The pages ahead are devoted to and inspired by Nkanga, our 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate. Each story demonstrates that the vast array of material used in art-making is not limited to the physical composition of the work, but also the infinite ways those materials enter our lives. The history of barbed wire is sewn into quilts, interrogating land privatization and its often violent legacy; cacao butter is cast into sculptures, representing systems of labor and products of restoration; a daughter mines the smell of her mother’s belongings to capture memory; a ceramicist listens to her clay, allowing for personalities to come forth; bricks of fired earth are stacked and disassembled, demonstrating the fragility of a wall at the hands of community.   

Director's Letter

How do we measure the impact of art? This kind of quantitative analysis is something with which museums often struggle. We can provide attendance figures, numbers of schoolchildren toured, or website hits, but these measures never illuminate the crux of the question. The question of impact is really about emotional response—hearts and minds moved rather than feet through the door—and that is more difficult to measure. Yet that is what we ask of our Nasher Prize nominators and jurors: Identify a single living artist with a significant body of work that has had an extraordinary impact on our understanding of sculpture. The international pool of nominators and our distinguished jury, fortunately, include some of the most astute observers of contemporary sculpture—directors, curators, scholars, and artists. They often identify the importance of an artist’s work before the rest of us. We, the audience, from the learned to the merely curious, are the fortunate beneficiaries of their foresight.   

This April, the Nasher Sculpture Center celebrates its eighth Nasher Prize Laureate, Otobong Nkanga, whose work has deeply affected audiences and has caused our jury to think anew about the form and role of sculpture. Incorporating numerous materials including wood, stone, glass, ceramic, soap, rope, and tapestry, as well as more ephemeral elements such as sound, scent, performance, poetry, and conversation, Nkanga’s work highlights the essential function of sculpture: making meaning out of matter. In doing so, her work deepens our understanding of matter itself and the network of connections it engenders—terrestrial, celestial, and human.  

Like a stone cast in still water, the current issue of The Nasher provides insights into the depths of Nkanga’s work as well as the expanding circles of its impact, which will be felt more keenly in person throughout the celebration of the Laureate from April 3 – 5; the run of her exhibition at the Nasher through August; and, through the publication of a monograph on her work, for years to come.  

Warmly,  

Jed Morse 
Interim Director and Chief Curator 

CAPTION: 

Otobong Nkanga, 2024. Photo by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn