Pat Oleszko, a sculptor and performance artist who was not well-known in New York before earlier this year, has won the 2026 Whitney Biennial’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award, a prize previously won by famed artists such as Zoe Leonard, Ralph Lemon, and Pope.L.
Oleszko’s contribution to the show was a large inflatable sculpture called Blow Hard (1995), featuring a gigantic green face pushing air into a trumpet that expels flames. As is the case with most of Oleszko’s work, the title is a pun, referring both to this figure’s act of blowing into its instrument as well as a phrase that denotes an overly prideful person.
Alongside it is Footsi (1979), a video in which two fingers garbed in little shoes and socks move across the artist’s body.
Oleszko’s pieces are one of the few artworks in the Whitney Biennial made well before this decade. Typically, the Bucksbaum Award, which was launched in 2000, has gone to artists who produce new work for the exhibition, a snapshot of the American art scene as it currently stands that takes place every other year. (This year’s edition also places an emphasis on artists from locales impacted by American intervention, including Okinawa and Afghanistan.)
Until very recently, Oleszko had not had much exposure in New York. Before David Peter Francis gallery mounted a show for her in 2024, the artist had not had a solo exhibition in the city since the 1990s, even though she has been based here for years. She gained wider acclaim earlier this year through a SculptureCenter retrospective mounted this winter, in advance of the Whitney Biennial’s opening this spring.
In a statement, Whitney Biennial curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer said that Oleszko had produced “one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American art,” adding, “Throughout the Biennial, it became clear that Oleszko’s work resonated not only with audiences but with many of the participating artists, who recognized in her practice a remarkable model of artistic freedom and invention.”
Guerrero and Sawyer said the prize’s jury had been unanimous in picking her. That jury included Guerrero, Sawyer, Whitney director Scott Rothkopf, and Whitney chief curator Kim Conaty. On the jury alongside them were Myriam Ben Salah, director and chief curator of Chicago’s Renaissance Society; Joan Kee, an art historian; and Manuela Moscoso, executive and artistic director of New York’s Center for Art, Research and Alliances.
