Meet the Winner of the Guggenheim’s Inaugural $50,000 Visual Arts Award

Meet the Winner of the Guggenheim’s Inaugural $50,000 Visual Arts Award Aside from its prestigious fellowship, the Guggenheim now offers another honor for accomplished creatives: the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award. Made possible by a generous gift from the Jack Galef Estate, the new prize will recognize contemporary artists of exceptional talent every two years, providing $50,000 to its recipients. To inaugurate the award, the Guggenheim […] READ: Meet the Winner of the Guggenheim’s Inaugural $50,000 Visual Arts Award

Art Jan 14, 2026 0 0 Add to Reading List

Meet the Winner of the Guggenheim’s Inaugural $50,000 Visual Arts Award

Catherine Telford Keogh. (Photo: Em Joseph)

Aside from its prestigious fellowship, the Guggenheim now offers another honor for accomplished creatives: the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award. Made possible by a generous gift from the Jack Galef Estate, the new prize will recognize contemporary artists of exceptional talent every two years, providing $50,000 to its recipients. To inaugurate the award, the Guggenheim tapped Catherine Telford Keogh, whose interdisciplinary practice focuses on themes such as value, waste, consumption, infrastructure, biology, and commodification.

For years, the Brooklyn-based artist has produced provocative pieces that play with materiality, scale, and time. Cradlers from 2025, for instance, incorporates fossiliferous limestone blocks sourced through Facebook Marketplace from a demolished Hudson Valley agricultural property. Telford Keogh later hoisted these blocks on mirrored stainless steel tubes along a curved spinal line, staging a fascinating encounter between sleek, geometric surfaces and rigid, displaced sediments.

Another project, titled Carriers (Gravity-Fed), also relies upon local materials, including sediment dredged from Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. In the installation, this sediment is merged with commercial objects encased in silicone, each of which flows down what appears to be a conveyer belt. It’s a monumental and circulatory gesture, suggesting that raw materials are continuously filtered through industrial movement.

“My practice has become increasingly vertical, driven by materials and processes that require extended timelines, learning how something behaves, sitting with it long enough for embodied knowledge to emerge,” Telford Keogh tells My Modern Met. “I’m interested in what happens when you stay intimately involved in a whole process, which takes time that’s difficult to protect.”

Despite such an ambitious vision, Telford Keogh didn’t expect to be named as the inaugural recipient of the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award. “I received a call from a curator on the selection committee,” she explains. “These things always feel like they’re meant for someone else until they’re not.” After the initial surprise faded, the artist remembers being touched, especially once she learned more about the award’s namesake.

“What stayed with me was learning about Jack Galef, that he was a poet and a teacher, someone committed to supporting artists at earlier stages of visibility,” she says. “There’s something meaningful about receiving an award rooted in that kind of care, and in the poetic as a mode of attention. I think of poetics as a register in my own work, the way language and material can hold contradiction, can slip between categories.”

It’s that legacy that the Jack Galef Estate hoped to extend toward its award recipients, according to co-executors Jade Borgeson and Sandra Sindel. “Jack held deep roots in New York City, where he was both a teacher and mentor to emerging visual artists,” the pair tells My Modern Met. “It is our privilege to see his legacy and passion for the arts endure through the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award and its first honoree.”

Ashley James, Guggenheim’s associate curator of contemporary art, agrees with the sentiment: “With this gift, it is so clear to me that the late Jack Galef understood that the importance of the arts was inextricable from the support of its artists. It’s a profound perspective,” she explains. “As curators, we get to support artists in really important ways, like through writing and presentations. It is a great privilege to have the additional capacity to recognize an artist and award them with funds to support their work and their lives, in any fashion they see fit.”

In Telford Keogh’s case, that support will translate into material research and building deeper relationships with collaborators. The artist also plans to pursue a kinetic work with fruit flies at its center. “I’ve realized I have to build the work around them, their needs, behaviors, life cycles,” the artist explains. “This opened up another vein of research I couldn’t have anticipated.”

Rather than presenting a roadblock, though, these unanticipated elements are a source of excitement for Telford Keogh. Now, she explains, she can embrace the natural speed of her creative process, which tends to unfold slowly. “I follow a material or organism and it pulls me somewhere,” she says. “This award gives me permission to stay with that slowness, to let the questions keep fraying rather than forcing resolution.”

Artist Catherine Telford Keogh has won the inaugural Jack Galef Visual Arts Award, recently launched by the Guggenheim.

“Cradlers,” 2025. Stainless steel, mild steel, fossiliferous limestone blocks, compressed post-consumer stainless steel, stainless steel hardware. (Photo: Argenis Apolinario)