Herb Alpert Award in the Arts

Drawing as language and gesture, Same Time reflects Steffani Jemison’s ongoing engagement with writing, abstraction, and embodied mark-making.

Steffani Jemison
Same Time (2017)
Acrylic paint on clear film

Painted at a time when menstruation was largely absent from art history or treated as taboo, Ángel de la Menstruación (1973) makes it visible and central. Cecilia Vicuña described the work as an angel that returns with each cycle, announcing continuity rather than concealment.

This work sits within a long throughline in Vicuña’s practice, where repetition and return carry meaning across time.

Sondra Perry turns a barbershop chair—a symbol of care and community—into a reflection on how technology shapes identity and belief. Using AI and digital media as both tool and metaphor, she examines how systems of power construct and reproduce images of Blackness.

Wrapped entirely in foil and fitted with a slow-moving motor, the chair hums softly as it moves. Each layer becomes a trace of touch, labor, and human presence within technological worlds.

FOIL MANE: Handshakes and Heartbreaks (2020–23)
© Sondra Perry. Courtesy of Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York.
2025 Herb Alpert Award Artist, Visual Arts

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
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📆 Now on view through January 18, 2026

Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

Few composers move as freely between continents, genres, and technologies as Lukas Ligeti. A percussionist, improviser, and composer, he bridges experimental music with global rhythmic traditions, performing and collaborating across Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

He has created works for the Kronos Quartet, Ensemble Modern, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and co-founded the groundbreaking West African electronic group Burkina Electric. His performances—often blending live percussion with electronics—embody an expansive approach to rhythm and sound that defies category.

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2010 Herb Alpert Award Artist, Music
Lukas Ligeti. Portrait with the Marimba Lumina electronic percussion controller. 2010. Photograph via Cantaloupe Music. © Lukas Ligeti

On June 26, 2023, Cai Guo-Qiang presented the daytime fireworks event When the Sky Blooms with Sakura at Yotsukura Beach in Iwaki City, Japan—an area devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Commissioned by Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent and organized by the Iwaki Executive Committee, the event filled the sky with daytime fireworks shaped like cherry blossoms, transforming a site of loss into one of renewal.

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2006 Herb Alpert Award Artist, Visual Arts
Cai Guo-Qiang. When the Sky Blooms with Sakura. 2023. Daytime fireworks, Yotsukura Beach, Iwaki City, Japan. © Cai Guo-Qiang Studio

In the early 1990s, Catherine Opie photographed members of q***r and leather communities with the compositional rigor of Old Master portraiture, reframing who could be seen within the language of art history. This is D**e (1993).

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Catherine Opie. D**e. 1993. Chromogenic print. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © Catherine Opie

Images from Among the Dead a play by Hansol Jung presented by Ma-Yi Theater Company in 2016

Three timelines collide in a Korean hotel room: a woman in 1975 retrieving her father’s ashes, a soldier in 1944 Burma, and a comfort woman in 1950 Seoul. Guided by a shape-shifting bellboy named Jesus, the play unpacks the emotional wreckage of war, the silence around sexual violence, and the fragmented legacies inherited by those left behind.

📸 Photos by Hunter Canning

Underground (Codes) by Yvette Janine Jackson at Wave Farm, Acra, NY (2022)

Installed deep in the pine forest at Wave Farm, Underground (Codes) is a site-specific sound work by composer and radio artist Yvette Janine Jackson. The installation featured two of her radio operas: Destination Freedom and Underground (Codes).

Both works were broadcast through directional steel cowls donated by artist Charles Lindsay and repurposed from his Code Humpback project—transforming the forest into a resonant chamber of auditory memory and resistance.

Sondra Perry’s couch and fern, GLITTER AND THE LION’S MANE (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 1934, 1.8 Ga) has been acquired by and is now on view.

The work has appeared in many contexts: as a live performance at Fondation Beyeler, suspended from the ceiling in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale, and in this gallery iteration at .nyc.

Perry’s practice collapses the boundaries between personal history, material presence, and digital abstraction and probes the slippages of identity in an increasingly technologized world.

The Venus Knot (2015) is a durational installation that invited visitors to move through projected videos, inner monologues and mirrored one-on-one conversations about personal truth.

The artist, David Thomson is a 2025 Alpert Award recipient. His work fearlessly investigates race, gender, and identity, and he is widely recognized for both his solo creations and collaborations with leading figures in contemporary performance.