Foundwork

To initiate the Open Call for our 2026 Artist Prize, we’ll be introducing you to each of our five jurors, each of whom are celebrated leaders in the international contemporary arts community.

For our first, we invite you to get acquainted with Manuela Moscoso (Manuela Moscoso), who joins us from New York. She is the inaugural Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (Center for Art, Research and Alliances) and curator of Ecuador’s national pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (2026). She was formerly Curator of the 2ª Bienal das Amazônias (2025), the Liverpool Biennial (2021), and a senior curator at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Moscoso’s practice spans exhibition-making, publishing, and writing, with a focus on relational, political, and embodied approaches to contemporary art and institutions.

The Foundwork Artist Prize is our annual juried award to support outstanding artistic practices in any media. The honoree will receive an unrestricted $10,000 grant, studio visits with each jury member, and a published interview as part of our Dialogues program. Visit www.foundwork.art/artist-prize to learn more about how to participate.

Our annual Open Call for the 2026 Foundwork Artist Prize is now underway!

For anyone who is new to our platform, Foundwork’s Artist Prize is a juried award to support outstanding artistic practices in any media.

This year’s honoree will receive an unrestricted $10,000 grant, studio visits with each of our five jurors, and an interview for Foundwork’s Dialogues program. As in past years, three artists will also be named to our 2026 Short List.

The 2026 jury brings together five eminent leaders within the contemporary art community, based in Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Guatemala City, New York, and Berlin:

Gabi Ngcobo (Gabi Ngcobo), Director of Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam

François Ghebaly (François Ghebaly), Founder of François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles 

Stefan Benchoam (stefan benchoam), Artist and Co-Founder of Proyectos Ultravioleta and NuMu, Guatemala City

Manuela Moscoso (Manuela Moscoso), Executive and Artistic Director of the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York

Esther Schipper (Esther Schipper), Founder of Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin

The Artist Prize is open to artists residing anywhere in the world with limited exceptions, and the deadline to register is 5 pm PT, December 31, 2026. To be considered, artists must maintain a published profile on the Foundwork website, with at least 6 artworks and an artist statement on their profile page, throughout the selection period: 5:00 pm PT, September 25, 2026 – 5:00 pm PT, December 31, 2026. Please see the FAQ and Prize Rules pages on our website for additional instructions, terms and conditions. If you have further questions, you can reach us at [email protected].

We’re so grateful to be able to support another prize cycle.

FoundworkArtistPrize

“I’m always looking to work with really intensive processes that are somehow within lineages of traditional making, but then I want to engage with them from an oblique point of view to try to come to something unexpected. These [ceramic molds] are never meant to be objects that exist; they’re always destroyed. To stop a process midway is to look at something that’s not supposed to enter as a material in itself,” Foundwork’s 2025 Artist Prize winner Antonia Kuo tells 🌪 in their Dialogues interview. Read more about Kuo’s multifaceted investigations of duration and process at www.foundwork.art/dialogues.

Pictured here: “Negative Array,” 2025; 8 ceramic lost-wax investment molds (hollow), welded steel

“Resin-coated image worlds, a mosaic of broken smartphones, videos made of photo bursts, and refit digital detritus. These are just a few manifestations of Maddie Butler’s () affective circuitry, as she encodes personal affects within technologically dominated ecosystems,” guest curator writes of the third artist she selected from our platform. “Under her charge, memes, data scraps, and salvaged gadgets collide and warp. This is all a matter of arbitration, as Butler seeks to totally distort origins, providing totally new perspectival courses. Alongside the cybernetic web, she hones in on the properties and conditions of light, using different methods of refraction and diffusion to recalibrate her visual fields.”
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Maddie Butler is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Minneapolis and now based in San Diego. Her work, which is concerned with the ways in which technology alters lived experience, has been shown at ’s Experimental Film Festival (Gyeonggi-do, Korea), , (St. Paul), , and (Miami). She has received grants from the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, the Russell Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation via Midway Contemporary Art.
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Seen here: “The Inevitability of the Image,” 2025; 2024 Samsung Class DU6950 Series Crystal UHD4K Smart TV, assorted smartphones
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