ARTnews Awards 2026 Established Artist of the Year: Vaginal Davis

Recognizing an artist with more than a decade’s worth of exhibition history whose latest exhibition comes at a pivotal moment in their career.

Vaginal Davis
for “Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product” at MoMA PS1, New York (October 9, 2025–March 2, 2026, US debut, following versions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and Gropius Bau, Berlin)

Often described as an icon of Los Angeles’s queer and punk scenes, Vaginal Davis has made art that often wasn’t meant for display in museums or galleries. At the core of her practice, spanning performances, zines, videos, installations, and more, is her artistic persona, which imbues her art with ribald, tongue-in-cheek humor, even as she discusses serious topics like race and identity, gender and queerness. Often, her art is designed to shock viewers and make them squirm. In doing so, Davis asks why her pieces would make anyone uncomfortable. “I have never cared for entertaining anyone. My performances may have elements that some may find entertaining, but that’s not my main purpose,” she once told Interview magazine.

In its US debut at MoMA PS1, “Magnificent Product” presented Davis’s uncanny world, from her days as the front woman for her band ¡Cholita! The Female Menudo during the late ’80s and early ’90s to her time making zines meant for queer people of color, who rarely featured in mainstream magazines. Each of the exhibition’s galleries was highly stylized. Her ephemera archive was installed on walls painted mint green and was obscured by a transparent scrim that was meant to be pushed away by viewers seeking a closer look. For an installation titled The Wicked Pavilion: Tween Bedroom (2021), a bright pink tween bedroom contained a massive plaster phallus on a rotating bed. Screened in a space meant to resemble the now-defunct Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard, her visual album, The White to Be Angry (1999), looks at the insidious nature of white supremacy in the US. As she once put it, it is a “nutters pastiche stabbing toxic masculinity, race, and gender, in the style of an MTV music video, while thrashing thorny filmmakers Clive Barker, Woody Allen, and Bruce LaBruce. Not for the faint of fart.”

Nominees:

Raven Chacon
for “Raven Chacon: Tiguex,” made in collaboration with the Tamarind Institute, the City of Albuquerque’s Department of Arts and Culture, and the University of New Mexico Department of Music (September 27, 2025)

Mike Cloud
for “Mike Cloud: Worldless Obstruction” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (May 2, 2026–February 7, 2027)

Jacqueline Humphries
for “Jacqueline Humphries” at the Aspen Art Museum (December 12, 2025–April 5, 2026)

Saodat Ismailova
for “Saodat Ismailova: Amanat” at Swiss Institute, New York (January 21, 2026–April 12, 2026)

Read more about the 2026 ARTnews Awards.