2026 Winter GRANTEES

Visual Grantee - María Rodríguez Jiménez

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Visual Grant to María Rodríguez Jiménez for her upcoming installation “Crossroads”.

Crossroads is a large-scale, quilted-painting installation occuring during Long Island City's open studios weekend at Pure Moon Studios (early summer). The scale of this quilted painting is approximately 18 feet long by 6 feet high. It will be double-sided, allowing viewers to experience both sides as they walk around the space. Crossroads will invite viewers to get lost and share in collective memory that color and repetition in patchwork allows.

Music Grantee - Patrick Cornelius

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Music Grant to Patrick Cornelius for the release of his collection of ensemble work, titled “We Dare”.  

We Dare is simultaneously a career retrospective and a tribute to the resilience and abundant creativity in New York’s big band scene. While Patrick focused mainly on adapting the music from my previous small group albums from the past 20 years, he also wrote a brand new piece dedicated to all of New York’s joyfully insane large ensemble composers and musicians: We Dare. 

Literature Grantee - Sidik Fofana

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Literature Grant to Sidik Fofana for the story collection, tentatively titled "Brief Moments in Black History"  

Brief Moments in Black History (tentatively titled) is a collection of 3-10 page stories that each deal with an aspect of the black experience in America. They are stories that can each be read in one class period, among them one told from the perspective of To Kill a Mockingbird’s Tom Robinson and a tale of police aggression unconventionally rendered.

Performance Grantee - Benjamin Akio Kimitch

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2026 Winter Performance Grant to Benjamin Akio Kimitch for his upcoming currently untitled new work.

The ensemble work examines the global cultural forces that shaped Japanese American identity between the 1945 Hiroshima bombing and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. By juxtaposing postwar pressures toward conformity in the United States with the expressive freedoms of postwar art movements in U.S.-occupied Japan, the work reflects Kimitch's lived experience as a Japanese American artist. Kimitch’s new work will have its world premiere in fall 2026 in New York City. It will be accompanied by a public symposium to help communities unpack the piece’s layered influences, including postwar Japanese art, U.S. soft power, and Japanese American incarceration.