This year’s honoree will receive an unrestricted $10,000 artist grant and studio visits with each of the distinguished jurors. The honoree and three shortlisted artists will also be invited for interviews as part of our Dialogues program to further public engagement with their practices.
About The Prize
The Foundwork Artist Prize is an annual juried award inaugurated in 2019 to recognize outstanding emerging and mid-career artists working in any media. Honorees receive unrestricted $10,000 grants and studio visits with our jurors who include distinguished curators, gallerists, and artists. Honorees and shortlisted artists are also invited for interviews as part of our Dialogues program to further public engagement with their practices. The Prize is open to artists residing anywhere in the world with limited exceptions, and our annual selection process takes place each fall. For instructions on eligibility and how to participate, please see the “Foundwork Artist Prize” section in our FAQ.
The Jury
Our 2023 jury includes esteemed curators, gallerists, and artists based in Los Angeles, Medellín, Miami, and New York. Our warmest thanks and welcome to these inspiring colleagues who will bring a range of important experience to our fifth annual selection process this fall.
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 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’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 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 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.
The deadline to register for this year’s award is 5:00 pm PT, September 26th. Artists, please see the “Foundwork Artist Prize” section in our FAQ for instructions on how to participate.
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