Nasher Prize Laureates

Winners of the Nasher Prize embody the tenets of the award: to recognize a living artist whose body of work has had an extraordinary impact on our understanding of sculpture.  Their work represents the pinnacle of achievement in the medium, extending its expressive possibilities and often expanding upon the notion of what sculpture is or can be.

Otobong Nkanga

2025 Laureate

Through a broad range of materials, used to orchestrate an equally broad range of artistic practices, the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate, Otobong Nkanga, weaves together powerful works that delve into the complex, often fragile relationships between humans, the land, and its resources, touching on issues of consumption, global circulation, connectivity, and care.

Senga Nengudi

2023 Laureate

Deploying such unexpected materials as used pantyhose and sand, the 2023 Nasher Prize Laureate Senga Nengudi creates art traversing the disciplines of sculpture and dance to yield works that speak to the fragility and resilience of the human body, our agency as individuals, and the importance of collaboration and friendship.

Nairy Baghramian

2022 Laureate

The 2022 Nasher Prize Laureate Nairy Baghramian takes the creation and presentation of sculpture as her de facto subject yet makes works highlighting the poignant, contradictory, and sometimes humorous circumstances that can suffuse both the artistic process as well as everyday life.  Over the past three decades, she has explored elements of sculptural practice and installation to create works that challenge their settings and upend expected modes of presentation as well as the architectural, sociological, political, and historical contexts that inform them. 

Michael Rakowitz

2020/21 Laureate

Since his career began in the late 1990s, Michael Rakowitz’s dynamic body of work has involved intensive research, resulting in an array of objects, environments, films, and publications that seek to reclaim, reposition or refocus complicated aspects of material and cultural histories or events.

Isa Genzken

2019 Laureate

With a career spanning four decades, Isa Genzken has continually reinvented the language of sculpture by creating objects inspired by popular culture and historical events that explore the complexities of contemporary realism.

Theaster Gates

2018 Laureate

With a strong focus on the material aspects of memory, history, and place, Nasher Prize 2018 Laureate Theaster Gates has established a new paradigm for sculpture by joining together disparate methods of artistic production—the creation of discrete objects and the re-zoning, rebuilding, and reterritorializing1 of architectural spaces.
 

Pierre Huyghe

2017 Laureate

The 2017 Nasher Prize Laureate Pierre Huyghe has profoundly expanded the parameters of sculpture through artworks encompassing a variety of materials and disciplines, bringing music, cinema, and dance into contact with biology and philosophy and incorporating time-based elements as diverse as fog, ice, parades, rituals, automata, computer programs, games, dogs, bees, and microorganisms.  Huyghe has consistently sought new ways to bring them together into a practice exceeding the sum of its multifarious parts.

Doris Salcedo

2016 Laureate

For the past three decades, Salcedo has created sculptures and installations that transform familiar, everyday objects into moving and powerful testimonies of loss and remembrance. Working in a variety of modes, from objects and large-scale installations to public interventions, she has fearlessly taken creative and political risks to challenge audiences with innovative, significant work. Salcedo’s commitment and her willingness to push artistic boundaries have already inspired a generation of artists, even as her work continues to grow and respond to many of the most salient issues facing humanity. 

2016 Nasher Prize Laureate, Doris Salcedo portrait
Nasher Sculpture Center
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