The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston announced a new annual award to recognize women artists. World-renowned multimedia artist and Boston native Sarah Sze will receive the inaugural award and the associated $100,000 prize.
“In Greek, the word meraki means to pour your soul into something,” said ICA Director Jill Medvedow, who announced plans to step down last year. “We are thrilled to recognize Sarah as the inaugural recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and to celebrate her important contributions to art and culture.” The award is made possible through a gift from ICA board member Fotene Demoulas and is set to last 10 years.
“It’s a huge honor to be the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and I’m inspired by the dedication to love, care, and art that the award stands for,” Sze said in a statement.
Sze, who is based in New York, has reached global audiences with her paintings and sculptures, often blending mediums in curious and complex ways. Sze represented the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale with an installation of meticulously assembled everyday objects, a work she created to reflect the overload of information in the modern world and the need for humans to place themselves within it.
A 2023 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum titled “Timelapse” showcased Sze’s architectural skill as she placed her installations in such a way that both highlighted the historic, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building and prompted visitors to question the relationship between art and the viewer.
Perhaps the most widely seen piece of Sze’s work is “Shorter than the Day,” a 5-ton, 50-foot-tall and 26-foot-wide suspended structure composed of steel and photos of the New York City sky at different parts of the day. Since 2020, the massive sculpture has been on display in LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B, where about 40,000 travelers pass each day.
More locally, people may recognize her work “Blue Poles, 2004” the blue colored model of a fire-escape that winds up, down, inside and outside the walls at the entrance of the Sidney-Pacific Graduate Residence at MIT.
ICA chief curator and director of curatorial affairs Ruth Erickson puts Sze’s Boston origins in context of her far-reaching career. “She first makes oil paintings while she’s in grade school here in Boston,” Erickson said. Sze grew up the daughter of an architect and a school teacher. She attended Milton Academy and went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in architecture and painting from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997.
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“Sarah is an artist who was trained and comes of age in the ‘90s,” Erickson continued. “And the ‘90s art historically is a time where we see artists that are really working within this mode of installation.”
A January 2026 exhibition at the ICA will feature Sze’s 2019 work, “Surround Sound,” a triptych painting made of oil, acrylic, acrylic polymers, ink, aluminum, archival paper, dibond and wood. It serves as an example of Sze’s blurring of lines between art and the world around it. “ When Sarah Sze first made this painting and presented it, it was as part of a kind of installation that replicated her studio,” said Erickson. “So there was a ladder, there were rags, the ground was covered with paper – really thinking again about this kind of expanded context of a single painting.” The piece will be displayed at the ICA alongside works by other artists such as Olga de Amaral, Diedrick Brackens, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Deana Lawson, Laura Owens, Deborah Roberts, Mickalene Thomas, Charlene von Heyl, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Ethan Sklar is a gallerist and partner at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery who has worked with Sze since 2010. Sklar looks at Sze’s work in relation to art history as he draws a line from Marcel Duchamp’s use of found objects. “There’s artists like Rauschenberg and Warhol who took that to another level in pop art. And then there’s artists like Heim Steinbach, who have made very specific, discreet or larger scale compositions using found objects,” said Sklar. “Sarah is in that legacy, but has taken it to another level.”
The award will bring Sze back to Boston in May of this year, when she will be honored at the museum’s annual Women’s Luncheon. Erickson compares the award winner to another famous Bostonian. “Sometimes we say that Sarah Sze is like the art world’s Matt Damon. She is somebody who is from Boston and has really achieved just incredible recognition throughout the world.”
