Trevor Paglen Wins Guggenheim LG Award, Securing $100,000 for Surveillance and AI-Focused Work
Trevor Paglen, the American artist whose photographs often look like quiet studies of sky and light until you realize they are records of hidden observation, has been named the 2026 recipient of the Guggenheim LG Award. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum announced the honor Tuesday, awarding Paglen $100,000 to support a practice that has long investigated surveillance technology, machine vision, and the politics embedded in images.
Paglen said the prize will help underwrite the high costs of producing work that depends on technical experimentation. “This is very expensive work to do,” he said, pointing to research and development expenses that can make ambitious projects difficult to finance.
Paglen (b. 1974) received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2017 and has built a body of work that uses the visual language of landscape and astronomy to direct attention toward systems designed to remain unseen. Photographs that appear to depict placid atmospheres or shimmering stars frequently document surveillance operations and other forms of monitoring that are deliberately kept out of public view. Beyond photography, his projects have also taken on the infrastructure of the internet and the ways automated systems analyze, classify, and identify what they “see.”
Although artificial intelligence has become a dominant topic in recent public debate, Paglen has been engaging it for more than a decade. In 2020, he produced a series titled “Bloom,” in which he fed images of flowering trees into an AI system that then recolored them according to internal logics not disclosed to the viewer, foregrounding the opacity of machine decision-making.
Paglen is also set to publish a new book this year, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI. He has described its central premise as an argument that contemporary image culture is being reshaped by two major shifts: the rise of computer vision in the 2000s and 2010s, and the more recent acceleration of generative AI. Together, he suggests, these developments are altering the relationship between humans and images so profoundly that older frameworks for interpreting visual culture need revision.
A five-person jury selected Paglen for the Guggenheim LG Award. The panel included Mami Kataoka, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, and Noam Segal, an associate curator at the Guggenheim. In a statement, the jury praised Paglen as “one of the most influential artists of our time,” citing what it described as rigorous research, technological subversion, and a willingness to take intellectual risks.
The jury also emphasized the way Paglen’s work makes “opaque and often inaccessible technologies” more legible to the public, while resisting dominant corporate narratives and keeping ethical and societal stakes in view.
Paglen will present an as yet un-detailed event at the Guggenheim on May 18. He is the fourth artist to receive the award, following Shu Lea Cheang, Stephanie Dinkins, and Ayoung Kim.
