2026 Sam Gilliam Award Winner Announced by Dia Art Foundation and Sam Gilliam Foundation

Award Confers $75,000 and Platform for Fall Public Program to Edgar Calel

New York, New York/Washington, D.C., May 19, 2026—Dia Art Foundation and the Sam Gilliam
Foundation announced today that Edgar Calel has been selected to receive the 2026 Sam Gilliam
Award, which includes a $75,000 gift and the presentation of a public program at a Dia location in
fall 2026. Established in 2023 by a generous gift from the Sam Gilliam Foundation and Annie
Gawlak, president of the foundation and Gilliam’s widow, for a period of 10 years the award is
granted annually to an artist working anywhere in the world who has made a significant contribution
in any medium and for whom the award would be transformative. Reflecting the critical support that
grants provided Gilliam in developing his practice, the Sam Gilliam Award furthers the foundation’s
commitment to advancing his legacy as a lifelong teacher and champion of artists as well as extends
Dia’s mission of supporting and providing platforms for artists.

Edgar Calel was chosen from a long list of artists nominated by a group of international curators and
museum directors. He was selected as the third Sam Gilliam Award recipient by a panel of jurors
comprising Jordan Carter and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curators, Dia Art Foundation; Elvira Dyangani
Ose, curator and artistic director, 2nd Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial; Annie Gawlak, president, Sam
Gilliam Foundation; Shanay Jhaveri, head of visual arts, Barbican; and Clara Kim, chief curator and
director of curatorial affairs, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Calel was awarded this grant due to his outstanding demonstration of a unique ability to work
effectively and sensitively, often creating enveloping environments that incorporate a range of media
while advocating for community and shared experiences. A visual artist and poet, Calel’s
multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance. Deeply rooted in
his Maya Kaqchikel heritage, Calel engages ancestral knowledge systems, ritual practices, and the
cultural traditions of Guatemala’s midwestern highlands, where he lives and works. Drawing on
materials, language, and sites connected to his hometown, his work foregrounds Indigenous
experiences and addresses histories of colonialism, systemic exclusion, and cultural erasure. Calel’s
practice is also grounded in the Maya Kaqchikel understanding of personhood as fundamentally
relational, extending to both human and nonhuman entities. Building on this framework, Calel
embraces a philosophy that the land itself is alive and inextricable from all beings’ agency.

“I thank my ancestors for giving me life and allowing me to use their wisdom to create art. I am very
happy to receive this recognition, and it will help me continue exploring the world and its mysteries.
Janila Matyox k’aslem—thank you so much, life, for everything,” said Edgar Calel, artist.

“We are delighted to recognize Edgar’s deeply inventive practice through the Sam Gilliam Award.
His work’s exploration of the environment and Indigenous histories through experimentation in
material and space resonates with Sam’s approach to art making as a means to confront urgent
social and political issues. Edgar’s selection as this year’s awardee extends Sam’s legacy and
demonstrates the Sam Gilliam Foundation’s continued commitment to supporting and fostering the
next generations of artists,” said Annie Gawlak, president of the Sam Gilliam Foundation.

“Edgar Calel has a remarkable ability to create works that operate at once intimately and
expansively, bringing together material, ritual, and community to form deeply resonant environments.
His forthcoming public program at Dia will offer an exciting opportunity to encounter these ideas in
dialogue with the institution’s program, and we are proud to support his practice through the Sam
Gilliam Award. As the award’s third international recipient, Calel advances its organically growing
history of meaningfully supporting artists working outside Western centers of contemporary art,”
said Jessica Morgan, Nathalie de Gunzburg Director of Dia Art Foundation.

In 2023, the Sam Gilliam Foundation selected Dia as its partner in developing the award based on
the institution’s long-standing history of providing artists vital support for the realization of ambitious
projects and building widespread public appreciation of their work. In 2019–22, Dia presented a
major installation of Gilliam’s work from the 1960s and ‘70s that situated the artist’s practice in
dialogue with that of his Minimal and Postminimal peers at Dia Beacon, highlighting his career
defining innovations. The long-term display featured two drape paintings, both titled Carousel
II (both 1968), installed together by Gilliam to form Double Merge (1968). In 2021, Dia made the
historic acquisition of the paintings, thereby enshrining Gilliam’s work and legacy within the
institution’s collection.

About Edgar Calel
Edgar Calel was born in Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa), Guatemala, in 1987. Hailing from a family of
Maya Kaqchikel artists and artisans, Calel’s practice often engages with sites and traditions around
his hometown as creative touchstones for works that meticulously interconnect localities, at home
and internationally. A leading voice of institutional critique among Latin American artists, his work
frequently addresses power dynamics and historical shifts while raising the profile of Indigenous
peoples through an anti-colonial transmission of living beliefs and customs. Recent solo exhibitions
have taken place at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2022); Desanexo do Desapê, São
Paulo (2023); Sculpture Center, New York (2023); and Mendes Wood DM, Germantown, New
York (2024). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Soft Power, Berlin (2023); Galeria de
artistas, São Paulo (2023); Armada Galería, Mexico City (2024); and Tate Modern, London (2025).
His work has been included in the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Liverpool Biennial of
Contemporary Art; and Bienal de São Paulo (all 2023) as well as in the Carnegie International,
Pittsburg (2022). Calel lives in Chi Xot.

About Dia Art Foundation
Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the
mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt
interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s
programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work,
and its collection is distinguished by the deep and long-standing relationships that the nonprofit has
cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ‘70s.
In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a
constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on
Land art, nationally and internationally. These include:

• Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max
Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks,
inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all in New York
• De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
• Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
• Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
• De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany
• Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)

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.