The Guggenheim Museum will this year new launch a new art prize. Titled the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award, the $50,000 prize is being endowed by the estate of Jack Galef and will be given out biennially to an artist working in sculpture, installation, and related mediums.
The prize’s first winner is Catherine Telford Keogh, whose sculptures consider the past lives of found materials and the connections between the environment and the global economy.
“Being the first artist recognized by this honor is something I carry with care and don’t take for granted,” she said in an email to ARTnews. “Awards like this offer artists something increasingly rare: the time and space to explore, to follow curiosity where it leads, and to move vertically, delving deeper rather than yielding to the pressure of quick decisions. So much of my work depends on durational attention, on exploring systems through field research and collaboration, on staying with materials and processes long enough to let them reveal what they’re already doing.”
She said she planned to use the honorarium to support two future projects: “one examines contamination and microbial life in the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site where I’ve lived and worked for six years, exploring how bacteria have evolved to metabolize what industrial processes left behind; the other, for a solo exhibition in Portland, traces a history of instruments designed to measure, regulate, and discipline eating, from eighteenth-century fantasies of the meal-in-a-pill to contemporary technologies that optimize the body for productivity. Both projects ask how materials, and the bodies entangled with them, persist within cycles of circulation that exceed human intention or control.”
The newly founded Jack Galef Visual Arts Award is now the only art award facilitated by the Guggenheim, which works with LG to offer a $100,000 prize for technology-focused artists. The most recent Guggenheim LG Award went to Ayoung Kim, a Korean artist whose work is being surveyed at MoMA PS1.
Previously, the Guggenheim used to run the Hugo Boss Prize, a closely watched art award that came with $100,000. The award was last given out in 2020 and was declared defunct in 2022.
