While the film industry is currently in the throes of awards season, it will soon be the art world’s turn as Art Basel prepares to launch an annual series of awards honouring artists, curators, museums, patrons and more this spring.
The Art Basel Awards will debut in May, with 36 medals awarded to artists across three categories: emerging, established and “icons”. Curators, museums and institutions, patrons, “allies” like fabricators or conservators, collaborators in adjacent disciplines like design or music, and members of the art media like critics and documentarians will also be honoured. The medalists will be honoured at Art Basel’s Swiss fair in June and featured in a new public leadership programme on 20 June building on the fair’s usual lineup of talks and panels.
“We wanted to do something that takes on and celebrates all the different members of the industry,” says Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s director of fairs and exhibition platforms. “We wanted to give recognition to people and institutions for what they do almost on a daily basis—so, for instance for museums, we’re not celebrating the best exhibitions, we’re celebrating their daily effort. We want to reward the people who are going to make a mark on the future of the industry, so it’s more about celebrating forward-thinking, rather than past achievements.”
The 36 medalists will be chosen by a jury from a pool of nominees put forward by a cohort of observers. The jury, chaired by De Bellis, features nine members: Sharjah Art Foundation president and director Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi; Kunstmuseum Basel director Elena Filipovic; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and 2026 Venice Biennale curator Koyo Kouoh; Dia Art Foundation director Jessica Morgan; Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist; Museu de Arte de São Paulo and 2024 Venice Biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa; Pérez Art Museum Miami director Franklin Sirmans and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art director and chief executive Philip Tinari.
“The first criterion for selecting the jury was to make sure that as much of the globe as possible would be covered, and also to have members who represent the cities where we operate, like Elena in Basel and Franklin in Miami,” De Bellis says. “We also wanted a jury that represents a wide range of interests. So, for example, Hans Ulrich is very interested in cross-disciplinary work and cross pollination; Adriano, meanwhile, is very interested in artists who are outsiders or maybe come from a wider spectrum of artists. They have overlapping interests of course, but each of them was selected very carefully for what they represent in the industry.”
In addition to the 36 medals to be announced in May, all the recipients will then be asked to select, through a peer review process, 12 members of their cohort to receive gold medals. That special tier of honourees will be revealed during an event at Art Basel’s Miami Beach fair in December. De Bellis adds: “We feel strongly that there’s no better compliment than to be highlighted, supported and judged positively by your peers.”
In addition to being fêted in Basel and Miami Beach, Art Basel Awards recipients will each receive a custom-designed medal. The awards will be presented in partnership with Boss, the flagship brand of the Hugo Boss Group, the German fashion and lifestyle company. That brand was involved in a previous high-profile contemporary art award, the Hugo Boss Prize, which was given to one contemporary artist every two years between 1996 (to Matthew Barney) and 2020 (to Deana Lawson). Recipients received $100,000 and a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.