArte's mission to nurture artists co-creating joyful and abundant futures in harmony with each other and Mother Earth.

Chicava Tate

Chicava R.L. Tate is the Creative Director of DuYe Moves, a community arts house on Governors Island offering free dance, wellness, and arts programming. Rooted in the principles of Beloved Community, DuYe Moves creates a safe third space where artists, practitioners, and neighbors gather in fellowship.

She is a certified Universal Healing Tao and Institute of Integral Qigong and Tai Chi Instructor, Chicava brings these practices to corporate wellness and private clients. Her fifteen-year tenure as Creative Producer of Brown Girls Burlesque shaped her commitment to political, theatrical storytelling as Feminine Sovereignty. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College focused on spirituality and Black burlesque heritage, a Fashion Marketing BS from Hampton University, and an AAS in Fashion Design from Parsons.

The grant will support “Journey of a Black Girl” Exhibition, presented by Courtney Brooks Gallery, which provides a space that is dedicated to celebrating the multifaceted journey, resilience, creativity, and strength of Black girls and women. This experience is essential for fostering self-esteem, identity, and a sense of belonging through art that creates a powerful communal voice. ourney of of Black Girl is highlighted through the lens, paint strokes and hand crafted stories that ties our nostalgia together shining light on sisterhood. With various mediums of art the creates engagement and fosters intergenerational connections.

Alexandra Idrobo

Alexandra Ayala Idrobo (Cali / Monteoscuro). Interdisciplinary visual artist and Bachelor in Visual Arts and Aesthetics from Universidad del Valle. Her vital and creative practice inhabits a constant duality between two territories, shaping a space of search, reaffirmation, and the awakening of ancestral knowledges that traverse her skin, body, gender, and sexual orientation as a Black queer woman. Although homosexuality is not the explicit subject of her visual art, Alexandra fully inhabits her orientation, having been an active member of the Lesbian and Dissident Artists Archive of Cali.

In her path, she understands she is never alone: her art is an uninterrupted conversation with herself, her ancestors, and a territory inhabited by bodies. Her primary anchor to the land and to stories of maroon strength is the fencing of machete and staff (esgrima de machete y bordón), a heritage she practices at the Academy of maestro Miguel Lourido—for whom she also designed and illustrated his book cover in 2024. This space represents the sacred place where she has symbolically planted her umbilical cord (ombligo).

Through photography, video, animation, collage, and painting, her work seeks to fill generational historical voids and challenge the gaps in the representation of blackness. She held her first solo exhibition at the Casa Museo Guillermo León Valencia in Popayán, and currently participates in the collective exhibition Develar at Universidad Icesi alongside other Black artists. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Banco de la República de Colombia and the Museo Afro. She has participated in highly prominent spaces, such as the 47th National Artists Salon (where she was an exhibiting artist in ancestral territory and a curatorial research assistant for the Norte del Cauca and Pacific region), the Bienal Black in Brazil, the Medellín Modern Art Museum (MAMM), ARTBO, Lugar a Dudas, and the Escuela Antiopresión collective residency at the 46th National Artists Salon.

The grant will support "The Golden Cacao: Memories of Repair," an investigation-creation project that beats from the very roots of Monteoscuro—historically called Puerto Tejada in official geography—in Northern Cauca. This proposal adopts as its symbolic, methodological, and conceptual axis the history of the gold cacao tree statuette of Monteoscuro, an emblematic object that condenses trajectories of historical dispossession and, at the same time, the unwavering territorial resistance of our Maroon (cimarrón) communities.

This golden statuette is not merely an archaeological piece or an inert residue of the past. It was a historical object presented to the then-president of Colombia, Eduardo Santos, by a delegation from Puerto Tejada. The purpose of this gift was of immense dignity: to show the head of state the material, agricultural, and cultural wealth that Northern Cauca and Black communities were actively contributing to the construction of the nation and the world. It is crucial to remember that, at a key point in our history, Monteoscuro was the leading international exporter of cacao. This historical fact, systematically rendered invisible, proves that our land and our labor sustained global economies before the aggressive monoculture of sugarcane devastated our territory.

The project begins with the firm intention of investigating the recovery of this historical and symbolic wealth. I propose to carry out a rigorous mapping of the object, tracing its provenance, its path in public and private archives, and attempting to locate the whereabouts of the statuette delivered to President Santos. However, our decolonial stance assumes that the value of this symbol does not depend on physical metal. If the physical statuette is not found in state archives or official collections, the project will continue with equal or greater force, establishing cacao and the machete as sign and meaning, as a living philosophy, an autonomous thought, a bodily theory, a concept of resistance, and a pedagogy of memory that deeply traverses the cuerpxs negrxs (Black bodixs) of our territory.

Fall Cycle Now Open — Apply by September 30

LiberArte is currently accepting applications for the Fall Cycle of the Liberation Through the Arts Grant. Applications are due September 30, 2026, with funds disbursed by December 1. Grants average approximately $500 and are open to individual artists whose work advances racial, social, and climate justice. Artists who were not selected in the Fall Cycle are encouraged to reapply next year. Learn more and apply here.

About LiberArte

LiberArte is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to nurturing artists co-creating joyful and abundant futures in harmony with each other and Mother Earth. Through grants, residencies, education, and cultural programming, LiberArte advances racial, social, and climate justice through the arts, building an affirming global community guided by creativity, innovation, and love in action.