Thirty-Six Visionaries Recognized in Landmark Global Honors Celebrating the Contemporary Art World
In an ambitious new chapter for global art recognition, Art Basel has unveiled the inaugural cohort of Medalists for its 2025 Art Basel Awards—an expansive, transdisciplinary tribute to those advancing the frontlines of contemporary culture. This is not simply another awards program. With 36 honorees spanning artists, curators, designers, patrons, and behind-the-scenes facilitators, Art Basel positions these Medals as structural affirmations of an increasingly interconnected cultural ecosystem—one where creative innovation extends far beyond the studio walls.
Structured across nine categories—Icon, Established, and Emerging Artists, as well as Cross-Disciplinary Creators, Patrons, Institutions, Curators, Allies, and Storytellers—the Awards acknowledge the full circuitry of cultural production. Each Medalist was selected by an International Jury from a sweeping nomination pool that merges established titans with catalytic new voices.
Among the honorees:
Lubaina Himid, the pioneering British Black Arts figurehead poised to represent the UK at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Adrian Piper, whose Conceptual investigations into race and identity have long served as intellectual cornerstones of contemporary discourse.
Meriem Bennani, fusing postcolonial critique with digital absurdity in a practice that feels both futuristic and deeply human.
Pan Daijing, whose soundscapes unfold as somatic, architectural spaces in themselves.
Grace Wales Bonner, rethreading diasporic memory into the language of high fashion.
Candice Hopkins, advancing Indigenous knowledge systems as critical art-historical frameworks.
Formafantasma, the design duo excavating material culture through ecological and philosophical interventions.
And RAW Material Company, Dakar’s forward-thinking art incubator, whose founding director Koyo Kouoh—an Awards juror and deeply respected institutional leader—is posthumously honored in this inaugural edition.
What distinguishes the Art Basel Awards from other circuits of recognition is their emphasis on community and interdependence. As Vincenzo de Bellis, Chair of the Art Basel Awards and Art Basel’s Director of Fairs & Exhibition Platforms, describes it: “These are not prizes for competition, but Medals of light—illuminating radical commitments to building networks of practice and exchange.”
The Medalists will be celebrated this June at Art Basel’s flagship fair in Switzerland, with additional recognition during the first Art Basel Awards Summit—a new conference platform addressing the business of art and its allied industries.
A culminating moment arrives in December, during Art Basel Miami Beach, when the Medalists will themselves nominate and elect 12 Gold Medalists, marking a rare inversion of the traditional top-down awards model. In this peer-led gesture, Art Basel makes a statement: that the most meaningful endorsements in the art world come not from institutions, but from one’s own community.
The Gold Medals carry material impact—honorariums totaling nearly $300,000, strategic partnerships, and international commissions aimed at scaling the artist’s work into new contexts. Recipients in the Emerging and Established Artist categories will each receive $50,000 in unrestricted support, while Icon Artists will have an equivalent donation made to an organization of their choice.
This debut edition unfolds with poignancy following the recent passing of Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025), whose curatorial voice helped shape the jury’s selections. The Awards are dedicated to her legacy—a reminder that while institutions and markets shift, it is often individuals, working with visionary conviction, who change the course of culture.
As the art world continues to globalize, hybridize, and regenerate, the Art Basel Awards emerge not as accolades for prestige, but as instruments for continuity—linking visionaries past, present, and future across a common arc of transformation.
