VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for Photography Recipients Introduced

Richmond, VA — The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) named the winners of the primary annual VMFA Aaron Siskind Award for Photography in the present day. Two artists, Qiana Mestrich and Shikeith, every acquired an unrestricted prize of $25,000 in assist of their ongoing artistic work. 

“Supporting artists is a core part of our mission, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is proud to support the practice of photography as an important means of creative expression,” stated museum Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “The Aaron Siskind Awards are purposeful and transformative –– enabling recipients to pursue major artistic projects.” 

The aim of the award is to offer materials assist that permits photographers to finish a significant physique of labor — whether or not the continuation or finalization of a photographic sequence, the event of an exhibition, monograph or guide venture, or one other main artistic endeavor. 

A panel of distinguished professionals within the discipline of pictures and the visible arts, together with Kaitlin Booher, the William and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography on the Columbus Museum of Art; Brendan Embser, senior editor of Aperture; and Carla Williams, photographer, archivist and scholar, evaluated 817 submissions. 

The recipients had been chosen on the energy of their creative imaginative and prescient, the standard and significance of their proposed tasks and their contribution to the broader discipline of latest pictures. 

Reflecting on the work submitted by Mestrich and Shikeith, Williams stated, “Their commitment not only to their individual creative practices, but to our collective knowledge and understanding of photography is both expansive and inspiring. Their highly personal, socially engaged imagery draws new voices into conversations about aesthetics, identity and history.” 

Informed by her upbringing because the daughter of immigrants from Panama and Croatia, Qiana Mestrich is an interdisciplinary artist and picture historian who lives and works between Brooklyn and New York’s Hudson Valley. Her work critically engages with themes of Black mixed-race id, motherhood, mothering and ladies’s company labor. 

The Reinforcements are half of a bigger digital archive Mestrich created as visible proof of the workplace labor of girls of coloration through the Information Age, particularly the interval between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the early 2000s. 

“Limited by the minimal photographs I could find online of the corporate labor history of women of color in the United States, I began to create my own speculative representations,” Mestrich stated. 

“Mestrich’s collages bring together office supplies, such as interoffice envelopes and punch cards, with images representing Black women entering the corporate workforce in the 1970s, often as secretaries. In doing so, Mestrich highlights feminism’s fault lines: Black women were sold a picture of success in advertising photography, one that could rarely be achieved through power suits or makeup,” stated Booher. “The project works on multiple levels, but on a visual level, the collages are punchy and surreal.” 

Shikeith, who lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates the sociopolitical buildings and histories shaping — and infrequently oppressing — the psychological landscapes of marginalized communities. Influenced by religious traditions from the African diaspora, his follow mines and reimagines strategies of disentanglement and reconciliation. 

Shikeith acknowledged, “My photographic practice is an ongoing dialogue with the past, centering the Black masculine body as a site of deep spiritual and psychological inquiry. In my images, Black men often appear with their eyes closed, a recurring gesture toward interiority, and in states of profuse sweating or “spilling,” a visible metaphor for each bodily launch and emotional catharsis.” 

In People Who Die Bad Don’t Stay within the Ground, Shikeith investigates the enduring specter of historic trauma. The artist defined, “photography becomes a means of making the hauntological visible, showing how unresolved historical events persist in the present, not as static memories but as active, shaping forces.” 

“Shikeith’s excavation of American history is a profound statement about Black inheritance in the 21st century,” stated Embser. 

“We were deeply impressed by the strength of this year’s submissions, which reflect the vitality of contemporary photographic practice,” stated Dr. Sarah Kennel, VMFA’s Aaron Siskind Curator of Photography and Director of the Raysor Center. “Both Qiana Mestrich and Shikeith approach their practices with extraordinary thoughtfulness and depth, using photography to probe urgent questions of identity, memory and history. Their work exemplifies the rigor and creativity that Aaron Siskind championed, and I am thrilled to launch this prize with such remarkable artists.” 

For extra details about the annual Aaron Siskind Awards, go to VMFA.museum.