{"id":238956,"date":"2026-01-15T07:01:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T07:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/238956\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T07:01:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T07:01:14","slug":"meet-the-winner-of-the-guggenheims-inaugural-visual-arts-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/238956\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Winner of the Guggenheim\u2019s Inaugural Visual Arts Award"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Catherine<\/p>\n

Catherine Telford Keogh. (Photo: Em Joseph)<\/p>\n

Aside from its prestigious fellowship<\/a>, the Guggenheim<\/a> now offers another honor for accomplished creatives: the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award<\/a>. 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<\/a>, whose interdisciplinary practice focuses on themes such as value, waste, consumption, infrastructure, biology, and commodification.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Another project, titled Carriers (Gravity-Fed), also relies upon local materials, including sediment dredged from Brooklyn\u2019s 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\u2019s a monumental and circulatory gesture, suggesting that raw materials are continuously filtered through industrial movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy 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,\u201d Telford Keogh tells My Modern Met. \u201cI\u2019m interested in what happens when you stay intimately involved in a whole process, which takes time that\u2019s difficult to protect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite such an ambitious vision, Telford Keogh didn\u2019t expect to be named as the inaugural recipient of the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award. \u201cI received a call from a curator on the selection committee,\u201d she explains. \u201cThese things always feel like they\u2019re meant for someone else until they\u2019re not.\u201d After the initial surprise faded, the artist remembers being touched, especially once she learned more about the award\u2019s namesake.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat 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,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that legacy that the Jack Galef Estate hoped to extend toward its award recipients, according to co-executors Jade Borgeson and Sandra Sindel. \u201cJack held deep roots in New York City, where he was both a teacher and mentor to emerging visual artists,\u201d the pair tells My Modern Met. \u201cIt is our privilege to see his legacy and passion for the arts endure through the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award and its first honoree.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ashley James, Guggenheim\u2019s associate curator of contemporary art<\/a>, agrees with the sentiment: \u201cWith 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\u2019s a profound perspective,\u201d she explains. \u201cAs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Telford Keogh\u2019s 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. \u201cI\u2019ve realized I have to build the work around them, their needs, behaviors, life cycles,\u201d the artist explains. \u201cThis opened up another vein of research I couldn\u2019t have anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI follow a material or organism and it pulls me somewhere,\u201d she says. \u201cThis award gives me permission to stay with that slowness, to let the questions keep fraying rather than forcing resolution.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Artist Catherine Telford Keogh has won the inaugural Jack Galef Visual Arts Award, recently launched by the Guggenheim.
\n\"\u2018Cradlers,\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cCradlers,\u201d 2025. Stainless steel, mild steel, fossiliferous limestone blocks, compressed post-consumer stainless steel, stainless steel hardware. (Photo: Argenis Apolinario)<\/p>\n

\"\u2018Cradlers,\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cCradlers,\u201d 2025. Stainless steel, mild steel, fossiliferous limestone blocks, compressed post-consumer stainless steel, stainless steel hardware. (Photo: Argenis Apolinario)<\/p>\n

\"\u2018Elixir<\/p>\n

\u201cElixir for the Spirits,\u201d 2023. (Photo: Sebastian Bach)<\/p>\n

\"\u2018Commercial<\/p>\n

\u201cCommercial Artifacts,\u201d 2023-ongoing. (Photo: Sebastian Bach)<\/p>\n

The $50,000 award will be presented every two years, honoring contemporary artists of exceptional talent.
\n\"\u2018Complementary<\/p>\n

\u201cComplementary Medicine,\u201d 2023. (Photo: Sebastian Bach)<\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/p>\n

Detail of \u201cCompost Index 3 with Volume 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1,\u201d 2023. (Photo: Sebastian Bach)<\/p>\n

\"\u2018Carriers<\/p>\n

\u201cCarriers (Gravity-Fed),\u201d 2024. (Photo: LFPhotography)<\/p>\n

The Guggenheim: Website<\/a> | Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by the Guggenheim.
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