This December, Art Basel Miami Beach marks a milestone: the unveiling of the first-ever Art Basel Awards’ Gold Awardees. These 11 outstanding practitioners have been selected from multiple art and arts-adjacent pursuits, following a packed debut year for the new accolade with rounds of judging, announcements, public talks and celebratory receptions. 'We realized there was no industry-wide celebration like you get in other creative industries, and we wanted to celebrate the whole world of art,' says Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s Chief Artistic Officer and the awards’ architect and jury chair. As part of the ceremony in Miami Beach, the first-ever BOSS AWARD for Outstanding Achievement—conceived by BOSS in partnership with Art Basel — will be presented to an artist whose recent work made a significant cultural impact within the art ecosystem and beyond.

As with other awards, there’ll be suitable pomp and ceremony at the grand finale in Miami’s landmark concert hall, the Frank Gehry-designed New World Center in South Beach. This includes a red-carpet moment, a top musical performance and winners receiving unique trophies. Honoring the fair’s roots, the exquisite handblown glass one-offs have been designed by Jacques Herzog, one half of the legendary Basel-based architecture practice Herzog and de Meuron and produced by Glassworks Matteo Gonet, also based in Basel. While there’s no holding back on gong-giving festivities, de Bellis explains, 'we’re not just celebrating for the sake of celebrating.' The awards have been carefully designed to address a particular art prize challenge: how to appropriately and adequately acknowledge the diffuse achievements of creative work.

What’s particularly eye-catching is that these are the only culture awards in the world where the gold awardees have been chosen by their fellow nominees, rather than the initial jury that selected 36 first-round medalists. "The beauty of it is that recognition comes from their peers," reflects de Bellis. 'This is unique, though I’m sure not an easy process.' What made this especially challenging for the awardees-turned-judges, he explains, was the community built between them when they met at Art Basel’s original base in Switzerland for events during the fair there last June. 'There was a very collegiate atmosphere,' he adds.

It’s not the only way the awards have subverted and expanded the traditional art prize format, either. They take in nine categories recognizing the art world’s reach: artists of course, with 18 medalists divided between icons (including the likes of American conceptualist David Hammons and Chilean poet, artist, activist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña), established mid-career (such as the Chinese art star Cao Fei and the German Nairy Baghramian) and emerging talents (boosting the profile of up-and-comers like Moroccan Meriem Bennani or the Chinese artist and composer Pan Daijing); there are the self-explanatory categories of curators, institutions and patrons; cross-disciplinary makers whose work bridges art to fields like fashion or design; a novel honor recognizing the contribution of ‘allies,’ those who work behind the scenes, and finally ‘storytellers,’ including critics and academics.

The emphasis is on those whose work feeds art’s ecosystem and is forward-looking, and the rewards given to the final gold awardees reflect this. The emerging artist will receive a no-strings-attached sum to create new work, the established artist a honorarium alongside a large-scale public commission to debut during Art Basel in Basel in June 2026, while the icon receives money to donate to any cause of their choosing. To ensure an expansive globalized perspective, an initial 36 medalists were selected by an expert jury of nine museum directors and curators from around the world, from Adriano Pedrosa from MASP in Sao Paulo and Franklin Sirmans of PAMM in Miami to Suhanya Raffel from M+ in Hong Kong and the late Koyo Kouoh of Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, who abruptly passed away earlier this year. (In honor of her memory, Art Basel is collaborating with RAW Material Company, an organization Kouoh founded in Dakar, Senegal, to create a new three-year fellowship for an art professional from the African continent to visit the Swiss fair.)

The medalists were first assembled for a formal, closed-doors ceremony in June, within Basel’s storied Rathaus, a 500-year-old medieval town hall. Here, they received a citation from the president of the cantonal government of Basel-Stadt, Conradin Cramer, and Art Basel’s CEO, Noah Horowitz, as well as a commemorative pin specially designed by Parisian jeweler Lorette Colé Duprat. A reception at Kunstmuseum Basel, compered by Russell Tovey, the actor, collector and host of the hit podcast Talk Art, and a DJ set from Vegyn provided an opportunity for awardees to toast each other alongside 400 VIP guests.

It was the Awards Summit, a talks program exclusively featuring the medalists themselves, which really set the tone for what the project is about. Topics included 'Radical Reimaginings,' a panel discussion addressing risk and material storytelling with Hans Ulrich Obrist and award winners, established artist Ibrahim Mahama and emerging artist Lydia Ourahmane. Juror and Kunstmuseum Basel director Elena Filipovic and Cecilia Vicuña asked, 'What can artists teach us about the world we live in?' Meanwhile, the president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and medalist in the patron category, Joel Wachs, explored 'patronage as a force for change' with Ann Goldstein, interim director at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Perhaps the ultimate confirmation both of the speakers’ and topics’ pertinence, though, was the fact that within the fair’s talks programs, the summit was a record-breaker for audience numbers. 'It was the most attended ever,' affirms de Bellis.

There is, of course, no better key to understanding the awards’ aims than the selection of medalists themselves. 'The icons have been selected for their legacy in how they speak to the future,' says de Bellis. 'Many are committed, not just to themselves, but to future arts communities and other industries.' The self-described 'painter and cultural activist' Lubaina Himid, for example, is especially lauded for her work furthering visibility for Black British artists, with trailblazing group shows and establishing collectives. In her pioneering video and performance art, Joan Jonas has broken ground for generations of artists.

For the director of Kunstmuseum Basel, Elena Filipovic, the challenge she and her fellow jurors had to rise to was, 'how to identify those individuals and institutions that are actually pushing our history forward, pushing debates about diversity, about sustainability; those who are not afraid to confront the tough, relevant topics of our time.' It’s a principle they clearly all adhere to. Best known for the earth maze she built at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Delcy Morelos’ work, for instance, affirms our interconnectedness with the natural world. Ho Tzu Nyen, meanwhile, utilizes new technology to take a long view, tackling Southeast Asia’s complex colonial history and politics, as well as their repercussions in present-day culture. For de Bellis, the emerging artists 'speak to how differently a new generation sees art and how important the cross-disciplinary approach we’ve taken with the awards is.' Indigenous heritage and community-building are particularly notable in the work of the Uzbek artist-filmmaker Saodat Ismailova, whose achievements include spearheading DAVRA, a collective of Central Asian artists. Mohammad AlFaraj is another ecologically minded maker, highlighting connections between multiple species while referencing both Saudi Arabian farming methods and ancient fables.

What makes the Art Basel Awards stand out is its inclusion of those pioneering but too-often unsung forces for change. Those acknowledged by the awards as 'allies' include Gasworks+Triange Network, the South London not-for-profit, which, through its residencies and exhibitions program, has supported hundreds of underrepresented artists from around the world in the past 31 years. The California-based Art Handlxrs* support the growth of marginalized people, be they Black, women or from the LGBTQ+ community in essential art industry roles, be that as technicians, fabricators or, indeed, art handlers. 'Storytellers' include two magazine editors-in-chief, Negar Azimi, of the Middle East-focused Bidoun, and Barbara Casavecchia, of the Italian Mousse magazine.

For Art Basel Awards juror Jessica Morgan, the range and means of selecting the Art Basel Awards’ first year of trailblazers makes it 'a meaningful departure from conventional art prizes. [...] spotlighting artists and cultural figures who are shaping discourse in transformative ways [that will] help to redefine what it means to contribute to the art world today.'

When the trophies have been handed out, the cocktails finished and the music ended, the hope is that the awards will amount to more than something that, as de Bellis puts it, 'you applaud for one night and move on from the next day. We’re not just thinking about what’s happening right now. It’s about the future of art.'