The Milwaukee-based Ruth Foundation for the Arts has named the five artists who have won its 2026 Ruth Awards. They are Yuji Agematsu, Ranu Mukherjee, Will Rawls, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and Anna Martine Whitehead.
The winners will receive an unrestricted grant of $100,000 each, which will be disbursed over a two-year period. Now in its third year, the Ruth Awards is open to artists working in North American and recognizes artists who “are accelerating the field forward, building deeper relationships and connections across communities, and developing artistic approaches to structural change,” according to a release.
The five artists are based in different parts of the country, with Agematsu and Rawls being in New York, Mukherjee in Los Angeles, Sebastian Chang in Oakland, California; and Whitehead in “the homeland of the Council of the Three Fires, also known as Chicago,” per a release.
Agematsu is best known for his miniscule sculptures, made from detritus found on the streets of New York. His work was most recently the subject of a two-venue exhibition at the Judd Foundation in SoHo and the Harlem home of dealer Gavin Brown.
Rawls is a multidisciplinary choreographer whose work has been shown and performed in museums across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Last month, he staged a performance of [siccer] at Performance Space New York to accompany his exhibition at the Kitchen.
Mukherjee works across painting, film installation, and performance, which can bring together Indian textiles, pigments, animation, or choreography. Her work has been featured in the 2022 Singapore Biennial and the 2019 Karachi Biennale, as well as been the subject of solo shows at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California.
Across a five-decade career, Sebastian Chang has worked as a director, dramaturge, writer, and arts educator. Her debut play Your Place Is No Longer With Us premiered in 1982. She cofounded a film production company called Life on the Water in 1986, and served as its artistic director until 1995. She was also the co-owner of FuseBox, a Korean fusion restaurant that operated in West Oakland from 2012 to 2017.
Whitehead is a performance artist whose work FORCE! an opera in three acts showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Oregon, and REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2024. She is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (2016).
“Each year, we receive a multitude of nominations that guide us towards the most inspiring and thought-provoking artists and practices today,” Ruth Foundation program director Kim Nguyen said in a statement. “Our world is better and more complex with artists in it, and this award acknowledges the necessity of supporting rigorous creative practice, critical thinking, and the freedom of artistic expression. It is an honor to reward this year’s artists for being responsive and empathetic, for their dedication to emergent strategies, for their constant pursuit of the big idea. We hope that this recognition carries them onwards into the future—we need them more than ever.”
