Edgar Calel Wins the 2026 Sam Gilliam Award
Edgar Calel, an artist and poet of Maya Kaqchikel heritage, has been named the 2026 winner of the Sam Gilliam Award, the annual prize administered by Dia Art Foundation and the Sam Gilliam Foundation. The award includes $75,000 and a public program at a Dia-managed site in the fall.
Born in 1987 and based in Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa), Guatemala, Calel works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance. His practice is rooted in the ancestral knowledge systems, ritual practices, and cultural traditions of Guatemala’s midwestern highlands, and it has drawn increasing attention in recent years for the way it links intimate material choices to broader questions of community and memory.
Calel’s work has been presented at SculptureCenter in New York and included in the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, the 2023 Bienal de São Paulo, and the 2022 Carnegie International. He is best known for large-scale installations that reflect the Mayan cosmovision, as well as for works that examine the tension between ownership and stewardship in museum collections. In 2021, his work *The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge (Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el)* was placed under Tate’s custodianship in London for 13 years, with the possibility of renewal by both the museum and the artist.
The award was established in 2023 and is endowed through 2033. Its previous recipients are Ibrahim Mahama in 2024 and Sheela Gowda in 2025. This year’s six-person jury included Dia curators and department co-heads Jordan Carter and Matilde Guidelli-Guidi; Annie Gawlak, president of the Gilliam Foundation and Sam Gilliam’s widow; Elvira Dyangani Ose, artistic director of the upcoming 2nd Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial; Shanay Jhaveri, head of visual arts at Barbican in London; and Clara Kim, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
In a statement, Jessica Morgan, director of Dia, said Calel has “a remarkable ability to create works that operate at once intimately and expansively,” bringing together material, ritual, and community. Gawlak said his exploration of environment and Indigenous histories resonates with Gilliam’s own approach to art making as a way to confront urgent social and political issues. The fall program will give Calel a new institutional platform at a moment when his work is already circulating widely across major international exhibitions.
