Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama wins inaugural Sam Gilliam Award

The Ghanaian sculptor, textile and installation artist Ibrahim Mahama has won the inaugural Sam Gilliam Award, a prize created last year by Dia Art Foundation and the Sam Gilliam Foundation in honour of the late artist’s legacy. Mahama will receive $75,000 and be featured in a public programme at Dia in autumn of this year. The award will be given out annually through 2033.

“I was first introduced to Gilliam’s important work as a student by my mentor Kąrî'kạchä Seid'ou, and it has been greatly influential on me ever since,” Mahama said in a statement. “The most important aspect of any community is to share their many gifts, even if they are born out of precarity, for within that point do we expand freedom for all life forms.”

Mahama was selected by a jury of five people, including Gilliam's widow and president of his foundation, Annie Gawlak; Yale Center for British Art director Courtney J. Martin; the chief curator of the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, Emiliano Valdés; Chisenhale Gallery director Zoé Whitley; and Jordan Carter, a curator at Dia. Of particular note in Mahama's selection was the increasingly ambitious nature of his work—both in scale and complexity—as well as the community-based character of many of his projects, which involve collaborations with large numbers of makers in his native Ghana.

“Mahama champions collaboration in his work and, just like he gives renewed purpose to the materials he collects and recycles into artworks, he revitalises his communities, turning castoff structures into institutions for convening, learning, artmaking and collective growth,” Jessica Morgan, Dia’s director, said in a statement. “This award honours both sides of his sophisticated practice.”

Using salvaged materials including textiles and found objects, Mahama creates works that range drastically in tone and scale, from wall-based pieces incorporating colourful fabrics to large-scale installations that comment on colonialism and industry. He is also known for vast public projects in which he wraps buildings’ façades in textiles produced in collaboration with numerous Ghanaian craftspeople. Next month he will wrap London’s Barbican Centre with one such work, a new textile commission.

Mahama’s art has been included in major international exhibitions across the globe in recent years, including the just-closed edition of Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia; the 2023 editions of the Sharjah Biennial, the Bienal de São Paulo and the Venice Architecture Biennale; the Ghanaian pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale; and Documenta in 2017. He is represented by White Cube and had his most recent solo show with the gallery at its Hong Kong space in 2022.