Guggenheim New York has announced Canadian-born, New York–based artist Catherine Telford Keogh as the inaugural winner of its Jack Galef Visual Arts Award. The new biennial prize recognizes exceptional achievement in visual art and provides the recipient with a $50,000 unrestricted award.
According to the museum, the award is intended to honor either a younger artist who has demonstrated significant talent or an older artist whose work remains under-recognized. Recipients are selected by a jury drawn from the Guggenheim’s curatorial department. The prize will be awarded every two years, beginning in 2025. The award was made possible through a gift from the Jack Galef Estate.
“Jack held deep roots in New York City, where he was both a teacher and mentor to emerging visual artists,” said Jade Borgeson and Sandra Sindel, co-executors of the Jack Galef Estate, in a joint statement. “He was an accomplished artist and advocate for the arts who understood the importance of investing in talent to grow and sustain the arts community.”
Born in Toronto in 1986, Telford Keogh works across sculpture and installation, primarily using found materials. Her practice examines how matter is transformed, and how infrastructure shapes contemporary life. She has held solo exhibitions with Helena Anrather in New York and Erin Stump Projects in Toronto. She is currently a Socrates Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York and has been longlisted for the Canadian Sobey Art Award. The artist noted in a press statement that the award would “deepen collaborations and pursue the slow, uncertain research that has always grounded my practice.”
Mariët Westermann, director and CEO of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, said the award reflects a commitment to supporting artistic innovation and sustaining contemporary practice. She described the prize as a way to invest in artists who are advancing visual art in new directions.
The Jack Galef Visual Arts Award joins a group of prizes associated with the Guggenheim. This includes the Guggenheim LG Award, which awards $100,000 to artists working with technology; its most recent recipient was Korean artist Ayoung Kim, who won the award in February 2025. The museum also previously administered the Hugo Boss Prize, another $100,000 award that was discontinued in 2022.
