Artadia

Meet our 2026 New York City Artadia Awards Finalist! sweat variant describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born. Since 1996, they have been working at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art to make challenging and rigorous work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through the exploration of Black interiority. They are interested in building a spectacle of radical intimacy, where both performers and audience are acknowledged as being locked in a mutual gaze. Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, actor, choreographer, and writer. Okpokwasili has earned numerous accolades, including a 2025 Art Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, and was the 2015-2017 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist, the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MoMA in 2022, and an artist in residence at the Brown Arts Institute in 2023. She continues to collaborate with Ralph Lemon, Kevin Beasley, Saidiya Hartman, and Kaneza Schaal, among other artists. Peter Born (he/him) works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation. In collaboration with Okpokwasili, Peter’s work has been featured in the Berlin Biennale, “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum, “Witch Hunt” at the Hammer Museum, “Loophole of Retreat: Venice”, “sex ecologies” at Kunsthall Trondheim, as well as performance work at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, MASS MoCA, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and ICA Boston, among others. He is the recipient of four New York Dance Performance “Bessie” Awards. His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions. Okwui Okpokwasili headshot photo by Michael Avedon. Peter Born headshot photo courtesy of the artist.

Meet our 2026 New York City Artadia Awards Finalist! Carrie Yamaoka is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges across painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture. She engages with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work addresses the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Her material engagement and rule-breaking strategies embrace accidents and dissolve binaries, such as improvisation/intention, methodology/intuition, and surface/depth. Toggling between visibility and invisibility, overlaying legibility and illegibility, breaking apart and recomposing, Yamaoka’s work is in a constant state of mutation. Yamaoka (b.1957, Glen Cove, NY) lives and works in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), MoMA PS1 (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Participant Inc. (New York), Grey Art Museum (New York), and MassMOCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Writing on her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, Ursula, and BOMB. Her work is included in the public collections of the Buffalo AKG, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, Sunpride Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the 2025 Maria Lassnig Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). A monograph, RE: Carrie Yamaoka, was published by Radius Books in 2025. Her work is included in the main exhibition In Minor Keys curated by Koyo Kouoh at the 61st Venice Biennale opening in early May 2026. Headshot photo courtesy of the artist.

Scroll to see a round-up of Awardee exhibitions closing in May! -@deedsweaves @cauleen_smith @hankwillisthomas @driskellcenter through May 8 -@saulhviii @rollinsmuseum through May 10 -@astriasuparak @gtmuseum through May 14 -@woffsilog @silverlensgallery through May 16 -@a_____rtist @commonwealthandcouncil through May 16 -@clarissatossin @thetorggler_cnu though May 17 -@mindyroseschwartz @mleblanc_chicago through May 23 -@hmmmekk @65grand through May 23 -@hmmmekk @boundarychicagospace through May 23 -@deedsweaves @museumangewandtekunst May 24 -@kameelahr #charissepearlinaweston @ccsbard through May 24 -@orianestender @columbianeighbors through May 29 -@astriasuparak @cclarkgallery through May 30 -@kangseunglee @talbotricegallery May 30 -@beatrizcortezflores @anahuacalli through May 31

Meet our 2026 New York City Artadia Awards Finalist! David L. Johnson’s work focuses on the ongoing effects of privatization, real estate development, and policing on public life in cities. Working across photography, video, found and stolen objects, and sound, Johnson uses direct forms of intervention to engage the politics, histories, and forms of use that define contemporary urban space. Through subtractive gestures, including the removal of hostile architecture, property markers, and surveillance devices, his work traces the material and legal conditions of these sites, producing moments of slippage between public and private property. Johnson (b. 1993, New York, NY) received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2015 and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. He is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and a part-time faculty member in the Fine Arts MFA program at Parsons School of Design. His work has been exhibited at the 2026 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago; and MoMA PS1, New York. Headshot photo courtesy of the artist.

Meet our 2026 New York City Artadia Awards Finalist! Working across sound, sculpture, and installation, Alice Gong Xiaowen’s practice unfolds as an indexical methodology, presenting ready-mades in dialogue with what precedes them, tethered to historical and personal lineages. How do things come into being, when does sensory perception end, and how do impressions remain within repetitive recollection? While mourning often fixates on a specific object of loss, Xiaowen’s research moves in cylindrical orbits around a void; the indecipherable, buried, or missing reemerge as physical remnants and evidentiary residue. Indexicality is understood as a temporal condition: sound unfolds durationally, while casting and mold-making register as its counterpart—a moment recorded and already past, like a single frame in a film—making perceptible the presence of absence, time, and change. Abstraction becomes a method for expanding interpretive potential, allowing recognition to unfold over time. Meaning remains open, contingent, and generative. The referent is elaborated through transformation rather than symbolically represented, drawing on the subtleties of difference and repetition as a modality against closure. Alice Gong Xiaowen (Canadian b. 1994, Beijing) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art. Solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at Franz Kaka, Toronto (2025); Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (2025); lower_cavity, Holyoke (2024); and House of Seiko, San Francisco (2023). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Silke Lindner, New York (2025); Minor Attractions, London (2025); Island Gallery, New York (2025); Bank, New York (2025); Kiang Malingue, New York (2025); Romance, Pittsburgh (2025); Stilllife, New York and Shanghai (2024); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2024); Iowa, New York (2024); and DUPLEX, New York (2022). Xiaowen is a recipient of the Susan H. Wedon Award (2025), the Explore and Create Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (2022), and the John W. Kurtich Foundation Travel Fellowship (2015). Headshot photo by Leor Miller.

5/12 @nyfacurrent Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grants 5/13 @themartinhouse Creative Residency Program 5/15 @wsworkshop Women’s Studio Workshop Studio Residency Grant 5/15 @monson_arts Fall 2026 Open Call 5/18 @studiomuseum The Studio Museum Harlem Residency Program 5/21 @viaartfund Artistic Production Grant Program 5/29 @joanmitchellfdn Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans Residency Program 5/31 @printshoporg Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency Program 6/1 @headlandsarts Artist in Residence Program Photo from Artadia tour of the Philip Johnson Glass House, June 2010.

Meet our 2026 New York City Artadia Awards Finalist! Frank WANG Yefeng's practice navigates the instability of identity, place, and perception, exploring the experience of "in-betweenness" that arises from a nomadic, transnational existence. Taking a non-hierarchical approach across 3D animation, video installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, and text, he constructs speculative worlds of whimsical characters and uncanny landscapes in which the boundaries between the human and non-human, virtual and physical, dissolve. Blending playful aesthetics with conceptual depth, his work invites viewers into nomadic spaces where perception is fluid and new connections and imagination continuously unfold. Frank WANG Yefeng (b. 1984, Shanghai) is a transdisciplinary artist based in New York City and Shanghai. He holds an MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has had recent solo presentations at The Window, CHANEL Culture Fund, London (2026); artport at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2025); High Line Originals (2025); Shanghai Museum of Glass (2025); Art Basel Hong Kong Encounters (2025); NARS Foundation (2024); and Smack Mellon (2023). He has received numerous residencies and fellowships, including Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), MacDowell, K11 Art Foundation × ArtReview, and Asia Art Archive in America, and was named an ISCP honoree in 2026. Headshot photo by a015.

Saturday we had the privilege of visiting our 2025 Houston Artadia Awardees! We started the day at the studios@gerardorosalesart and @lovieolivia , followed by screening of @virginia.l.montgomery ’s public installation at the Moody. Grateful to our Houston Awardees and community for making it such a special day. 💙

Meet our 2026 New York City Artadia Awards Finalist! Suneil Sanzgiri’s research-driven practice considers questions of inheritance and indebtedness in relation to histories of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle across the Global South. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work explores image-making, collective memory, and testimony, and are often in dialogue with the works of filmmakers, revolutionaries, and poets, drawing together a slippage between the living and dead. Beginning with an examination of his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, to centuries of Portuguese colonial occupation, Sanzgiri's recent works contend with the possibilities of transhistorical and cross-continental solidarity, wrestling with their own forms to test the efficacy of words and images in times of struggle, mourning, suffering, and action. Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. His award-winning work has been screened and exhibited extensively at festivals and arts venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, 18th Istanbul Biennial, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Doclisboa, Viennale, lo Schermo dell’Arte, de Appel, Jameel Arts Center, ICA London, Whitechapel Gallery, MASS MoCA, e-Flux, Hessel Museum, Criterion Collection, and many more. His first institutional solo exhibition, “Here the Earth Grows Gold,” opened at the Brooklyn Museum in Fall 2023. Other solo exhibitions include “An Impossible Address” at Mercer Union in Toronto, Canada (2025), and at EMPAC in Troy, NY (2025). His work has been written about in BOMB Magazine, MOUSSE, e-Flux, Art in America, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Film Quarterly, SEEN Journal, Dissent, November Magazine, and more. Headshot photo by Shala Miller.

CALLING ALL #bayareaartists: The application for the 2026 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awards is now open! Free to apply for all visual artists living and working within Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma Counties for the last two consecutive years at minimum. All submissions will be reviewed by a panel of prominent curators. Three artists will be selected to receive $15,000 in unrestricted funds. Application is free, simple, and easy! The deadline is June 1st, 2026 at 11:59pm PT. Visit the link in bio for more information and to apply.

What an incredible last week we’ve had celebrating Artadia Awardees in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! In San Francisco, we spent the morning with 2025 Bay Area and SEEN Awardee @m_yimartin at @jessicasilvermangallery for a walkthrough of her solo exhibition "The Shape of Dusk," followed by a conversation with curator Victoria Sung. In New York, we joined marcelacguerrero, co-curator of the 2026 Whitney Biennial, for an in depth walkthrough. It was incredible to see the work of seven Artadia Awardees featured in this year's exhibition including @basel.abb & @ruanne.ar , @cyber.sula , @alieyalnostudio , @mariahgarnett , @nileharris , @youngjoonkwak , and @ham_m2a . We were also thrilled to have Awardee Nile Harris join us to discuss his performance work. In Los Angeles, we gathered at @moca for a curator-led tour of MONUMENTS with Assistant Curator @paulakroll , exploring works by Awardees @bethanyjoycollins , @victoriouspurple , @cauleen_smith , and @hankwillisthomas . Thank you to all the curators, artists, and community members who joined us for these special events. We're grateful for your continued support of our Awardees across the country! 💙

We're thrilled to share that five Artadia Awardees have been named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows! Among the 223 distinguished individuals in the 101st Class of Fellows are Awardees, American Artist (2024 New York City), Jonathan Michael Castillo (2026 Chicago), Kota Ezawa (2005 San Francisco Bay Area), LaMont Hamilton (2015 Chicago), and Anne Wilson (2001 + 2008 Chicago) The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most esteemed honors in the arts and sciences, supporting visionary work at the highest level. We're incredibly proud to see our Awardees recognized for their exceptional contributions. Congratulations to all the 2026 Guggenheim Fellows! 💙 @guggfellows @a_____rtist @joncastillophoto #kotaezawa @lamonthamilton @annewilsonartist