Trevor Paglen Wins 2026 LG Guggenheim Award, With $100,000 Honorarium and a May Lecture-Performance
A prize created to probe the uneasy overlap of art, technology, and power has landed on an artist who has spent years mapping what most people never see. The multinational electronics company LG and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York have named American conceptual artist Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) the recipient of the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award, which includes a $100,000 honorarium.
Paglen, who is based in New York, works across photography, writing, digital art, sculpture, and other formats. He has become one of the most influential U.S. artists of his generation for projects that attempt to visualize the systems and boundaries of mass surveillance, communications infrastructure, and computer imaging — the technical backbones that quietly structure contemporary life.
“We’re living through a profound transformation in our relationship to images,” Paglen said in a statement. “Images, sensing systems, algorithms and the infrastructures around them have become active participants in the world — shaping decisions, identities, cultures and histories.”
In its citation, the LG Guggenheim Award jury praised Paglen’s capacity to bring “legibility and public access to opaque and often inaccessible technologies, while resisting dominant corporate narratives and foregrounding broader societal and ethical considerations.”
This year’s jury included Mami Kataoka, the director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; Melanie Lenz, the curator of digital art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; Rasha Salti, a researcher, writer, and curator of art and film, and a curatorial advisor to the late Koyo Kouoh; Noam Segal, the LG Electronics associate curator at the Guggenheim in New York; and Eugenio Viola, the former artistic director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá.
Paglen’s award year will include a public program at the Guggenheim. On May 18, he will deliver a hybrid lecture and performance titled “The Lizard People Are Here!” The title nods to conspiracy culture and paranoia, but the premise is pointedly grounded: the systems Paglen tracks are not speculative fantasies so much as everyday, largely unexamined realities.
The following day, May 19, Verso will publish Paglen’s new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, extending his long-running inquiry into how images are produced, interpreted, and operationalized in an era shaped by machine vision.
The award is part of the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, launched in 2022 as a five-year collaboration between LG and the Guggenheim. Past recipients include Stephanie Dinkins (2023), Shu Lea Cheang (2024), and Ayoung Kim (2025). One additional artist will be recognized in 2027, the initiative’s final year — a timeline that underscores the program’s aim to build a sustained, multi-year conversation about how technological systems are remaking visual culture, and how artists can make those shifts newly visible.
