As we gear up for a new round of California Arts Council Fellowships, we wanted to revisit this letter from LAPP’s William Ruiz Morales. This letter originally appears in the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Catalog, a beautiful full-color collection of work by more than 90 California artists, that you can view digitally. The CAC Catalog was produced by Los Angeles Performance Practice in partnership with the California Arts Council. This activity is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov
A LETTER TO ARTISTS
By William Ruiz Morales
Dear Artists,
I am deeply grateful for the journey we shared over the past year, a journey that now finds new resonance through this digital publication, offered as an invitation to remain in dialogue.
Working alongside you has been a privilege. Through your diverse practices, I deepened my understanding of the creative ecology of Los Angeles. Your work is a reminder that creativity is a form of survival, a way of making sense of this city’s many contradictions. As an immigrant, fellow artist, and relatively recent transplant still learning the dynamics of Los Angeles, I want to thank each of you, and Los Angeles Performance Practice, for opening the landscape and offering space for shared growth. In the workshops, field trips, conversations, and even the photo shoots, I witnessed the emergence of an artist-led network of exchange. I hope this publication is not a conclusion but a continuation.
A note for context: I joined LAPP as a Programs Associate and worked closely with Patricia Garza, whose leadership made running this initiative possible. Under their guidance, I focused primarily on the mentorship and learning structure of the Individual Artist Fellowships initiative and had the honor of co-shaping professional development pathways that responded to the needs of this cohort. Throughout the fellowship, we listened. You shaped the process. The testimonies you generously shared became the curriculum. From the beginning, I was struck by how a small organization like LAPP could take on such an ambitious project without losing its signature person-to-person approach. This is the kind of proximity we continue to see as essential for meaningful relationships between institutions and artists.
We are living through a moment in which artists are expected to do more with less, to move between institutional logics and community urgencies, to survive precarity and still be visionary. Too often, artists are spoken about rather than spoken with. Too often, institutions prioritize metrics over lived realities. If we are to build a sustainable arts ecosystem in Los Angeles, institutions must realign, not with trends or mandates, but with artists. That means investing in long-term support. It means resisting simplified narratives that erase complexity. It means recognizing that artistic labor is also infrastructural labor. And it means being open to what we don’t know and embrace it.
Though the fellowship has formally ended, our commitment has not. We are still here, still listening, still learning. Please continue to reach out. Let us keep building through collaboration, solidarity, and shared action.
As artists and art workers, we must continue to advocate for a field that resists simplification for the sake of marketability. Your work reaches beyond studios and stages. It opens doors to other possible worlds. The practices gathered here come from various geographies, languages, and cultural inheritances, and allow us to imagine a Los Angeles that speaks in plural tongues, layered, multiple, and shimmering. This publication is one such small, localized act of resistance. It reminds us that even in times of division, we can convene differences without collapse.
In solidarity and reflection,
William Ruiz Morales (he/él)
Director of Field Initiatives + Creative Producing
Los Angeles Performance Practice
