Speed Art Museum Names Deana Lawson and Brandon Ndife as Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program 2026 Residents

SGVAP extends Gilliam’s legacy of innovation, experimentation, and engagement with place by fostering artistic exchange and engagement with Louisville’s diverse communities and layered histories 

Louisville, KY (March 30, 2026) —The Speed Art Museum announced today the selection of acclaimed photographer Deana Lawson (b. 1979) and Louisville-raised sculptor Brandon Ndife (b. 1991) as the second artist cohort for the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program (SGVAP). Established in 2024 in collaboration with the Sam Gilliam Foundation, SGVAP honors the profound impact that Gilliam’s formative years in Louisville had on his groundbreaking career by bringing two leading artists to the city each year to create new work shaped by its communities, histories, and evolving cultural landscape. Lawson and Ndife will conduct research, engage local community members, and develop new work, which will be presented through a series of exhibitions and public programs at the Speed.

“Deana Lawson and Brandon Ndife’s engagement with place, lived experience, and community through their work makes them an ideal selection for this year’s Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program residency at the Speed Museum,” said Annie Gawlak, Founder and President of the Sam Gilliam Foundation. “Their practices align with the program’s goal to foster artistic exchange with the history, culture, and people of Louisville—a place that was deeply impactful in shaping Sam’s career and the experimentation and innovation that defined it. We are excited to bear witness to their development of new work through this residency and to see how it advances both their own creative practices as well as Louisville’s arts ecosystem.”

Led by Sam Gilliam Assistant Curator of Artist Programs Diallo Simon-Ponte and supervised by Tyler Blackwell, curator of contemporary art at the Speed, the program enables visiting artists to engage Louisville and the broader Southern cultural landscape as catalysts for intellectual and spiritual exploration. By seeding dynamic dialogues between these artists and local communities, the residency advances each artist’s practice while contributing to the vitality of the city’s creative ecosystem. Central to the program is an expanded understanding of artistic practice to encompass painters, sculptors, and photographers as well as writers, archivists, librarians, community activists, and farmers, all of whose work shape the social life of the region. Through its interdisciplinary framework, SGVAP positions artistic production as a site of collective knowledge-building and civic engagement.

“Brandon Ndife and Deana Lawson represent two of the most unique and compelling voices in contemporary art today,” said Blackwell. “Each artist brings a distinct yet resonant approach to questions of place, embodiment, and the construction of lived experience. Through their time in Louisville, we look forward to the ways their practices will engage the city as both site and subject—continuing to expand the program’s vision of sustained, reciprocal exchange.”

“My practice has been shaped through a porous relationship to place—moving between geographies, communities, and modes of seeing,” said Lawson. “Each location brings its own visual language, its own psychic and social conditions, which then become embedded within the work. I am interested in how Louisville’s histories and lived realities might enter that continuum, expanding the ways I think about image-making, intimacy, and the construction of presence.”

“I grew up in Louisville craving contemporary art outlets, and I worked at the Speed in high school, so it is exciting to come back and engage a younger, wider, and more diverse audience with my work, which centers around physical displacements and the future of lived environments,” said Ndife. “Louisville is a city of many parts, and its landscape varies in access, promise, and development. I am very excited and honored to integrate my lived experience and engage the community with my work through the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program.”

By inviting artists to work in dialogue with Louisville’s layered histories and contemporary realities, the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program models an approach to artistic exchange that is both locally rooted and nationally resonant, continuing Sam Gilliam’s legacy of innovation, experimentation, and engagement with place. Following its inaugural year with vanessa german and Eric N. Mack, the program enters its second year with a focus on artists whose practices move between local specificity and global discourse.

“Year two of the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program will build on the dialogue developed and deepen the exchange between the program and Louisville residents,” said Simon-Ponte, the Sam Gilliam assistant curator of artist programs. “Brandon and Deana each bring practices that are profoundly attentive to the social and political context in which we live and offer rigorous reflections on how these conditions shape the way we exist. We are excited to welcome them into sustained conversation with Louisville, and to support the ways their work will embed itself in the city’s histories, communities, and futures.”

About the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artists Program 2026 Artists 
Deana Lawson 
Deana Lawson (born 1979) is an acclaimed photographer whose work bridges documentary traditions and imagined realities through careful staging of environments, poses, and objects. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 and, in 2020, became the first photo-based artist to receive the Hugo Boss Prize. Her 2021 exhibition Centropy at the Guggenheim Museum marked the final iteration of the prize. Lawson’s work is held in major collections including the Tate Modern, Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, the Whitney, and MoMA. She teaches at Princeton University as the Dorothy Krauklis ’78 Professor of Visual Arts and lives and works between Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

Brandon Ndife 
Brandon Ndife (born 1991) creates sculptures that merge domestic forms with elements of the natural world through meticulous hand-building, casting, and painting. His work considers how everyday objects index life under capitalism while imagining alternative futures in which human-made and natural worlds converge. Ndife has presented solo exhibitions at Greene Naftali, New York (2024); Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); and Storm King Art Center, New Windsor (2022), and has been included in major group exhibitions such as the New Museum Triennial (2021). His work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. He lives and works in New York.

About the Speed Art Museum 
The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, is the state’s oldest and largest art museum, serving as a vibrant cultural hub for the community and region for nearly 100 years. Through its expansive, encyclopedic collection, bold exhibitions, and community-focused programs, the Speed transforms how visitors perceive the world and themselves, sparking curiosity, connection, and well-being. Located on the University of Louisville campus but operating as an independent nonprofit institution, the Speed provides opportunities to engage with art through public and academic programs, screenings at the Speed Cinema, family offerings in the Art Sparks interactive learning gallery, and more. Fulfilling its mission of inviting everyone to celebrate art forever, the Speed is committed to creating a welcoming and accessible space for the community. For more information, visit speedmuseum.org.

About the Sam Gilliam Foundation 
Established in 2023, the Sam Gilliam Foundation advances the vision and values of abstract artist Sam Gilliam by organizing and supporting significant exhibitions of the artist’s work, fostering new research and publications, and collaborating with arts organizations and institutions on initiatives that extend Gilliam’s generosity and enthusiasm for supporting emerging and longtime artists, art students, scholars, curators, and the cultural ecosystem at large. Helmed by Annie Gawlak, the Foundation serves as a primary resource on the artist and a steward of his collection and archive, with important holdings of Gilliam’s work in a variety of mediums and original papers and materials pertaining to his life and work. Since its activation, the Foundation has expanded its mission to champion the work of rising artists by establishing the Sam Gilliam Award in partnership with Dia Art Foundation, and to continue Gilliam’s legacy by launching the Gilliam Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with the Speed Art Museum and the Sam Gilliam Lecture series in collaboration with John Hopkins University.