The Grilled Cheese Grant

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The Grilled Cheese Grant

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The Grilled Cheese Grant is an annual community fundraising event and emerging artist grant that provides financial support for undergraduate students and emerging artists in Southern Wisconsin.

03/27/2026

We are at a loss of words with how amazing this year’s Grilled Cheese Grant was. Thank you to everyone for coming together, celebrating, and supporting the finalists!

Congratulations!

This year was by far the biggest we’ve ever seen!

Thanks to small donations, sponsorships, and all the attendees, we were able to make 333 grilled cheese sandwiches and raise $14,551.31 after expenses such as paying our jurors, photographer, and DJs for their time. This allowed us to award the artists a total of $9,458.35, more than we’d ever imagined would be possible!

Thank you to our sponsors!

Thank you to for their continued fiscal sponsorship! for the drinks, for the sound setup, bread from and cheese from and

Your presence means more than just showing up, it means believing in something bigger. It means believing in emerging artists, in their voices, their risks, their stories, and their courage to create when the world feels uncertain. Art is not just something we hang on the walls air watch from a distance. It is language. History. Protest. It is connection. It’s how we understand each other when words alone fall short.

Photographer 📸:
Host 🌸:

03/22/2026

333 SANDWICHES !! We ran out of basically everything for the first time ever! Thanks to our sponsors and everyone who showed up to support emerging artists, we raised over 13k !!

5th place went to James
4th place went to Emmanuel
3rd place went to Grace
2nd place went to Jaaron
& 1st place went to Amanda !!

Scroll through to see how much each artist will go home with and to see who won our first every coloring contest (judged by 1 year old baby June lol)

03/18/2026

WE ❤️ OUR COMMUNITY SPONSORS & PARTNERS

Each year, our program is made possible by our community. From individuals and small businesses to nonprofits and arts organizations, we receive support in many forms, which helps make GCG sustainable!

We are so grateful to our generous donors and sponsors, who care deeply about supporting the arts in Wisconsin and putting $$$ into the pockets of emerging artists.

THANK YOU to our 2026 sponsors and partners:

💖🧀 Show them some love in the comments ⬇️⬇️

03/17/2026

🔆 COMMUNITY COLLABORATORS 🔆

This thing just keeps getting better! There will be SIX community collaborators at the 11th annual Grilled Cheese Grant with fun activities free for the whole family!

🧀 will host a letter writing exchange workshop. Practice community solidarity, familial nurturing, or some good old fashioned self love with our friends and neighbors!

✌️ will hold another one of their collaborative community drawing sessions right in the heart of the action. They highlight and support lateral learning and sharing. Decompression via self-expression. Stop in and share in some doodling!

🫶 bringing Hot Potato to GCG with PUMP’N JUMP: carve a potato to create a stamp, marking a moment on a piece of paper where they’ll respond to a question about movement, pausing, and what guides us in life. They’ll leave with the paper + maybe also a Japanese sweet potato,, to carry home a small seed of possibility for Milwaukee’s future, inspired by the past of sharing food in the streets.
Japanese sweet potatoes available for purchase: $4.14

✨ hosts a one-page zine making workshop. Excited about the prospect of zines, DIY publication, and physical media? Pop in and learn the basics, share with your friends, and change the world!

🌙 will host a quick lesson on butter making (a key ingredient of grilled cheeses that does NOT go overlooked in our house) along with a lil takeaway zine… maybe some dried sourdough starter? You’ll have to come to find out!

🍯 our favorite community-focused ceramics studio will be bringing clay activities- have an interest in sculpture? Of course you do! Visit Janelle to get the low-down on an art making process that appears in every culture and predates the written word!

Don’t forget ❗️❗️❗️
GCG 2026 is THIS SATURDAY, 3.21 at from 3-8pm!
Get there before 6:30 to vote on the finalists and get a sandwich!

03/15/2026

❗️NEW❗️ NEW ❗️NEW❗️

We will have LIVE SCREEN PRINTING this year at the 11th annual Grilled Cheese Grant ! 🙉 Bring your own shirt, pants, tablecloth, jacket OR peruse from our collection of blanks! We got it all for you 👚👖👕🩳

We have 3 available designs, 2 fan favorites and one brand new little cutie patootie!

🔅$5 for a print on something you bring
🔆$15 for a print on one of our shirts

🤍🖤Black and white ink only 🖤🤍

03/13/2026

Give it up for our friends on the decks!😈~ March 21, 3-8 pm ONLY!!!

…

starting us out with cumbia, some classic and some fresh 🪲

rounding out the night with a signature sound only he can provide 🦎

🪱Voting may end at 6:30pm, but we’re going to party and shake till the sun goes down!!!!

🐞We’re getting close, cheeseheads!

03/11/2026

🧀🚃💎 Amanda Smithivas is a sculptor and undergraduate student at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

She is best known for her stained glass and metal sculptures, which combine decorative aesthetics and contemporary issues. Amanda has exhibited work in museums and galleries across the Midwest, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Woman Made Gallery, Bridgeport Art Center Chicago, Betty Brinn Children’s Museum, Var Small Works Gallery, and Satélite Gallery.

📒🗳️ See Amanda’s intricate sculptures and vote for her next Saturday at the Grilled Cheese Grant, March 21!

03/10/2026

🧀🫶📸 Jaaron Langford is a Milwaukee-based artist, born and raised on the city’s Northside.

He is pursuing a BFA in Photography and Printmaking at the University of Milwaukee Wisconsin, where he has studied various photographic techniques and alternative processes in both mediums.

His work explores themes of the domestic environment through a research-driven process, utilizing the city’s archives, local literature, and community conversations. He aims to show a side of the city many don’t appreciate, highlighting both the beauty and current challenges Northside residents face.

📒🗳️ Be sure to get to the Grilled Cheese Grant before 6:30pm to vote for Jaaron and see his Remarkable work in person!

03/08/2026

🧀✌️📸 James Kramer is an artist living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

His arts practice reflects on the notion of unseen labor and the invisible processes, efforts, and bodies that sustain cultural production. Through this lens, Kramer highlights the systems of visibility and invisibility, lengthening the structures beneath images and objects that shape contemporary life.

He is the co-founder of Triple 3 Magazine (est. 2024) , a biannual print publication that celebrates art, fashion, and culture.

📒🗳️ Read more about James on our website and see his gorgeous photographs at the Grilled Cheese Grant next Saturday, March 21st!

03/05/2026

✨⭐️ GCG 2026 ⭐️✨

See that on the horizon ??! We sure can 😈 It’s the ultimate cheese party just around the corner!

🧀🧀🧀 Come support 🧀🧀🧀
Grace ()
Emmanuel ()
James ()
Jaaron ()
Amanda ()

Along with our 5 fabulous finalists, the 11th annual GCG will be featuring local DJs, community collaborators, and a live screen printing booth! As always, we’ll be serving the best grilled cheeses you’ve ever had and celebrating art, community, and resilience all night long.

Wisconsin is currently ranked 49th out of all 50 states for arts funding, and with the continued dismantling of cultural institutions at the state and federal level, it’s easy to feel pessimistic about the future for artists in America’s Dairyland. That’s why we decide to come together to invest in the future we want to see year after year!
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The Grilled Cheese Grant (GCG) is an annual community fundraising event and visual artist grant that provides financial support for undergraduate seniors and emerging artists in Wisconsin by making grilled cheese sandwiches.
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🟡 March 21, 2026
3-8pm, voting ends at 6:30
3374 W Hopkins Ave, MKE

🟡 Free to attend
$15 for a ballot and a sandwich
$5 for students w/ ID
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03/03/2026

🧀🫶🎨 Emmanuel Guerra is a Mexican-American interdisciplinary artist based in Milwaukee whose practice spans drawing, painting, object-making, and video.

Rooted in the complexities of a Midwest and Mexican-American upbringing, Guerra’s work excavates the terrain between cultural memory, ancestral sacrifice, and the act of dreaming — both passive and active — as a means of reclaiming what displacement has rendered ephemeral.

Through found imagery, reimagined histories, and cultural iconography, they negotiate shared experiences of grief and kinship, reshaping lost narratives into new, tender contexts. Guerra’s recent exhibitions reflect an ongoing reformation of creative practice concerned with the porousness of identity and remembrance.

📒🗳️ Read more about Emmanuel on our website and see their breathtaking paintings and sculptures at the GCG on March 21st!

02/27/2026

🧀🫰⚒️ Grace Barden is an artist and metalsmith based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Born and raised in the heart of the Midwest, she creates work that explores themes of feminism, grief, and matrilineage, often drawing from deeply personal experiences. As a second-generation metal artist, Barden’s practice is profoundly influenced by her mother, whose creativity informs her passion for craft. Her work has been exhibited across the Midwest, showing at the 407 Gallery of Green Bay, the Rahr West Art Museum of Manitowoc, the Ella Sharp Museum of Jackson, Michigan, and the INOVA Gallery at Kenilworth Square East in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

📒🗳️Read more about Grace on our website and be sure to marvel at her beautiful metalwork at this year’s Grilled Cheese Grant on March 21st!

Address

Milwaukee, WI

Website

http://grilledcheesegrant.com/

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