The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) announces the recipients of the 2024/25 City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Project (COLA-IMAP). The nine master artists will each produce a series, set, or singular new artwork in performing, literary, design, and/or visual arts with a grant of $10,000 from the City of Los Angeles. The original works will premiere at DCA’s Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG) in the Spring of 2025 and in partnership with Grand Performances in the Summer of 2025 as part of the 28th edition of DCA’s COLA-IMAP annual initiative.
Each of these COLA-IMAP recipients demonstrates an exemplary career-trajectory of more than 15 years of professional public presentations in the LA region. In addition, their ongoing creative endeavors and contributions to the community have earned these artists the highest respect from their peers.
The 2024/25 COLA Independent Master Artist Project recipients in the performing, literary, design, and visual arts are:
Performing and Literary Artists
Charles Jensen writes across literary genres, seeking the best form for the story he wants to tell. He has published three poetry collections, and has a memoir (2024), novel (2025), and second memoir (2026) contracted for publication. Jensen has also published seven chapbooks, most of which represent hybridized or cross-genre work. To learn more about Charles Jensen and his literary works, visit Charles-Jensen.com..
Azar Lawrence is a professional musician born and raised in Los Angeles. Lawrence has played with the masters of the jazz genre, R&B, Rock, and Blues. With over 50 years of experience, he has provided a platform from which he now delivers a sound that is even more his authentic sound— one of musical healing, fun, and excellence. Lawrence and his band have recently played the Monterey Jazz Festival where they were well received. To learn more, visit AzarLawrence.com.
Willy’s work is a movement based in contemporary dance drawing inspiration from African Aesthetics. He is inspired by black improvisational techniques and creates a new dance/movement vocabulary that reflects his experience as a dancer, a martial artist and a musician. Willy is a social justice advocate that creates works that are inspired by social issues lived by black communities. To learn more about Willy and his work, visit WilfriedSouly.com.
*Yozmit The DogStar* is the opposite of a commercialized popstar, possessing self-awareness and an art practice as tools for liberation from inequality, bigotry, and marginalization around gender identity. Yozimt seeks to inspire the queer community to find liberation together in the form of the awareness-based performance art project called *DoYou*. Yozmit The DogStar uses original music, stylized movement, and costume as a shamanic/theatrical trinity to create a multi- sensory, transcendent, experience for herself and the audience by incorporating theater, dance, pop culture, fashion, gender identity, mythology, divine iconography, and traditional Korean shamanism onto a single canvas.
Yozmit presents different aesthetics in diverse cultures and time periods of east and west to create a mind provoking time traveling experience through her artistic expression. A Goddess archetype, “Yozmit The DogStar,” is a shapeshifter, a main character in the show who is described as her higher channel artistic alter ego. Using her given male form but embodying both The Sacred Feminine and The Sacred Masculine. As Yozmit’s agent, and caretaker she creates songs, looks, costumes, situations, public performances, workshops and spreads the goddess’s message of *DoYou* meaning “do”ing “you”—a process of becoming fully self-realized by acting upon self-identity. For more information, visit Yozmit.com.
Design and Visual Artists
Carmen Argote is a multidisciplinary artist often pointing to the body, class, and economic structures in relation to architecture and personal history. For more information about Carmen Argote and her work, visit CarmenArgote.com.
Olivia Booth has been in dialogue with glass for decades and within that time, it has taken on many forms of expression in her practice. Always returning to a dance between opacity and transparency, a polishing and re-polishing of an ever-clouding lens. She uses literal transparency to keep troubling questions about how transparency and the rhetoric around it has led us forward, led us astray, and is drawing her way through this path. Recently Booth’s work has caught a kind of wind and is feeling it to be more developed and resonant than it’s ever been, and more poised to take a leap. Learn more about Olivia Booth and her work, visit OliviaBooth.net.
For the past 5 years Bryan Ida has been engaged in a body of work that examines historic events in the context of the current social and political climate and raises awareness of past abuse and injustice by a government against a targeted minority group known as “con.Text”. Ida’s researches and references text from government documents and uses the words of the documents as his mark to render portraits of contemporary subjects with ties to the events that the document represents. Using the words as a building block in the formation of the image does not define the subject by the words being used. Instead the words are blended together, blurred, and transformed from a label to a broader gesture that is used to define a new visual language of strength and beauty. Learn more about Bryan Ida and his work at BryanIda.com.
Flora Kao’s art investigates the poetics of human relationship with the environment. She explores the psychological potential of constructed space; examining our impulse to order and preserve in the face of the unknown and uncontrollable, anchoring moments of intense emotion through repeated action. As described by Shana Nys Dymbrot in the LA Weekly, “In drawings, sculptures, environmental installations and increasingly working directly in nature, artist Flora Kao explores the lyricism of spatial constructs of experience. From full-scale contact drawings of homes with personal and cultural significance, to sculptural objects invested with emotional and societal meaning, and a narrative interest in our cultivation of the natural world, Kao examines the liminal entanglement of memory and history. With data, ritual, storytelling, resilience, and transcendence in the mix, her gentle deconstructions of our feeble attempts to control the forces of nature and the courses of destiny reveal deeper poetic and somatic forms of insight regarding the unseen patterns we sense at play behind it all.” For more information about Flora Kao and her work, visit FloratKao.blogspot.com.
Visual resistance is at the core of Jemima Wyman’s practice. Her work investigates camouflage as a social, formal and political strategy. She works with various mediums (collage, textiles, installation, painting, performance and mixed media) in order to detail the playful subterfuge present in the dynamics of camouflage. Wyman’s recent work explores the theme of visual resistance through pattern and masking, especially when it is used by marginalized groups to gain power (counterpower) in zones of conflict and protest. To learn more about Jemima Wyman and her work, visit JemimaWyman.com.