Sep, 15, 2026
Media AlertsModern and Contemporary Art
Phoenix Art Museum Announces 2026 Arizona Artist Awards Winners
Alanna Airitam, Memo Guitterez, Nika Kaiser and Liza Stout to receive funding and exhibition opportunities as the next cohort of Scult Family, Lehmann Emerging and Sette/Cohn Artist Award recipients
PHOENIX (September 15, 2026) – Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) announces the recipients of the 2026 Arizona Artist Awards. Alanna Airitam was named recipient of the 2026 Scult Family Artist Award and Memo Gutierrez and Nika Kaiser were named recipients of the 2026 Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards (Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards.) Liza Stout is the winner of the Sette/Cohn Artist Award, established in 2024 to expand the Arizona Artist Awards program and deepen PhxArt’s support of local artists. As part of the awards, each artist receives a lifetime Membership to Phoenix Art Museum as well as funds to support their artistic practice. Airitam, Gutierrez, and Kaiser will also have the opportunity to exhibit their work in solo and group exhibitions at the Museum. Airitam will premiere work in January 2027, with Guitierrez and Kaiser exhibiting jointly in summer 2027.
“We are thrilled to announce this year’s recipients of the Scult, Lehmann, and Sette/Cohn Artist Awards in recognition of their meaningful contributions to Arizona’s vibrant arts and culture landscape,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Museum’s Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. “Each of these artists has developed a dynamic and thoughtful practice shaped by their lived experiences, communities and unique perspectives on identity, connection and the broader human condition. We are honored to support their work as part of our ongoing commitment to elevating the voices of Arizona-based artists and are deeply grateful to the Scult, Lehmann and Cohn families, Lisa Sette, and Artlink for their generosity and partnership in making these efforts possible.”
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.
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.
Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards
The Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards help foster the creative practices and careers of emerging Arizona-based artists. Candidates must have lived in Arizona for a minimum of one year and are invited to apply through an annual open call hosted by Artlink, a non-profit organization that has supported and amplified Arizona artists and community-based art events and initiatives for more than 30 years. Recipients receive $10,000 in monetary support and the opportunity to present a joint exhibition at the Museum with fellow Lehmann awardees. The 2026 Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards jury was assembled by Ramírez and included Ramírez; 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; and Sally Lehmann.
The Museum has named Memo Gutierrez and Nika Kaiser recipients of the 2026 Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards. Based in Phoenix, Gutierrez is a multimedia artist who works with sound, electronics, and sculpture. His practice examines the possibilities within discovering the intrinsic agency of found and raw materials through sonic and sculptural expression. Gutierrez was born in El Paso, Texas, where he lived until moving to Tempe to pursue his MFA at Arizona State University. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally. He has received various awards including the International Sculpture Center’s “Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture.” His work has been shown at Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Axis Gallery, Belger Crane Yard Studios, Mesa Arts Center, Eric Fischl Gallery, Modified Arts Gallery, and the Tucson Museum of Art. His work is a part of the permanent collections of both the El Paso Museum of Art and the Rubin Center for Visual Arts.
Kaiser is a multi-disciplinary artist working with video, sound, photography, and installation. Her practice deploys a meeting of the imaginary and the real to explore ideas of deep time, interspecies connection, anti-capitalism, and future ecologies, and is informed by her upbringing in the Sonoran borderlands. Kaiser holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Oregon. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including two Arts Foundation New Works Grants, two Night Bloom Grants, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. Among many of her collaborative projects, she performs as one half of the experimental sound and video project Alluvium and she co-runs Precious Cargo, an experimental gallery space and book shop that focuses on DIY publishing projects. Kaiser teaches Experimental Practices in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Arizona.
Sette/Cohn Artist Award
Established in 2024, the Sette/Cohn Artist Award is a $5,000 prize awarded to an emerging Arizona artist selected from the Lehmann Emerging Artist Award application pool as part of a five-year initiative dedicated to supporting arts engagement and strengthening community partnerships. It is named in honor of Lisa Sette, who has supported and represented Arizona-based artists, both through her gallery and personally, for more than 40 years, and Lee and Mike Cohn, longtime Museum supporters who in 2023 provided the seed funding to launch the Phoenix Art Museum Education and Engagement Excellence Fund and have extended their generosity to support Arizona-based artists. The award’s recipient is selected by Olga Viso, Selig Family Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Phoenix Art Museum; Lee and Mike Cohn; and Lisa Sette.
The 2026 Sette/Cohn Artist Award recipient is Liza Stout. Stout’s artwork explores the connection between the body and caregiving tools, highlighting the unseen repetition of labor. Raised in a Colorado resort town sustained by hospitality and service, she grew up working in restaurants, where tending to the experiences of guests trained her in particular detailed attention: the folding of a napkin or the mopping of a floor. These were precise tasks that asked of the body the same focused repetition that making a sculpture does, sanding back and forth on wood or compressing clay between her fingers.
Stout builds tools and objects that reference the gestures that support, contain or tend to other bodies. Wood is central to her practice because of its tactile presence in daily life. As a natural material it absorbs repeated motion, wears unevenly and carries the evidence of hands over time. The making of each tool is itself a kind of labor, and that process feeds directly into performance, where the objects are activated and brought into dialogue with generational histories of caregiving. This creates a loop with no clear ending, one that mirrors how caregiving and service work actually operate: ongoing and always beginning again.
Stout earned her MFA from Arizona State University and her BFA from Pratt Institute. She was a 2026 Windgate Fellow at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. Her work has been shown at Tempe Center for the Arts, Terra Forma and the Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art.
“I offer my heartfelt congratulations to Alanna, Memo, Nika, and Liza on being named this year’s Arizona Artist Awards recipients,” said Christian Ramírez, Cohn Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Engagement at Phoenix Art Museum. “Each of these artists has developed a distinctive and multifaceted practice, and their work is a powerful reflection of the talent, creativity and strength of Arizona’s arts community. I look forward to working with Alanna, Memo, and Nika as we begin planning their exhibitions and finding meaningful ways to engage our community with their evocative work and unique perspectives. I am equally excited to see how Liza takes advantage of this award opportunity to continue growing and evolving as an artist.”
The Arizona Artist Awards are made possible by the Scult Family; Sally and Richard Lehmann; and the Cohn Fund for Arts and Culture, a founding gift of the Phoenix Art Museum Education and Engagement Excellence Fund.
For high-resolution photography or more information, contact the Museum’s Communications Office at samantha.andreacchi@phxart.org or press@phxart.org.
About Phoenix Art Museum
Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) has engaged millions of visitors with the art of our region and world. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, PhxArt creates spaces of exchange and belonging for all audiences through dynamic exhibitions, collections, and experiences with art. Each year, 300,000 guests on average engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 21,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern, and contemporary art and fashion design, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. PhxArt also presents live performances, outstanding examples of global cinema, arts-education programs and workshops, an art+music festival, and more for the community. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.
About Artlink Inc.
Artlink keeps the arts integral to our development by connecting artists, businesses, and the community. Founded as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization by artists in 1989, the Artlink name is a guiding principle for the organization, as it supports stakeholders of the arts and culture community, amplifying its collective strength. Visit artlinkphx.org to sign up for the Artlink newsletter, or connect socially on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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