Since its inception in 2016, the Nasher Prize has given the Nasher Sculpture Center an international footprint. No other prize anywhere in the world cites sculpture specifically, and its $100,000 award is the same amount presented to winners of the Pritzker prize for architecture.
Winners of the Nasher Prize have their roots in Colombia, France, Germany, Iran and the United States. And now, its newest recipient, Otobong Nkanga, 49, is the first to have been born in Africa.
She also becomes the first biennial honoree of a prize that had previously been awarded every year. The Nasher made its selection official Oct. 5, with the ceremony in her honor occurring in Dallas on April 5, 2025.
In its announcement, the Nasher praises Nkanga for a body of work that resonates with cultural and ecological significance: “The movement of raw materials across continents, extracted from the land for trade and consumption, is a prominent concern of Nkanga’s investigations. She often references the experience of seeing an abandoned copper mine in Namibia, where formerly green hills were stripped bare in the 20th century, leaving a bleak scar on the land.”
The museum and Dallas now have a chance to trumpet her art for almost two full years, with the next winner not being named until autumn 2025.
Nasher director Jeremy Strick said the biennial format allows the museum to showcase the work of the artist in much greater depth than before.
“Overall, what distinguishes the Nasher Prize is not only the prize aspect but also its program. And that program has continued to grow and evolve, whether it’s through our Nasher Prize dialogues, or the graduate symposium, or the range of educational community aspects we undertake each year.
“And so, we’re always sort of evaluating, ‘What are the needs? What can be done better?’ From its inception, we have always shown work by the laureate. And those works have been shown in different places around the museum.
“On the one hand, our public in Dallas has always asked if they can see more work by the artist than we have been able to show. And so, the thought was, by going to a biennial celebration, we would have the opportunity to make a fuller presentation, to mount an exhibition of the artist’s work.”
The biennial approach, Strick said, plows further ground by allowing for even more than exhibitions.
“What artists find most meaningful is a publication. Because, when you think about it, everything in an exhibition is ephemeral. It goes up, it comes down. A prize is a moment in time. But a publication is something that endures.”
The timeline, he said, “was too compressed before to do a publication. What we can do now with this two-year biennial prize is produce a publication with a full overview of the artist’s work, essays by noted authorities, and it can really be a kind of ongoing, lasting resource for those who are interested in the artist. And it wouldn’t be so much of an exhibition catalog.”
In essence, “the two-year framework allows us to create a full exhibition and to produce a monograph.”
Each year, the nine-member international jury meets in the summer before making its announcement in the fall. When the prize was conceived seven years ago, Strick outlined its history by saying that it first surfaced in conversations among museum founder Raymond Nasher and his family. They saw it as a logical extension of the center and its mission, Strick said in 2016, “that it would be an institution of international consequence located in Dallas, in a place that would have an impact on the field of sculpture internationally and on the Dallas community.”
Since its founding, the prize has spawned a pattern. Most of the artists chosen, Strick says, “have been very much in mid-career. Nkanga is an artist whose work has grown in prominence and acclaim. I would say that, heretofore, she has received more recognition in Europe than in the United States. Although her work has been exhibited in various museums in the U.S. She’s hardly unknown.”
In a 2019 interview, Nkanga said, “I am interested in this idea of what your perception is and what the reality of material is and what it can become. You realize how materials can relate to what our memory has registered. What happens if we play with that memory — try to break that perception and rediscover the material? If you touch it or smell it, it breaks our preconceived ideas of what it is.”
Born in Nigeria, Nkanga grew up in her native country and in Paris, with a global education to follow. She attended schools in Nigeria, Paris and Amsterdam, where her studies extended to theater and dance, elements of which she uses in her work. She now lives in Antwerp, Belgium.
She has presented solo exhibitions in Belgium, Austria, Italy, France, Norway, Germany, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Chicago, Denmark, Lebanon and the Netherlands. Two of her more prominent American group exhibitions were “Black Melancholia” at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York in 2022 and “Witch Hunt” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2021.
“I see her as an artist who works in sculpture,” Strick said, “but who works across a variety of mediums and art forms. She produces installations, films, tapestries, drawings, poetry, photography and these are often brought together.
“Our jury is always thinking about, ‘What are the issues that an artist addresses? Whether they’re aesthetic or social and environmental issues.’ What is quite interesting about Nkanga is her focus on the materials themselves and the history of materials. If you think of any material, whether it’s a metal or stone or wood, or a seed or a thread, it comes from somewhere.
“And as it has gone from its place of origin to where it currently resides, there is a story. If it’s a metal, where was it extracted? And what were the conditions of its extraction? If it’s a seed, where did it come from? And how was it gathered and taken? Then how does it come to be in the place it is now? And what changes were effected along the course of its travels?
“The story is not simply of the material itself but of all the people who touched it and the conditions that allowed them to touch it,” Strick said, “that made its gathering and movement possible. Such conditions can be social. They can be political. They can have ecological import.”
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