Ibrahim Mahama Wins Inaugural Sam Gilliam Award

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has been named the winner of the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award. The prize wasestablishedlast year by the Dia Art Foundation and the Sam Gilliam Foundation in honor of the late artist. Mahama will receive $75,000 and will be featured in a public program at one of Dia’s locations this fall. Presented to an artist “residing anywhere in the world, who has made a significant contribution to any medium of art and for whom receiving the award would be transformative,” the prize will be awarded annually through 2033.

Gilliam was known for liberating the canvas from the frame and instead draping it across various supports, including walls, or heaping it on the floor. Hediedat the age of eighty-eight in 2022. “I was first introduced to Gilliam’s important work as a student by my mentor Kąrî’kạchä Seid’ou, and it has been greatly influential to me ever since,” Mahama said in a statement. “The most important aspect of any community is to share their many gifts, even if they are born out of precarity, for within that point do we expand freedom for all life forms.”

Mahama, who works across the fields of installation, sculpture, and textiles, is best known for repurposing jute sacks, which he sews together, covering architectural structures with them. Frequently collaborative, his work investigates themes of migration, postcolonialism, and globalization. He was selected as the winner of the Gilliam Award by a five-person jury comprising Annie Gawlak, Gilliam’s widow and president of his foundation; Courtney J. Martin, director of the Yale Center for British Art (soon to become the executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation); Emiliano Valdés, chief curator of the Medellín Museum of Modern Art; Zoé Whitley, director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery; and Jordan Carter, a curator at Dia. The jury praised Mahama for “his continuous growth as an artist, in terms of the complexity, scale, and responsiveness to site in his multifaceted material practice, as well as the meaningful impact of his ambitious work as a community-oriented practitioner.” 

“Mahama champions collaboration in his work and, just like he gives renewed purpose to the materials he collects and recycles into artworks, he revitalizes his communities, turning castoff structures into institutions for convening, learning, artmaking and collective growth,” said Dia director Jessica Morgan in a statement. “This award honors both sides of his sophisticated practice.”