2025 Arizona Artist Awards winners
Phoenix Art Museum
Upcoming Exhibition(s)
STYX, in progress
Sgraffito drawing on 18 wood panels prepared
with kaolin clay, acrylic medium binder, India ink
six acrylic on wood panels
Courtesy of the artist
Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) has announced the recipients of the 2025 Arizona Artist Awards. Alice Leora Briggs was named the recipient of the 2025 Scult Family Artist Award and Chris Ignacio and Jan Talmadge Davids were named the recipients of the 2025 Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards (Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards). New this year is the Sette/Cohn Artist Award, established in 2024 to expand the Arizona Artist Awards program and deepen PhxArt’s support of local artists. Shaunté Glover was named the inaugural recipient. As part of the awards, each artist receives a lifetime Membership to Phoenix Art Museum as well as funds to support their artistic practice. Briggs, Ignacio, and Talmadge Davids will also have the opportunity to exhibit their work in solo and group exhibitions at the Museum premiering in summer 2026.
“We are thrilled to announce this year’s Scult, Lehmann, and Sette/Cohn Artist Awards recipients, in recognition of their artistic contributions to our state’s robust arts and culture landscape,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Museum’s Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. “Each of these artists has built a dynamic, thoughtful practice that speaks to their own lived experiences, communities, and perspectives on identity, connection, and the larger human condition. We are honored to support their work as part of our ongoing commitment to amplifying the voices of Arizona-based artists through our annual Artist Awards program, and we are grateful to the Scult family, the Lehmann family, the Cohn family, Lisa Sette, and Artlink for their generosity and partnership in strengthening those efforts.”“I offer my heartfelt congratulations to Alice, Chris, Jan, and Shaunté as our newest cohort of Arizona Artist Awards recipients,” said Christian Ramírez, Cohn Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Engagement at Phoenix Art Museum. “These artists have all built multifaceted practices, and their work stands as a testament to the strength of the artistic community here in Arizona. I look forward to working with Alice, Chris, and Jan as we begin planning for their forthcoming exhibitions, which will be designed to engage our community with their evocative works and wide-ranging perspectives, and I look forward to seeing how Shaunté utilizes this award opportunity to support her artistic growth.”
Alice Leora Briggs: Scult Family Artist Award
Each year, Phoenix Art Museum recognizes a mid-career Arizona-based artist with the Scult Family Artist Award. Eligible candidates must have resided in Arizona for a minimum of four consecutive years and are nominated by a group of curators, museum directors, and other arts professionals from across the state. Their candidacy is evaluated based on their demonstration of artistic excellence, active creation and exhibition of new work, and career-spanning evolution. Following a robust review process, a jury of curators, art scholars, artists, and other experts and professionals in the field from across the country selects the recipient. The Scult Family Artist Award includes monetary support of $20,000 and an invitation to present a solo exhibition of new and past work at the Museum. The 2025 Scult Artist Award jury included Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, San Antonio Museum of Art; Olivia Miller, Executive Director, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon; Ann Morton, 2019 Scult Family Artist Award recipient; Christian Ramírez, Cohn Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Engagement, Phoenix Art Museum; and Jeff Scult.
Photo by the artist
The 2025 Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award recipient is Alice Leora Briggs. Born in an oil boomtown in West Texas, Briggs grew up in Idaho’s Snake River Valley and is now based in Tucson, Arizona. Through her practice, she investigates human frailties through drawings, woodcuts, letterpress broadsides, site-specific installations, and books. Her work has been featured in more than 50 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 35 public collections, including those of Phoenix Art Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Library of Congress; Oxford’s Bodleian Library; and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her publications include Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez (2010); an illuminated manuscript-police blotter created with writer Charles Bowden; Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon (2022) produced with photojournalist Julián Cardona; and The Room, a portfolio of woodcuts created with U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand. Briggs was a Fulbright Scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa and is represented by Evoke Contemporary in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Etherton Gallery in Tucson, Arizona.
Chris Ignacio and Jan Talmadge Davids: Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards
The Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards foster the creative practices and careers of emerging Arizona-based artists. Candidates must have resided in Arizona for a minimum of one year and are invited to apply through an annual open call hosted by Artlink, a non-profit organization that has supported and amplified Arizona artists and community-based art events and initiatives for more than 30 years. Recipients receive $10,000 in monetary support and the opportunity to present a joint exhibition at the Museum with fellow Lehmann awardees. The 2025 Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards jury was also assembled by Ramírez and included Ramírez; Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, San Antonio Museum of Art; Olivia Miller, Executive Director, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon; Ann Morton, 2019 Scult Family Artist Award recipient; and Sally Lehmann.
Photo by Sequoyah Wildwyn Dechter
The Museum has named Chris Ignacio and Jan Talmadge Davids as the recipients of the 2025 Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards. Based in Phoenix, Chris Ignacio is a Filipino-American puppeteer, producer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersection of voice, technology, and identity. He began his puppetry career in New York in 2012, training with experimental artists at La MaMa and working across theater, community arts, and livestream media. In 2023, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera as a puppeteer in Florencia en el Amazonas, directed by Mary Zimmerman. He has also premiered original puppetry works at New York theaters including La MaMa, The Tank, and The Brick, and has toured both nationally and abroad. In Phoenix, Ignacio has served as a media designer for major institutions such as Ballet Arizona, Arizona Broadway Theater, Arizona Opera, and Childsplay. His original projects, including those featured in exhibitions at Vision Gallery and Mesa Arts Center, center community collaboration, particularly with young people or people with limited arts exposure. He holds an MFA in Theatre/Interdisciplinary Digital Media from Arizona State University (ASU), where he now teaches motion capture and 3D animation. Ignacio also serves as creative producer for the T. Denny Sanford Harmony Institute at ASU.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Jan Talmadge Davids works in clay and mixed media to explore landscapes of her childhood and their local ecologies and to articulate ideas of place-making. Through installation and material sensitivities, she invites the viewer to engage in the ideas of fragility and vulnerability. Talmadge Davids was born in Tucson, Arizona, spending her youth in the southeastern part of the state. She attended the University of Arizona, California State University at Long Beach, and then came from Los Angeles to pursue her MFA at the Herberger School of Art and Design, where she found the opportunity to reconcile her past with her present, which is embedded in the desert landscape. Her work has been shown at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; The Carolyn Campanga Klefeeld Contemporary Art Museum in Long Beach, CA; Tempe Center for the Arts; eye lounge; The Tucson Museum of Art; and Art d’Core Gala.
Shaunté Glover: Sette/Cohn Artist Award
Established in 2024, the Sette/Cohn Artist Award was created to expand PhxArt’s Arizona Artist Awards program. The new $5,000 prize is awarded to an emerging Arizona artist selected from the Lehmann Emerging Artist Award application pool as part of a five-year initiative dedicated to supporting arts engagement and strengthening community partnerships. It is named in honor of Lisa Sette, who has supported and represented Arizona-based artists, both through her gallery and personally, for more than 40 years, and Lee and Mike Cohn, longtime Museum supporters who in 2023 provided the seed funding to launch the Phoenix Art Museum Education and Engagement Excellence Fund and have extended their generosity to support Arizona-based artists. The award’s recipient is selected by Christian Ramírez, Cohn Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Engagement, Phoenix Art Museum; Olga Viso, Selig Family Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Phoenix Art Museum; Lee and Mike Cohn; and Lisa Sette.
Photo courtesy of the artist
The inaugural 2025 Sette/Cohn Artist Award recipient is Shaunté Glover. Glover is a multidisciplinary artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. Her creative journey spans photography, film, printmaking, and sculpture, exploring identity and representation to use art as a catalyst to increase visibility, strengthen community engagement, and amplify the voices of marginalized communities, particularly those of Black women. Rooted in her upbringing in South Phoenix, Glover’s work draws from memories of childhood, basketball, family, and everyday neighborhood life. She combines these influences into layered visual narratives that reflect lived experience and cultural nuance.
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