Jury Named for ARTnews Awards Honouring US Exhibitions
Five US-based curators and two editors from ARTnews, a New York art magazine, have chosen the nominees and winners for the 2026 ARTnews Awards. ARTnews published the jury line-up on 14 November 2026.
The awards are now in their third year. They are an editorial project that honours work at arts institutions in the United States. A curator is a staff member who plans and organises the exhibitions a museum or foundation shows to the public.
Four of the curators were named in the announcement. Giampaolo Bianconi is the Dittmer Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jordan Carter is a curator at Dia Art Foundation, which he joined in 2021. Lauren Cornell is artistic director of the Hessel Museum at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies, known as CCS Bard. Miranda Lash is the Ellen Bruss Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.
Only exhibitions that opened between August 2025 and July 2026 were eligible. Touring shows could enter at one point only: their first stop in the United States. Anything that later travelled to other American venues did not count again.
The selection worked in stages. Each juror nominated between one and three exhibitions in each category. The jury then met twice to pick the nominees and a winner in each of the six categories.
The announcement did not name the categories or the winners, so those results are still to come from ARTnews. Until then, the list of exhibitions in contention remains with the jury and the magazine's editors.
For readers, the process is easy to follow. Each juror first put forward a short list of shows. The group then narrowed those lists in two rounds of discussion before settling on a winner in each category.
For the institutions involved, the eligibility window is the detail to watch. A show had to open within those twelve months to be considered, and a touring exhibition was judged only by its first American showing.
