Alison Saar, 2024. Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno.
Alison Saar, a Los Angeles-based artist, has been named the 2025 David C. Driskell Prize winner by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art for her contributions to the African American art community. In addition to receiving an unrestricted $50,000 cash award, Saar will be recognized at a gala event at the High Museum on September 20. The institution has presented the prize annually since 2005 in recognition of the work of African American artists and scholars.
Born in 1956, Saar is known for her sculptures, installations, and mixed-media works informed by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and exploring the African American experience, particularly Black female identity. Her oeuvre is typified by large-scale figurative sculptures, often of metal or wood and by her use of textiles. Saar’s work is held in the collections of numerous major art institutions, including those of the High Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. Public artworks include a 2008 memorial to Harriet Tubman in New York’s South Harlem neighborhood, and Salon, 2024, a sculpture commissioned in honor of the 2024 Olympic Games and now permanently displayed in the Charles Aznavour Garden on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Saar holds a bachelor of arts degree from Scripps College and a master of fine arts degree from the Otis College of Art and Design.
“Saar’s work delves deeply into the histories of the African diaspora and its artistic traditions, exploring how they influence and connect to cultural identity today,” said High Museum director Rand Suffolk in a statement. “Her sculpture Tobacco Demon has been a fixture in our galleries for decades. We are honored to recognize her distinguished practice and myriad contributions to African American art with the 2025 Driskell Prize.”
“I am honored to have been chosen as the 2025 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize,” said Saar in a statement. “At a time when many of the civil rights milestones achieved by previous generations—by our mothers and grandmothers—are being threatened or dismantled, the Driskell Prize empowers Black artists and art historians to push back. When our art is removed from museum exhibitions or our shows are canceled, this prize offers not only validation, but also the support to continue making work that is courageous and truthful work that is often stifled by the limitations of mainstream institutions.”
