'Otobong Nkanga Wins the Nasher Prize for Sculpture' – The New York Times

5 October 2023

The Nigerian-Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga makes unorthodox work addressing the global extraction of natural resources. She has sung to copper mines in Namibia and balanced potted plants on people’s heads in Switzerland. But now, her expansive view of sculpture is being recognized by one of the art world’s top honors: the Nasher Prize.

The prize is more than a $100,000 award. A winner becomes a laureate at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, where curators help devise public programming, an exhibition and a published monograph.

“I wasn’t expecting this, but I am extremely honored,” said Nkanga, 49, who now resides in Antwerp, Belgium. The museum exhibition will be an opportunity for the artist to reintroduce herself to American audiences. Her last solo exhibition in the United States was in 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where she presented soap sculptures, large paintings and woven tapestries. Included in the 2022 Venice Biennale and Documenta 14, she is a fixture of the European museum circuit, where she has received six major exhibitions over the last two years, including at the contemporary art museum in Turin, Italy, called the Castello di Rivoli.

Read in full via The New York Times.