The Nasher Prize, a prestigious $100,000 prize given by the Nasher Sculpture Center to honor a living artist who has made significant contributions to sculpture, was announced to go to the Nigerian-born, Antwerp-based artist Otobong Nkanga in 2025.
Image courtesy of Artsy.
“[Nkanga’s] work harnesses sculpture’s capacity to embody experience; uses the Earth’s raw materials to incite feelings such as belonging, nostalgia, retrospection—through objects, through performance, through textiles, drawing, painting, poetry,” Strick said during a press event on Wednesday. “She affects her audience, while suddenly addressing issues of consumption, globalism, connectivity, and more.”
Born 1974, Kano, Nigeria Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances examine the social and topographical relationship with our everyday environment. The multidisciplinary installations by Nkanga that incorporate everything from earth, lava rocks, pools of water, and tree trunks to shimmering, dystopian quilts and murano glass and raise critical questions about our relationship to the environment are what she is best known for. Nkanga offers an alternative definition of identity to the social ideas of belonging by examining the idea of land as a place of non-belonging. She paradoxically highlights the memories and historical effects sparked by people and the environment. In order to elicit narratives and stories about the land, she lays out the inherent complexities of resources like soil and earth as well as their potential values.
Her work has resonated internationally over the past decade and a half, evidenced by her impressive exhibition history, including at the major biennials (Venice and São Paulo, as well as Sharjah three times, among others) and solo exhibitions at esteemed art museums worldwide (Hayward Gallery, Tate, Zeitz MOCAA, and Castello di Rivoli, to name a few). She is represented by Lisson Gallery, Lumen Travo Gallery, and Galerie In Situ – Fabienne Leclerc.
Nkanga was chosen by a jury of esteemed artists, curators, and other art professionals including Nairy Baghramian, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Lynne Cooke, Briony Fer, Hou Hanru, Yuko Hasegawa, Rashid Johnson, Pablo León de la Barra, and Sir Nicholas Serota. The selection process starts with more than 160 nominees, according to Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher Sculpture Center. Jurors convened in June to narrow down a shortlist of 60 finalists to a single winner.
“The work of Otobong Nkanga makes manifest the myriad connections — historical, sociological, economic, cultural and spiritual — that we have to the materials that comprise our lives,” said Strick.
Strick further described the honor as “the only prize of its kind and scale devoted exclusively to excellence in the field of sculpture.” The previous Nasher Prize Laureates are Senga Nengudi, Nairy Baghramian, Michael Rakowitz, Isa Genzken, Theaster Gates, Pierre Huyghe, and Doris Salcedo.
There have been changes to the Nasher Prize’s schedule this year. The prize will now be given out every two years, according to Nasher director Jeremy Strick. Officials said the decision was made to enhance the experience of the winners, giving them more time to plan their exhibitions and publications.,
