2026 Scult Family Artist Award: Alanna Airitam

Alanna Airitam

The 2026 Scult Family Artist Award recipient, Alanna Airitam, is a photographic artist based in Tucson, Arizona, whose work explores Black lived experience as a site of memory, imagination and possibility. Working across photography, installation, archival research and material experimentation, she considers how histories are constructed, how ideas of beauty, value and belonging take form, and how the ways we live, create and care for one another might reveal about the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Drawing from traditions of Black studio photography and Western portraiture, Airitam engages the archive as both a site of historical reckoning and a repository of knowledge, beauty, love, creativity and self-determination. Moving between history, lived experience and speculative possibility, her work asks how people create meaningful lives within and beyond the structures that seek to define them, and what other ways of being might become imaginable when flourishing is understood as fundamental to being fully alive. A self-taught artist, Airitam has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Her work is held in numerous public and institutional collections, including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, New Orleans Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Tucson Museum of Art. Her commitment to creating spaces for artistic exchange and community extends beyond her studio practice as co-founder of the Southwest Black Artists Collective and co-founder and co-director of The Projects/SPACE, an artist-run space in Tucson, Arizona.

(Above): Alanna Airitam, Portrait. Courtesy of the artist.

(Header): Alanna Airitam, They Will Say You Were Lucky/We Unlearned Gravity, The Body Been Liftin’, 2026. Photography. Courtesy of and © Alanna Airitam

About the Scult Family Artist Award

Each year, Phoenix Art Museum recognizes a mid-career Arizona-based artist with the Scult Family Artist Award. Eligible candidates must have lived in Arizona for a minimum of four consecutive years and are nominated by a group of curators, museum directors and other arts professionals from across the state. Candidacy is evaluated based on their demonstration of artistic excellence, active creation and exhibition of new work and career-spanning evolution. Following a robust review process, a jury of curators, art scholars, artists and other experts and professionals in the field from across the country selects the recipient. The Scult Family Artist Award includes monetary support of $20,000 and an invitation to present a solo exhibition of new and past work at the Museum.

The 2026 Scult Artist Award jury included Catharina Manchanda, Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum; Patricia Sannit, 2016 Scult Family Artist Award recipient; Keshia Turley, Assistant Curator at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; Christian Ramírez, Cohn Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Engagement, Phoenix Art Museum; and Jeff Scult.