Foundwork Artist Prize

2026 Selection Process Underway

Thank you to everyone who shared their work to be considered for this year's Foundwork Artist Prize. Our selection process is underway and we will be sending related notifications in due course.

2026 Jury

Our 2026 jury includes five curators, gallerists, and artists based in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, Guatemala City, and Los Angeles:

Stefan Benchoam

Stefan Benchoam is an artist and exhibition-maker from Guatemala City with a strong interest in collaboration. As an artist, he has participated in exhibitions La Casa Encendida, Madrid; The White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, London; La Loseta, San Juan; LACMA, Los Angeles; MAZ, Guadalajara; and MADC, San José, among others. He is co-founder of Buró de Intervenciones Públicas, which develops low-cost, high-impact projects in public spaces worldwide. He is also co-founder and director of Proyectos Ultravioleta, a multivalent hybrid space/gallery for contemporary art, and is co-founder/co-director of NuMu—Guatemala's only contemporary art museum. As a writer, he has written for Mousse Magazine and South as a State of Mind, as well as artist monographs including Carlos Amorales and Vivian Suter.

François Ghebaly

Originally from France, François Ghebaly established his namesake contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles in 2009, later expanding to New York. Over fifteen years, he has become a pivotal figure in the global art landscape, championing a progressive, multi-generational roster across painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Ghebaly is widely respected for his keen eye and commitment to nurturing experimental voices during the foundational stages of their careers. He has consistently launched emerging talents into international prominence and institutional acclaim. Notable figures who came up through the gallery include Andra Ursuța, Kathleen Ryan, Kelly Akashi, Meriem Bennani, Sayre Gomez, Candice Lin, Neïl Beloufa, and Christine Sun Kim. Today, Ghebaly’s spaces remain essential global hubs for boundary-pushing contemporary art.

Manuela Moscoso

Manuela Moscoso is the inaugural Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and curator of Ecuador's national pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (2026). She was formerly Curator of the 2ª Bienal das Amazônias (2025), the Liverpool Biennial (2021), and a senior curator at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Moscoso's practice spans exhibition-making, publishing, and writing, with a focus on relational, political, and embodied approaches to contemporary art and institutions.

Gabi Ngcobo

Gabi Ngcobo is the Director of Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam. Between 2020 and 2023, she was Curatorial Director at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP) where she curated “Handle with Care” (2021), “SCENORAMA” (2022) and, in 2023, “Frequencies” by Oscar Murillo and “Specifications for a Reverse Archaeology” with Nolan Oswald Dennis. Ngcobo has worked on independent curatorial projects, collaborated with various institutions in different parts of the world and, for seven years, lectured at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg. In 2022, she curated “The Show is Over” at the South London Gallery and co-curated “The ‘t’ is Silent” at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenes in Deurle, Belgium. Ngcobo also curated the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018) and was one of the co-curators of the 32nd Sao Paulo Bienal (2016).

Esther Schipper

Esther Schipper founded her gallery in Cologne in 1989, relocating to Berlin in 1997. Conceptual art from around the world, featuring radically experimental and time-based works, formed the core of her gallery's early program. Today Esther Schipper's gallery represents over 50 artists and estates, with a diverse range of international artists, established figures, and emerging talents practicing in various media. Esther Schipper opened a company in Korea in 2017 and a public gallery in Seoul in 2022, as well as a gallery location in Paris on Place Vendôme the same year. Since 2024, the gallery also operates an office and showroom in New York.

About the Prize

The Foundwork Artist Prize is our annual juried award for emerging and mid-career artists working in any medium. The honoree receives an unrestricted $10,000 grant, studio visits with our jurors, and an interview in our Dialogues program. In addition, three artists are named to our Short List and each receives a $1,000 micro-grant. See the Foundwork Artist Prize section in our FAQ for details on eligibility and how to participate.

2025 Honoree

Antonia Kuo

Centering around recording, translation, and the potential of the photographic medium, her practice is interested in how images and materials are alchemically transformed through technology and the hand.

2025 Honoree Artwork 1

Solar Array, 2025 Unique photochemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper, x-rays, photogram on silver gelatin paper (4 panels) 91 3/4 x 103 x 2 in.

2025 Honoree Artwork 2

Behemoth, 2023 Unique photochemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper in aluminum frame (diptych) 93 x 81 x 2 in.

2025 Honoree Artwork 3

Milk of the Earth (Array), 2025 Unique photochemical paintings on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper in aluminum frames, welded steel, hydrocal plaster, CRT video monitors with foundry footage 120 x 120 x 12 in. 2:54

2025 Short List

Eugene Jung

Eugene Jung is an artist based in New York and Seoul who builds post-apocalyptic environments that respond to contemporary catastrophes through sculpture and installation. At times, cartoonish worldviews are added to the landscape of ruins to construct an alternative reality. In doing so, she contemplates how the media and popular culture consume and sense disasters as images. The artist’s use of pseudo-real materials suggests a complex relationship between reality and artwork. Her work has been shown at the Busan Biennale in Busan; Thaddaeus Ropac, Museumhead, Art Sonje Center Art Hall, Arko Art Center, DOOSAN Gallery, and AVP Lab in Seoul; and the Hessel Museum of Art in New York. She was also named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list.

Gozié Ojini

Gozié Ojini was born in Los Angeles and lives and works in New Haven, CT. He holds an MFA from Yale University’s Sculpture Program, a BA from the School of Art and Architecture at UCLA, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME. He was recently included in “Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2025). He has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York (2024) and In Lieu, Los Angeles (2023), and has been included in various group exhibitions, among them “Stitious” at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (2025), “After Hours” at the Kiang Malingue, New York (2025), and “Polyphonic Views” at Funkhaus, Berlin (2025), among others.

Umico Niwa

Umico Niwa explores the constraints and possibilities of personhood through installation, drawing, and sculptures. The resulting works speak to a deep, palpable longing for transcendence—a desire for self-actualization not confined by conventional identity markers. Niwa lives between the US and Japan, and a major installation is currently on view at the Sculpture Center, NY and will travel to Museo Tamayo, Mexico City in 2026. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as: The Asia Society, Houston; Public Gallery, London; Towada Art Center, Japan; Someday, NY; Simon Subal, NY; Kristina Kite, LA, and Miriam, NY. She was a resident at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (2023–25) and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE (2022). Her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at ILY2 in Portland, OR in spring 2026.

Meet the 2025 Jury

The jury for the 2025 Foundwork Artist Prize includes highly acclaimed and visionary voices hailing from New York, Los Angeles, Boston, London, and Paris:

Ebony Haynes

Ebony L. Haynes is a writer and curator from Toronto, Canada. She is presently based in New York where she is senior director at David Zwirner and leads the gallery’s 52 Walker space in Tribeca. Haynes sits on the boards of Artists Space and the New Art Dealers Alliance. She also runs Black Art Sessions, an online “school” that offers free professional practice classes to Black students worldwide.

Carmen Hermo

Carmen Hermo is the Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art at the MFA Boston, and co-curated “Rituals for Remembering: María Magdalena Campos-Pons” and “Ana Mendieta and Counter History: Contemporary Art from the Collection.” Previously, she was Associate Curator for the Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art, where she curated “María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” (2023–25), “Baseera Khan: I Am an Archive” (2021), and formed part of the curatorial collective for “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” (2019), among other projects. She has also worked as Assistant Curator for Collections at the Guggenheim Museum, and with the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. She holds an MA in art history from Hunter College.

Lauren Mackler

Lauren Mackler is an independent curator, writer, and designer based in Los Angeles. She has organized exhibitions and catalogues for MOCA LA, the Hammer Museum, MCA Chicago, Frieze Projects, Artissima, the MAK Center, MoMA PS1, and more. She co-organized the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Hammer and The Huntington, has been on faculty at Art Center, SVA, UCLA, and Otis, and served as managing editor of Sublevel, CalArts’ literary magazine. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, BOMB, Flash Art, Numéro, and others. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Propiedad Privada, published by Semiotext(e) and ISLAA. In 2010, she founded Public Fiction, a forum for staging exhibitions, performances, and programs by contemporary artists and writers, as well as a journal in print.

Antonia Marsh

Antonia Marsh founded Soft Opening in 2018, following her work as an independent curator. The gallery’s early space was a glass-fronted vitrine in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station that focused largely on site-specific curated projects. Now located in Cambridge Heath, Soft Opening represents fourteen emerging to mid-career artists, based in the UK and internationally, working closely with them to develop exhibitions and projects both at the gallery in London and elsewhere. With an emphasis on production and publications, Soft Opening takes an active role in supporting the development of new artist projects both on- and offsite wherever possible.

Hugo Vitrani

Hugo Vitrani is a curator at the Palais de Tokyo, where he co-created the performance program Symbiosis. He has curated group exhibitions such as “All in the Name of the Name” (2024, with Les Rencontres d’Arles), “Il morso delle termiti” (2023), “Foudre Sentimentale” (2022), “Jusqu’ici tout va bien” (2020), and “Prince·sses des Villes” (2019), and he initiated the Lasco Project (2012–2022). He curated solo exhibitions by artists including RAMMELLZEE (2025), Mohamed Bourouissa (2023), Jay Ramier (2022), and Maxwell Alexandre (2022). Since 2024, he has contributed to the visual direction of the intellectual review AOC. With the Palais de Tokyo, he co-curated the 15th edition of Nuit Blanche (2016), the 15th Lyon Biennale (2019) and Anticorps (2020). Working independently, he curated “Partenaires Particulaires” (CAB Foundation, 2025), “Echosystems” (a tribute to Virgil Abloh, Galerie Kreo, 2023), and “L’esprit souterrain” (Domaine Vranken-Pommery, 2018). He is the co-author of several books and catalogs, including Woman Life Freedom – An Iranian Revolution (2023, ed. Beaux-Arts de Paris).

2024 Honoree

Satpreet Kahlon

Beginning with the understanding that most Indigenous cultures are existing in a post-apocalyptic reality, she approaches the act of building sculpture as a kind of prayer.

2024 Honoree Artwork 1

from all of us, 2023 (detail view). Scanned archival photos on cardboard substrate, scanned card given to artist on her 4th birthday, weaving yarn, scrap wood, staples, pigment, crayon, wax, beads, pipe cleaners, plaster, rain water from the Great Basin in nevada, journal entry from august 2023 45 x 60 x 7 in.

2024 Honoree Artwork 2

Polyester diamond quilted fabric fabricated in China (after Kalf's Still Life with a Chinese Bowl, Nautilus Cup and Other Objects), 2022. Image transfer on handmade reclaimed cardboard substrate, reclaimed wood, staples, polyester diamond quilted fabric collected from recycling plant in Seattle in July 2022. 45 x 26 1/2 x 38 in.

2024 Honoree Artwork 3

obscured, repeated, 2023. Scanned archival photos on cardboard substrate, weaving yarn, scrap wood, staples, pigment, crayon, wax, beads, pipe cleaners, plaster, rain water collected from The Great Basin, embroidery materials. 50 x 30 x 4 in.

2024 Short List

Adam Farah-Saad

Adam Farah-Saad is a London, UK-born multidisciplinary artist and lecturer whose practice spans photography, sculpture, installation, moving image, writing, and performative gestures. Grounded in the spiritual, emotional, and geographical textures of urban life, his work often weaves together seductive aesthetic assemblages, opening up spaces for critical and sincere reflection and connection. Through these spaces, he explores what it means to love, grow, and survive as a human. Farah-Saad recontextualizes images, objects, and narratives to reveal their sensual and affective dimensions, paying homage to the layered connections of city life. Drawing from the creative energy of communities that shaped him—from the council estates to the gay bars—he invites audiences to rethink their relationships with cultural and spatial dynamics, expanding their aesthetic and emotional experiences.

Minne Kersten

Minne Kersten is an artist based between Paris and Amsterdam, working on video, installation and paintings. Through her architectural environments, she speculates how buildings can be receptive to stories and traumas, as she stages situations subjected to chaos, decay, and deconstruction. Working across diverse media, she interweaves personal experiences such as mourning, loss, and memory with the collective domain of fiction, fables, and symbols. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at CAPC Musée Bordeaux 2024, Glasgow International 2024, Bonnefanten Museum 2023, 16th Lyon Biennale 2022, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam 2022, the Living Art Museum 2022, Hotel Maria Kapel 2021, HISK Brussel 2021, Haus Wien 2021, De Ateliers 2020, among others. In 2022, she was awarded the Volkskrant Visual Arts Audience Award and was nominated for the Royal Award of Modern Painting. She participated in residencies at De Ateliers, Triangle Astérides, and Cité Internationale des Arts and is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam.

Joyce Joumaa

Joyce Joumaa (she/her) is a visual artist working between Beirut, Montreal, and Amsterdam. After growing up in Tripoli, Lebanon she pursued her studies in Film at Concordia University. Working primarily with video, Joumaa’s work engages with histories shaped by conflict and crisis while specifically investigating the phenomenology of political performance, often rooted in her native Lebanon or diasporic experiences. Through documentary and experimental filmmaking, archival research, and photography, her practice attempts to create narratives that reimagine our relationship to past events, historical figures, or emblematic sites, examining how they continue to act upon us in the present. Joumaa has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, E-flux screening room, Galerie Stewart Hall, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the 60th Venice Biennial, and the 35th edition of Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Plein Sud Centre D’exposition, and Eli Kerr Gallery. She is the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists and the 2023 Plein Sud award.

Meet the 2024 Jury

Our 2024 jury includes acclaimed curators, gallerists, and artists based in Hong Kong, London, New York, Basel, Richmond, and Abidjan:

Olivia Aherne

Olivia Aherne is a curator based in the UK, currently holding the position of Curator at Chisenhale Gallery in London. Aherne previously worked as Curator at Nottingham Contemporary, and has also developed projects for Department of Love (2019–2023), Nir Altman, Munich (2020); Art Night, London (2019); SAFA, Shanghai; and LUX, London (2018). In 2018, she was awarded the NEON Curatorial Award in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery and participated in the inaugural Shanghai Biennial Curator’s Lab. She writes for publications including Art Monthly and Mousse, and is a visiting tutor on the MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Mohamed Almusibli

Mohamed Almusibli is Director and Curator of Kunsthalle Basel. Before assuming his current role in March 2024, Almusibli served as cofounder and curator of the independently-operated art space Cherish in Geneva. His curatorial work is characterized by a sensitive engagement with contemporary artistic positions. He has demonstrated a close connection to artists of our time, an innovative perspective on the use of new technologies, and a keen interest in bridging the local and international art scenes.

Lorraine Kiang

Lorraine Kiang, who has previous work experience with Christie’s New York and Hong Kong, cofounded the Hong Kong gallery Kiang Malingue with Edouard Malingue in 2010. In 2016, Kiang Malingue opened its second space in West Bund, Shanghai, and closed in 2019 due to the pandemic; it currently has three exhibition spaces in Hong Kong. Lorraine spearheaded Condo Shanghai in 2018, collaborating and bridging between local and international galleries. She has been part of the Organising Committee of the International Galleries Alliance since 2020, in an effort to create community amongst galleries globally.

Rachel Uffner

Rachel Uffner launched her eponymous gallery in 2008 in New York City’s Lower East Side, dedicated to supporting multi-generational artists working in a variety of mediums. Over the past 15 years, while expanding several times, Rachel Uffner Gallery has established itself as a vital platform for introducing new artists’ voices, championing female artists, and nurturing significant international careers.

Monsieur Zohore

Monsieur Zohore is an Ivorian-American artist whose practice investigates the nature of consumption and digestion by conflating domestic quotidian life and labor practices with artistic production. Through performance, painting, video, installation, and sculpture, Zohore draws from art historical and queer histories as well as popular culture and his Ivorian-American heritage, deploying systems of humor, economics, religion, and mourning. He received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. He is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives and works between Richmond, New York City, and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

2023 Honoree

Valerie Asiimwe Amani

Working through various physical and embodied mediums, Amani's practice interrogates the ways in which body erotics, language, and the mythical are used to situate (or isolate) the self within community.

2023 Honoree Artwork 1

Mkutano // A Place for Us, 2023. Textile, Copper, wood, video, text transfer on fabric and book. 314 x 157 x 196 in.

2023 Honoree Artwork 2

The Weight of Small things, 2023. Live performance with poetry and a soundscape.

2023 Honoree Artwork 3

Memory Portal I, 2021. Wood, felt, calico, tranfer printing, wax candle, ink and yarn. 80 x 80 x 25 in. Part of a body of work titled A Confluence of Parts.

2023 Short List

Catalina Ouyang

Catalina Ouyang is a sculptor, writer, and interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. They have presented solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York, NY; No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; and Knockdown Center, Queens, NY. Their work has been included in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, Portland, Maine; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT; Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles; Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, Austria; and Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA, among others. Ouyang is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and was a 2020-21 Smack Mellon Artist in Residence. Their work has been written about in publications including the New York Times, Flash Art, Frieze Magazine, Momus, and Artforum. Ouyang holds an MFA from Yale University.

Sonia Almeida

Sonia Almeida is an artist whose paintings, artist books, and textile works mine non-verbal forms of communication, symbolism, and abstraction. By repeating a personal constellation of motifs to enact slippages in translation, she explores the ways in which shared cultural conditions and assimilation can splinter into plural realities, resulting in miscommunication and continuous efforts at interpretation. She received her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and BFA from the University of Lisbon. She is a recipient of the 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and of the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize. Almeida is represented by Simone Subal Gallery in NYC and has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions hosted by Culturgest, Lisbon, Portugal (2023); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2012) (2014) (2016) (2019) (2021); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2014); and T293, Rome, Italy (2011); among others, as well as group shows. She lives and works in Boston.

Clifford Prince King

Clifford Prince King is an artist living and working in New York and Los Angeles. King documents his intimate relationships in traditional, everyday settings that speak on his experiences as a queer Black man. In these instances, communion begins to morph into an offering of memory; it is how he honors and celebrates the reality of layered personhood. Within King's images are nods to the beyond. Shared offerings to the past manifest in codes hidden in plain sight, known only to those who sit within a shared place of knowledge. Public collections holding his work include the Hammer Museum, Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, ICA Miami, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. Publications carrying King’s images as commissioned work and features include Apartamento, Aperture, BUTT, Cultured, The CUT, Dazed, Fantastic Man, i-D, Interview, T Magazine, The New York Times, Vice, Vogue and The Wall Street Journal.

Meet the 2023 Jury

Our 2023 jury includes esteemed curators, gallerists, and artists based in Los Angeles, Medellín, Miami, and New York:

Alex Gartenfeld

Alex Gartenfeld is Artistic Director at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, where he oversees institutional and programmatic growth, and leads the development of the museum’s permanent collection. During his tenure ICA Miami has been one of the fastest growing contemporary and post-war collections in the world, adding over 800 works in just the last five years. Major ICA Miami exhibitions curated by Gartenfeld have included solo presentations for Terry Adkins, Chakaia Booker, Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Jadé Fadojutimi, Hugh Hayden, Donald Judd, Michel Majerus, Paulo Nazareth, Senga Nengudi, Hélio Oiticica, Chris Ofili, Sterling Ruby, Ettore Sottsass, and Andra Ursuta, among many others.

Davida Nemeroff

Davida Nemeroff founded Night Gallery in Los Angeles in 2010. Over the past thirteen years, she has built a roster of emerging, mid-career, and established artists, including Mira Dancy, Samara Golden, Tomashi Jackson, Danielle Mckinney, Robert Nava, and Claire Tabouret. Nemeroff has gradually expanded the gallery, bringing it to international prominence while ensuring that it remains a hub for Los Angeles's thriving visual art community. She lives in the city with her husband and two children and is the co-founder of Sexy Beast, a benefit for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.

Shinique Smith

Shinique Smith’s twenty-year multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation, and performance. Smith has built a complex visual vocabulary that resonates on intimate and social scales, exploring ideas of transformation and ritual through materials such as fabric, clothing, and personal belongings. Her totemic works bear the presence of her body and serve as containers that operate at the convergence of consumption, displacement, and spiritual sanctuary. Smith’s work has been featured in exhibitions and collections of many prestigious institutions, including Baltimore Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim, Minneapolis Art Institute, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Whitney Museum, and Studio Museum in Harlem.

Emiliano Valdés

Emiliano Valdés is a curator, writer, and editor currently serving as Chief Curator at the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (MAMM). He is an advisor to Kadist (Paris/San Francisco) and is currently curating the Bawwaba solo projects section of Art Dubai 2024. Prior to that, he was Associate Curator for the 10th Gwangju Biennale and Co-Director of Proyectos Ultravioleta. In 2012, Valdés was the CPPC Curatorial Fellow at dOCUMENTA(13) (Kassel), and from 2009 to 2012, he was Curator/Head of Visual Arts at the Centro Cultural de España in Guatemala City. Valdés has also worked for institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and contemporary Magazines. He is interested in the intersection between art, communities and urban processes with an attention for environmental and spiritual practices.

Nicola Vassell

Nicola Vassell is Founder of Nicola Vassell Gallery, a contemporary art gallery committed to discourse that widens the lens of the history and future of art. Its focus is on developing an inter-generational, cross-disciplinary program of artists and thinkers. From 2013 to 2021, Vassell led Concept NV, an advisory and curatorial platform specialized in collection building and exhibitions rooted in cultural phenomenology. She is an editor of books, whose publications include, Uman: I Want Everything Now; Jean-Michel Basquiat 1981: The Studio of the Street; Francesco Clemente: Works 1971-1979 and Kehinde Wiley: Black Light. Vassell was a Director at Deitch Projects and Pace Gallery, New York. She is a member of New Museum’s Artemis Council.

2022 Honoree

Dominique White

Dominique White weaves together theories of Black Subjectivity, Afro-pessimism, and Hydrarchy with the nautical myths of the Black Diaspora into a term she defines as the Shipwreck(ed); a reflexive verb and state of being.

2022 Honoree Artwork 2

May you break free and outlive your enemy, 2021. Cast iron, forged iron, sisal, kaolin clay, null sails, sisal. Photo: Flavio Pescatori. Courtesy VEDA Firenze and the artist.

2022 Honoree Artwork 1

Ruttier for the Absent, 2019. Null sail, sisal, kaolin clay, worn rope, destroyed palm, iron, raffia, residue from the Mediterranean. Photo credit: Ilaria Orsini. Courtesy VEDA Firenze, INCURVA, and the artist.

2022 Honoree Artwork 3

Land, Nation-State, Empire, 2022. Mahogany, charred mahogany, forged iron, raffia, kaolin clay, null sails. Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI, VEDA, and the artist.

2022 Short List

Anna Perach

Anna Perach explores the dynamic between personal and cultural myths. She is interested in how our private narratives are deeply rooted in ancient folklore and storytelling, interweaving female archetypes into sculptural hybrids in order to examine ideas of identity, gender, and craft through the mediums of wearable sculpture and performance. Perach has exhibited internationally at galleries including White Cube, London; Vitrine Gallery, Basel; and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel. In 2022, she presented a solo show with Edel Assanti in London and took part in Miart with ADA Gallery, where she received the Carol Rama Award; in 2021, she participated in Arco Madrid with The Ryder Gallery and received the Ingram Prize; in 2020, she received awards from Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Foundation and the Royal Society of Sculptors. She lives and works in London.

Junghun Kim

Junghun Kim is a multidisciplinary artist whose works are conceived as activation systems where poetic, spiritual, and political gestures reveal dimensions of causalities that have remained invisible to our anthropomorphic vision. While searching for regenerative ecological care and its distribution, his work guides audiences into interactive and collaborative environments. Kim was selected for the 2021 Young Korean Artists exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art, South Korea and for the SEMA Emerging Artists Support Program solo exhibition at Seoul Museum of Art Storage, South Korea in 2019. He has exhibited at Para Site, Hong Kong, 2022; MaMA, Rotterdam, 2021; Sign Project Space, Groningen, 2021; and Villa Iris, Botin Foundation, Santander, 2017. He lives and works between The Netherlands and South Korea.

Chris Zhongtian Yuan

Chris Zhongtian Yuan examines the ways in which spaces of absence and exile are politicized through sound and non-fiction storytelling. Recomposing vernacular sonic and spatial materials, their work investigates narratives and politics simultaneously building and dismantling our everyday spaces. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions and screenings include: IFFR, Rotterdam; Reading International, Reading; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Somerset House, London; V.O Curations, London; Videoex, Zurich; The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan; K11, Wuhan; and the Venice Architecture Biennale’s Greek Pavilion, Venice. The artist has previously received the K11 Art 11 Prize, the Aesthetica Art Prize, and has curated films for OCAT Institute’s Research-Based Curatorial Project Award. They live and work in London.

Meet the 2022 Jury

Our 2022 jury was composed of dynamic curators, gallerists, art fair directors, organization founders, and artists based in Berlin, Los Angeles, London, and New York:

Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneaux is an artist working in the fields of drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and video, often exploring connections between historical events and present-day truths. Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as The Kitchen and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Vera List Center at MIT, Cambridge; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum für Gegenwartskuns, Basel; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz. His work has also been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Bronx Museum, Performa 15, and Whitney Museum, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other venues. Arceneaux's work resides in collections including the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

César García-Alvarez

César García-Alvarez is the Founding Executive & Artistic Director of The Mistake Room (TMR) in Los Angeles, CA. At TMR Garcia-Alvarez has curated solo exhibitions and projects with Oscar Murillo, Ed Clark, Felipe Baeza, Thomas Hirschhorn, Vivian Suter, Diana Thater, and Mandy El-Sayegh amongst others. Prior to founding TMR García-Alvarez was the Associate Director/Senior Curator at LAXART (2007-2012) and was one of the co-curators of the first Made in L.A. organized by the Hammer Museum in 2012—the same year he was appointed U.S. Commissioner for the 13th International Cairo Biennial in Egypt. In 2021 he was co-curator of the third edition of Desert X. García-Alvarez has held multiple teaching positions and publishes frequently. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Lauren Kelly

Lauren Kelly has worked at Sean Kelly since 2006 and was named a Partner of the gallery in January 2019. Lauren has been instrumental in expanding the gallery’s roster of artists with the addition of Jose Dávila, Sam Moyer, Peter Liversidge and Hugo McCloud. In addition, she works closely with Marina Abramović, Dawoud Bey and Julian Charrière. Lauren has travelled to Havana, Cuba extensively, and organized the first solo US exhibitions of Diana Fonseca Quinones and Alejandro Campins. Lauren is a member of the selection committee for ZONAMACO 2023 and serves on the board of Independent Curators International (ICI) She has also developed the gallery's partnerships with various international arts organizations. Born in Wales and raised in New York City, she currently resides in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn.

Eva Langret

Eva Langret is Director of Frieze London. Prior to this, she was Artistic Director of Frieze London. Before joining Frieze, she worked with a number of non-profit and commercial initiatives in London, including Tiwani Contemporary, The Delfina Foundation, The Wapping Project and 198 Gallery. She is a member of Chisenhale Council and sits on the board of Forma in London.

Javier Peres

Javier S. Peres is the founder of Peres Projects, a contemporary art gallery which he founded in 2002 to promote contemporary international artists to a global audience. The gallery represents and supports a diverse group of artists throughout their careers, who often demonstrate inter-disciplinary and experimental practices. The program focuses on nurturing ambitious projects by the represented artists, in dialogue with leading institutions and scholars, with the goal of expanding their presence internationally. Since the gallery’s inception, it has operated project spaces and presented important exhibitions of contemporary art internationally. Currently it has locations in Berlin, Seoul and Milan.

2021 Honoree

Kent Chan

Kent Chan is an artist, curator, and filmmaker whose practice reflects an interest in the tropical imagination, past and future relationships between heat and art, and challenges to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence.

2021 Honoree Artwork 1

Dew Point, 2021. Durational performance, radiator, water spray.

2021 Honoree Artwork 2

Heat Waves, 2021. Two-channel video. Duration: 21:20.

2021 Honoree Artwork 3

Warm Fronts, 2022. Four-channel video. Duration: 61:14. 8 mirror plexiglass. 594 x 841 mm. Venue: Kunstinstituut Melly.

2021 Honoree

Onyeka Igwe

Onyeka Igwe is a London-based artist and researcher whose film and installation practice invokes sensorial, spatial, and non-canonical ways of knowing to pose fundamental questions such as “how do we live together?”

2021 Honoree Artwork 1

Still from Sitting on a Man, 2018. HD Video. Courtesy of the artist.

2021 Honoree Artwork 2

Still from Specialised Technique, 2018. HD Video. Courtesy of the artist and BFI National Archive.

2021 Honoree Artwork 3

Installation image of a so-called archive in "THE REAL STORY IS WHAT'S IN THAT ROOM" at Mercer Union, Toronto, November 6, 2021-February 26, 2022. Photo by Mercer Union.

2021 Short List

Selva Aparicio

Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, and performance to dig deeper into ideas of memory, death, intimacy, and mourning. Aparicio received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Yale Center for British Art; Can Mario Museum, Spain; CRUSH Curatorial, New York; Roots & Culture, Chicago; and The Kyoto International Craft Center, Japan, among other venues. She was awarded the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights in 2016, the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize in 2017, a MAKER Grant from the Chicago Artist Coalition in 2020, and was a 2020-21 artist-in-residence at BOLT.

Bri Williams

Bri Williams is a sculpture and installation-based artist using allegorical found objects, along with their own personal and familial relics, to develop abstract forms through material processes of degradation and subsequent preservation. Williams received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Mills College. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Murmurs, Los Angeles (2020); Queer Thoughts, New York (2020); and Interface, Oakland (2018). Their work has also been included in group exhibitions at Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2021); Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2021); Thierry Goldberg, New York (2021); and Chart Gallery, New York (2021). Williams lives and works between Long Beach and Los Angeles.

Law Yuk Mui

Law Yuk Mui is a Hong Kong-based artist working with image, sound, and installation, as well as the methodologies of field study and collecting. She received her MFA from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is the co-founder of the artist-run organization Rooftop Institute. Law’s works have been extensively exhibited in Asia, including at Art Tower Mito, Japan (2020); the Jogja Biennale (2019); Art Basel Hong Kong (2018); Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou, China (2017-18); Videotage, Hong Kong (2017); and 1a space, Hong Kong (2017), among others. In 2018, Law received the Award For Young Artist (for media art) from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Excellence Award (for media art) at the 23rd ifva Awards.

Meet the 2021 Jury

Our 2021 jury was composed of leading curators, gallerists, educators, and artists based in Bordeaux/Paris, Hong Kong/Shenzhen, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Gothenburg/São Paulo:

Vanessa Carlos

Vanessa Carlos is the founder of Carlos/Ishikawa in London, a gallery dedicated to considered and ambitious exhibitions offering diverse artists’ perspectives on structural, socio-cultural and political questions. The program focuses on international artists with often wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary, and experimental practices that challenge the aesthetic conventions of conceptual art, and on art that is able to operate on an affective, emotional level as well as a rigorous, intellectual one. Carlos also founded Condo in 2016—a large-scale collaborative initiative for international galleries, now operating in London, New York, Shanghai, and São Paulo. She is a board member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and a sector expert for Art Basel Hong Kong.

Qu Chang

Qu Chang is an independent curator and writer based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. From 2016 to 2020, she served as a curator at Para Site art space in Hong Kong. Her curatorial projects include “Sea Breeze” (2019, Jogja Biennale, co-curated with Cosmin Costinas), “Cafe do Brasil” (2019, Para Site), “Doreen Chan: Hard Cream” (2019, HB Station), “Crush” (2018, Para Site), “Law Yuk Mui: From whence the waves came” (2018, Art Basel Hong Kong), and “Adrift” (2016, OCAT Shenzhen), among others. Qu is a contributing writer to Artforum, Yishu, Ocula, and other art journals. She is currently a PhD student in the Cultural Studies department at Lingnan University.

Bridget Donahue

Bridget Donahue has worked with artists at Gladstone Gallery, D’Amelio Terras, Gavin Brown's enterprise, and now as the owner of her eponymous gallery on the Bowery in New York City. From 2008–18, Donahue co-founded Cleopatra’s, a not-for-profit storefront gallery in Brooklyn. She has taught at The City College of New York and lectured elsewhere on collaboration within contemporary art, and has served on boards and committees in various roles for New Art Dealers Alliances, Creative Capital, Frieze New York, and Independent Curators International, among others. Donahue holds a Master of Arts degree in Contemporary Textile Culture from Norwich University College of the Arts (UK) and a BA in Anthropology and Journalism from Boston University.

Cédric Fauq

Cédric Fauq currently serves as Chief Curator at CAPC musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux. Fauq previously held the position of Curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and was Curator of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, London where he developed exhibition projects (“Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance;” “Sung Tieu: In Cold Print;” “Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio”), performances (Okwui Okpokwasili; Steffani Jemison; Lou Lou Lou Sainsbury), and various publications. He also writes and develops freelance projects with collaborators including DOC, Paris (2018); Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna (2018); Nir Altman, Munich (2019); Altantis, Marseille (2020); and Futura, Prague (2021). Fauq co-directed clearview.ltd in London from 2016–18 and was a member of the Baltic Triennial XIII curatorial team in 2017–18.

Thomas Lawson

Thomas Lawson is an artist whose practice, while rooted in painting, spreads out to encompass writing, editing and publishing, curatorial work, and teaching. A member of the so-called “Pictures Generation,” his work is driven by an interest to understand the role of mass media imagery in constructing cultural narratives, and how these narratives impact the creation of individual identity. He has shown and published internationally, and been recognized by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In addition to his art practice, Lawson is Dean of the School of Art at CalArts as well as Editor-in-Chief of the contemporary art journal East of Borneo.

Thiago de Paula Souza

Thiago de Paula Souza is a curator and educator interested in configurations of knowledge and power that enable contradictions, as well as in art and education’s ability to re-elaborate the past and produce new ethical codes that help us imagine a world where violence is no longer the foundation. He is currently co-curating the 3rd edition of Frestas Triennial of Arts in Sorocaba, São Paulo. In 2018–19, he participated in the Basis Voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) post-academic Fellowship Program and curated the exhibition, “Tony Cokes: To Live as Equals.” Alongside curator Gabi Ngcobo, de Paula Souza created the platform I’ve seen your face before as part of the project “Echoes of South Atlantic” for the Goethe Institut, and served on the curatorial team of the 10th Berlin Biennale, “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” De Paula Souza is a PhD candidate at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

2020 Honoree

Tracey Snelling

Working across media, Snelling navigates the gray area between observation and storytelling, illuminating the complex relationship between place and identity.

2020 Honoree Artwork 1

Rooms, 2019

Mixed media sculpture with video

2020 Honoree Artwork 2

Men Wrestling (Part of Bedroom, Living Room performances), 2018

Life-size installation with performance by Ron Helbig and Christopher Adams-Cohen

2020 Honoree Artwork 3

Sozialwohnungen Admiralstrasse, 2020

Wood, plaster, paint, metal, lights, lcd screens, media players, speakers, transformer

31 x 54 x 16 in.

2020 Short List

Melanie McLain

Melanie McLain (b. 1982, Tallahassee, Florida) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the ways in which industrial design—and our corporeal experience within our built environments—inform and reflect social hierarchies. McLain has had solo shows and site-specific projects at Un Estudio Sobre Revolución at Salon Acme, Mexico City; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; and Practice Gallery, Philadelphia. She has been in group shows at M74, Mexico City; Parallel Vienna, Vienna; Churner & Churner, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and the Queens Museum, Queens. She lives and works in Mexico City.

Joiri Minaya

Joiri Minaya (b. 1990, Brooklyn, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice subverts colonial dynamics while addressing issues of identity-construction, otherness, and displacement. Minaya has had solo shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City; Baxter Street Camera Club, New York; Blanton Museum, Austin; Centro de la Imagen, Santo Domingo; and El Museo del Barrio, New York. She has been in two-artist or group shows at Wave Hill, Bronx; Timothy Taylor, New York; Kate Werble, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Andrea Heimer

Andrea Joyce Heimer (b. 1981, Great Falls, Montana) is a painter whose work contemplates loneliness, memory, and self-understanding through narrative imagery that is often autobiographical, humorous, and fantastical. Heimer has had solo shows at Nino Mier, Los Angeles; Nicelle Beauchene, New York; Half Gallery, New York; Antonio Colombo Gallery, Milan; and idrawalot Collective, Berlin. She has been in group shows at 1969 Gallery, New York; Half Gallery, New York; Almine Rech, Paris; and the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul. Heimer is represented by Nino Mier in Los Angeles, and lives and works in Bellingham, Washington.

Meet the 2020 Jury

Our 2020 jury included distinguished curators, gallerists, and artists based in Berlin, Tulsa, Los Angeles, Omaha, and Mexico City:

Rachel Adams

Rachel Adams is Chief Curator and Director of Programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. She has previously held curatorial appointments as Senior Curator at University of Buffalo Art Galleries, Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, and Associate Curator at Arthouse at the Jones Center (now The Contemporary Austin). Adams holds an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Some of her forthcoming projects include exhibitions with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Joey Fauerso, Maya Dunietz, and All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy, which offers reflection and insight as the nation embarks on the next presidential term in the United States.

Anat Ebgi

Anat Ebgi is the owner and director of the eponymous gallery in Los Angeles. Ebgi received her BA from the New School for Social Research and her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She opened her gallery as a project space in a Chinatown motel in 2008 and expanded to its current Culver City location in 2012. The gallery added another exhibition space called AE2 in 2017 to showcase the works of undiscovered artists. The gallery represents twenty artists, many of whose works have been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Natasha Ginwala

Natasha Ginwala is Associate Curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin, as well as Artistic Director of the 13th Gwangju Biennale with Defne Ayas. Ginwala has curated Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14, 2017, among numerous other exhibitions. She was also a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and has co-curated The Museum of Rhythm, at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, 2016–17. Ginwala writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and is a recipient of the 2018 visual arts research grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Kalup Linzy

Kalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist whose work is in the public collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester. Linzy's work has garnered numerous awards, including a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital grant, and a NYFA, among others. Linzy is represented by David Castillo Gallery in Miami, Florida, and The Breeder Gallery in Athens, Greece. He serves on the board of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa, received his MFA from the University of South Florida in 2003, and is a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Humberto Moro

Humberto Moro will be assuming the position of Deputy Director of Program at DIA Foundation, New York, in early 2022. He is currently Deputy Director and Senior Curator at El Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, a Curator at EXPO Chicago, and an Adjunct Curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah. Moro has previously held positions at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and at Zona MACO and Museo Jumex in Mexico City. He was the recipient of the 2016 Estancia Tabacalera Research Award for Latin-American curators, Madrid, and was part of the 7th Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course, in Gwangju, South Korea. Born in Guadalajara, Moro holds a BFA in Painting from the Universidad de Guanajuato, and an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College.

2019 Honoree

Edra Soto

Based in Chicago, Soto's multi-modal practice as an artist, curator, and educator casts new light on the architecture and objects of daily life.

winner work 1

Screenhouse, 2017

Sintra, pvc, metal

144 x 120 x 96 in.

winner work 2

Open 24 Hours (+Guided Tour), 2018

Cleaned glass liquor bottles

Dimensions variable

winner work 3

GRAFT, 2019

Sintra, metal, paint

120 x 456 x 6 in.

2019 Short List

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is a conceptual photographer working on ideas related to intimacy, domestic space, and marginality. He has exhibited widely with recent solo shows including Arms to Pray With, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, Never in a Hurry, Staple Goods Gallery, New Orleans, and A Simple Song, Baxter Street Camera Club of New York. He received his BFA in 2016 from New York University, and is a 2019 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist grantee. Brown Jr. was born in 1993 in Baldwin, New York, and is based in Queens.

Julie Schenkelberg

Julie Schenkelberg transforms objects and environments to reflect upon the state of post-industrial and domestic cultures in America’s Rust Belt. She has exhibited at venues including Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York, which represents her, Plug Projects, Kansas City, and David Klein Gallery, Detroit. She received her MFA in 2011 from School of Visual Arts, New York, and has received awards from organizations such as the NEA and the Frey Foundation. Schenkelberg was born in 1974 in Cleveland and is based in Detroit.

Christian Ruiz Berman

Christian Ruiz Berman draws from personal histories of migration and adaptation to express his own language of allegory and fractured narratives. His work has been exhibited at venues including New Gallery of Modern Art, Charlotte, The Yard, Brooklyn, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, among others. He received his MFA in 2018 from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and has attended residencies such as Marble House, Cha North, and Wassaic Project. Ruiz Berman was born in 1982 in Mexico City and is based in New York.

Meet the 2019 Jury

Our inaugural 2019 jury was composed of the five members of Foundwork's founding advisory board, bringing the perspective of leading curators, gallerists, educators, and artists:

DeWitt Godfrey

DeWitt Godfrey is an artist and educator based in Hamilton, New York, where he is a Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University. Godfrey is also a former Board President of College Art Association and is committed to the rethinking of artists' training, support networks, and modes of dissemination. Godfrey's work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Becca Hoffman

Becca Hoffman is Managing Director of Art Aspen, SOFA Chicago, and Art Palm Springs, as well as the former Director of the Outsider Art Fair, New York and Paris, where she led the fair's program for seven years to provide one of the foremost platforms for self-taught and so-called outsider artists. Previously, Hoffman was Director at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, where she also focused on championing artists from unconventional backgrounds.

Tod Lippy

Tod Lippy is the Founding Editor of ESOPUS, the non-profit arts publication that for fifteen years provided a multidisciplinary platform to a wide range of artists, from emerging and self-taught to established figures in post-war and contemporary art. Lippy is also a curator and in addition to mounting numerous shows in connection with ESOPUS, has organized exhibitions at venues such as White Columns, New York, and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn.

Manuela Paz

Manuela Paz is the Director of Development and Strategic Planning at Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, an organization that produces exhibitions and develops collaborative networks of curators, artists, and other practitioners globally. Paz is also Co-Founder and Director of EMBAJADA, a gallery in San Juan where she works with emerging and mid-career artists from Puerto Rico and abroad.

Helen Toomer

Helen Toomer is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of STONELEAF RETREAT, a residency and creative space in the Catskills focused on supporting womxn and families. Helen is also the founder of Upstate Art Weekend in New York which she launched in 2020. Previously, Helen was Executive Director of Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) as well as the Director of PULSE Contemporary Art Fair and Collective Design Fair. Before that she used to run a gallery on New York's lower east side, toomer labzda, whose program focused on emerging artists.