In the eight years since CULTURED began compiling its annual Young Artists list, the honorees have gone on to stage headline-making exhibitions, launch boundary-breaking initiatives, and direct feature films. This year, CULTURED is introducing a new element to the Young Artists initiative: the inaugural Young Artists Prize. This unrestricted financial award seeks to make the challenge of building a sustainable, uncompromising career just a little bit easier for one extraordinary talent. 

As CULTURED editors put the Young Artists list together year after year, we see the mounting pressures that emerging creators face—including finding their audience and refining their practice while contending with the strains (personal and financial) that accompany periods of transformative growth. With the Young Artists Prize, an award bestowed on an outstanding honoree from CULTURED’s annual list, the magazine does its small part in the monumental task of supporting an artist on their path. 

It was difficult to select a single winner from the remarkable crop that our editors assembled for the list’s eighth edition. To do so, we enlisted the help of a trusted team of advisors: Amy Cappellazzo, founding partner of Art Intelligence Global; Ruba Katrib, curator and curatorial director of MoMA PS1; Nicola Lees, director of the Aspen Art Museum; and artist Mickalene Thomas. They reviewed the work of all 27 artists to identify a creative force whose work reflects the spirit of the prize.

Together with our esteemed jurors, CULTURED is proud to award this year’s inaugural Young Artists Prize to Kahlil Robert Irving. The Fayetteville, Arkansas and Saint Louis, Missouri-based artist turns discarded and found materials into biting social commentary on the experiences of his community. His work—which will be on view next year in solo shows at the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, and Kiang Malingue in Hong Kong—serves as a testament to the expressive power of ceramics. 

As Kahlil says in his Young Artists profile written by Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa, “I’m constantly reminded that this is a marathon. But I also remember that the world is on fire, and I just gotta do what I can while I can.” 

For more, see the full 2023 Young Artists list, their individual profiles, and advice from past Young Artists honorees.

“It's kind of hard for me to even call myself a visual artist,” confesses Oshay Green over Zoom. “It’s a bit intimidating to me in a way … There’s an intention, and there’s a responsibility, to being one.”

It’s not surprising that Green, who is based in Dallas, struggles with the moniker. The show notes for “This whole time I’ve been seeing the same shit I had seen in my dreams,” the artist’s solo show at Blinkers in Winnipeg, Canada, last year, highlight his self-taught bonafides and his origins as a welder and sound designer.

At 29, Green has been making music much longer than visual art—the materiality of sound gives him a language for his three-dimensional work. The term “artist” only became relevant to him in 2018, when he started tinkering with metal, pallets, wood, and steel in a painter friend’s Dallas studio. Green simply thought, Why not?

His oblique relationship to the artist label is mirrored in his installations: assemblages composed of found materials that have not quite transcended their prior status as debris, the uncanny trace of their past lives an aura that hovers around them.

Green uses materials such as concrete, ink, rope, obsidian, and charcoal to render industrial prisms through which the mythology of capitalism, decay, and mortality are refracted. Even the artist’s influences form a kind of layered collage—splashes of Madlib and J Dilla with a touch of Nam June Paik.

When I ask him why he makes work, Green mentions survival. “I’m working out of necessity. I’m trying to create some sort of liberation—I’m not talking about freeing the fucking world or anything,” he muses. “I am just looking for the key that opens a door to something else.”

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Jo Messer.

Shuriya Davis didn’t caption their bruise-colored, semi-abstract homages to Big Gay Idiot DJ, the early 2010s phenom formerly known as DJ Total Freedom, when they posted them on Instagram. In September, the Alabama-born, Mississippi-based artist began flooding the app with these brown, purple, and green premonitions from a muddy future.

After a summer of silence (due to a health crisis) from a hitherto loquacious account, the posts were the first sign that Davis was in the studio again. “Working with portraiture is the quickest way for me to get ideas,” they confess over the phone.

For the 27-year-old, the process is a kind of emotional shorthand. “I’m always returning to those images of DJ Total Freedom. They have an intimacy,” says Davis. “Those images set the tone for what I’m interested in making: figures that are deep and contemplative about the world they’re existing in.”

Muses, like DJ Total Freedom, enter the studio via Instagram screenshots and websites like Black Archives, a well of documentation that underscores the plurality and complexity of Black experiences. Once applied to a work however, a reference image—even one freighted with meaning—functions less as a blueprint than as something to riff on.

It’s no surprise that Davis looks up to Georg Baselitz, whose work embraces that moment where portraiture grazes abstraction. Nor is it shocking that Davis claims they learned to draw from studying Willem de Kooning in undergrad at the Rhode Island School of Design. Unlike their figurative peers’ interest in representation as a way to affirm certain narratives, Davis does not seek resolution. The messiness of personhood is left intact. 

“I lose track of where things begin and end a lot, so I try to make paintings that portray that,” they say. “One mark helps another mark find its resonance. I make use of every mark so that there are no accidents in this creation.”

At the moment, following memorable inclusions in group shows like Nahmad Contemporary’s “Ugly Painting” and a run of sold-out solo exhibitions, Davis’s marks are still in their accumulation phase. But there are more presentations on the way, at New York’s Derosia, and at Stars, their long-term gallery in Los Angeles. That’s enough of a plan for Davis. Painting has their full attention. 

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Oscar yi Hou.

“The tears that you cry when you’re sad, when you’re happy, or when you’re yawning are actually different molecular compositions,” Jes Fan explains over Zoom. “Thinking about things at the molecular level excites me.” These are recurrent themes in the Hong Kong- and Brooklyn-based artist’s work: smallness, intellectual engagement, and the biological code that underpins and defines our turbulent emotional lives.

Fan was born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong before moving to New York in 2014 to study. In his almost 10 years in the city, the artist has developed a practice that harnesses installation, sculpture, and video to design, test, and even farm substances including oysters and plants.

Whatever the focus, Fan’s work of late has emphasized exploration, process, and continuity. Currently, the artist—who graduated with a BFA in glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014—is at work on the third chapter of an ongoing series called “Sites of Wounding,” which began in 2020.

The first chapter, which he presented at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery earlier this year, took a local oyster species as its launch point, and included video works and large glass-embalmed shells, evoking the museumification of nature, body modification, and artifacts of global capitalism. The latest chapter will focus on soybeans and the process of soy milkmaking, using the liquid as a video projection surface.

“I have a fascination with these underlying networks of labor and materials—it comes to me quite organically, because my family worked in factories, and my dad ran a factory in China,” he says. The simplicity of Fan’s persistent thematic inquiries (how is something made? where, by whom, and for what purpose?) allows for a current of complex themes to emerge, which the artist prods and unravels.

Fan’s sculptural interventions echo the concepts at the heart of his work. In Bivalve I and Bivalve II, both 2023, bubbling, glass forms drip from shells made of resin. The pieces are situated in an industrial frame, asking viewers to confront the ways that organic materials are embedded in complex systems of labor, and how they endure in the face of destruction and extraction.

Though he confronts the viewer with these heady questions, Fan understands that he is implicated, too. “I extend these questions and apply them to myself,” he asserts. “How am I made? What am I made of?"

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Oscar yi Hou.

Dominique Knowles's adoration of horses began in childhood, when he started riding in the Bahamas. “I drew horses because I desired horses,” the 27-year-old artist says. Perhaps this bond is the genesis for the movement, yearning, and mark-making that present themselves as something of a spiritual trinity in his work.

When the artist turned 14, he became immersed in the community of artists that orbited his uncle’s contemporary art gallery, Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts, in the Bahamian capital of Nassau. “Painting offered an alternative way of living that the horse stables did not,” he explains. “I can be emotional in the paintings. It’s a different sense of community that is a bit more self-governing, eclectic, and unique.”

Fueled by this early exposure, Knowles found his way stateside, earning a BFA and MFA in painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he completed his studies in 2020.

Today, the artist’s paintings could be described as character studies that explore, with spiritualistic dedication, a single being or act. Every brushstroke arcs and billows so that Knowles’s central figures appear at once to be moving and melting—rendered in a palette of rustic, almost prehistoric oranges, browns, and reds.

“My Beloved,” his most recent show, which ran this past summer at Hannah Hoffman Gallery in Los Angeles, was an homage to Knowles’s horse, a lifelong companion who died in 2021. The show featured eight works bearing the same title—The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons, 2023.

The artist painted the windows of the gallery an earthy ochre, bathing the space in warm light to create a cathedral-like hush. Indeed, one painting felt almost reminiscent of an altarpiece.

In Knowles’s swirling atmosphere of death and rebirth, mourning seems to be a requirement for engagement. “The most important thing,” he says, “is the intimacy in the painting, the intimacy between the painting and the viewer, or between the artist and the expression— it’s this alchemy of intimacy."

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Oscar yi Hou.

“The character is contemplating her pregnancy, like, ‘Do I give myself an abortion with a knife? Do I jump out the window?’” explains Olivia van Kuiken.

The 26-year-old painter is giving me her elevator pitch for The Trumpets of Jericho, an experimental fable about an expectant young woman trapped in a tower. Its author—Unica Zürn, a Surrealist renegade often overshadowed by her other half, Hans Bellmer—wrote the text after giving birth to two children and going through a self-induced abortion.

Zürn and the 1968 novella have been a compass of sorts for Van Kuiken since she first discovered the book as a freshman at Cooper Union. She turned to them once again this year in preparation for her first solo show with Château Shatto, which will open in time with Frieze Los Angeles in February.

From her own turret in Queens, a second floor studio overlooking a mom-and-pop auto shop, the artist points to the themes—bodily alienation, linguistic abstraction, the “edges of experience”—that continue to rivet her and translate easily to her narrative-allergic body of work. 

As a high schooler in New Jersy, she found solace in black-and-white darkroom photography, hoping to follow postconceptual doyenne Liz Deschenes’s footsteps. The figure eventually made its way into her work, but Van Kuiken isn’t interested in dwelling on its subjectivity.

“When people are in my paintings, they’re like placeholders,” she explains. “Like bathroom signs, almost.” (The depictions of women on their deathbed that framed her solo show at Chapter NY earlier this year typify this depersonalization; in her panoramic treatment of their corpses, they became more landscape than life force.)

Text, too, has surfaced in recent works, like a gestural hurricane of a painting stamped with “UNICA” in Cooper Black font. Looking at it across the studio, Van Kuiken says she’s aware the lay viewer won’t recognize her cherished inspiration’s first name. That’s the point.

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Theresa Chromati, Giangiacomo Rossetti, and Emma Stern.

Aurel Haize Odogbo’s interest in collage stems from her fascination with her chosen medium’s ability to take a fragment of our world and breathe new life into it. Using hard and soft pastels, metal leaf, and bird feathers as sinew, the Nigerian-American artist stitches images from the glitchy ecosystem of role-playing games together with signs, symbols, and cultural artifacts from the Yoruba tradition in pursuit of something “angelic.” 

“Ancestor worship held so much power in my adolescence,” says Odogbo, who is transgender, when she calls from a “self-appointed” residency in Berlin. “It allowed me to believe in myself when I didn’t have a reason to, and when everyone around me told me not to believe in the young woman I was growing into."

The Baltimore-born artist’s fascination with the virtual also surfaced in her youth, when she would watch her older brother play classic video games on the TV—her face bathed in the flickering light of an alternate universe, entranced. 

These games became the “possibility model” for Odogbo’s life as an artist—they proved that one could build and inhabit another world. She found herself particularly fixated on avatar creation and “on the ability to design a body without the constrictions of our world.” She saw the voltaic screen of her monitor as a kind of “digital altar or portal,” a place to commune with a vast network of imagined forms. 

During the spiritual journey of Odogbo’s teenage years, her personal exploration of precolonial traditions and beliefs stood in stark contrast with the strict, prescriptive Christian religion of her father. The membrane that separates what we denote as “sacred” and “profane” loomed large in the 14 ambitious psychedelic collages she showed in “Quasiii—PortalsUponPortals,” her debut solo exhibition at Deli Gallery’s Mexico City outpost this summer.

In the show, her abstract meditations on the angelic and the alien relied on speculation as their primary narrative mechanism, introducing us to deities that wait in the far-off future, shooting out from the picture plane like solar flares from a neighboring galaxy. 

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features on Omari Douglin, Giangiacomo Rossetti, and Kahlil Robert Irving.

“I was very interested in car design when I was younger,” recalls painter Jasper Marsalis. “I took this summer course, and the instructor explained that in their prototypal phase, you could only draw cars facing one direction. That really bothered me.”

That anecdote foreshadows the fixations that would emerge, years later, in the 28-year-old musician and artist’s work: a subversion of perspectival conventions, a complication of linearity, and an emphasis on the unreliability of optical experience.

“It sparked my fascination with art-making, or with art-making as a suite of questions,” says Marsalis, who is currently on the road touring his debut album, Excelsior, under the moniker Slauson Malone 1. Today, his artwork—the result of that suite of questions—sprawls well beyond a single medium.

Intimately scaled oil paintings depict the vastness of light, while large-scale works contract as if under pressure. Occasionally, Marsalis makes three-dimensional “drawings” out of soldered aluminum pieces that glisten like spider webs on the surface of his canvases.

In his exhibitions, one finds bowling balls on a gallery floor, their holes stuffed with ear plugs or their rotundity interrupted with a wooden wedge. These anthropomorphic sculptures capture the simple physicality of the human figure—they make you feel the weight of your head on your shoulders.

In solo exhibitions at Los Angeles’s Kristina Kite Gallery, London’s Emalin, New York’s Svetlana, and Minneapolis’s Midway Contemporary Art, the prolific young multi-hyphenate has channeled his fixation with the insufficiency of the senses into artworks that force viewers to interrogate their own ability to perceive the world.

And the ear, he contends, is just as treacherous as the eye. Marsalis’s musical output is as compositionally attuned to disorder and chaos as the artist’s two-dimensional work. For the Los Angeles native, the stage and the picture plane are interdependent, parallel forums for expression, but that doesn’t make the exchange a seamless one.

“Going between music and art, two economic worlds that secretly I think really hate each other,” he muses, “that’s an inherently unstable position.”

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features on Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Emma Stern, and Jo Messer.

“I was talking with a friend the other day, and she said that being an artist is thinking, This is bad, this is very, very, very, very bad, but not derailing it,” says Willa Nasatir, laughing. “Like throwing a birthday party and wanting to cancel it at the last minute. But the thing about being 33 is having a better grasp of how to sit through that.”

The artist is in a serene mood when I meet her at Los Tacos near Tribeca Park, and says that she hasn’t been feeling the post-show depression that often hits two to three weeks after an opening. The show in question is her third solo exhibition at Chapter NY, the gallery that has represented the Los Angeles native since 2016.

The obligatory CV line about Nasatir tends to include the fact that she had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art five years out of Cooper Union, but what’s useful in approaching Nasatir’s compositions across photography and painting is the psychoanalytic dictum at the heart of her work: Everyone and everything that appears in our dreams is a part of ourselves.

Nasatir’s pictures break down and anatomize the solidity of objects by splitting them up into parts, giving form to how the body is marked by and yields to the multiplicities of desire, power, and pleasure.

As an observer-participant of the world she depicts, her process is arguably one of the subject reflecting on herself as an object, and the central theme of her work might be that of relationships—those that constellate the fractured facets within personality, sexuality, and friendship, dynamics that are never concretized but drift in an ever-shifting tide of ebbs and flows.

A couple days before our meeting, Nasatir had a dream that an Angelyne-like figure driving a hot pink Corvette backed into her car. The strongest emotional current in the dream was one of relief, she remembers, as she’d recently switched her car insurance from California to New York.

She pauses as she realizes she’s made a photograph of a brick smashing into a toy Corvette. It’s currently hanging in the Chapter NY show. Why did she make it? “I’m not sure,” she grins. “I guess to fulfill the dream I had a month and a half later.” She seems genuinely bewildered by this, but reasons, “I’m happy that my work still feels mysterious to me, that it doesn’t feel solved or like I’ve reached the edges, the contours of the thing.”

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Giangiacomo Rossetti, and Oscar yi Hou.

Violet Dennison makes paintings with the precision and foresight of an installation artist. This is an affectation that the Bridgeport, Connecticut–born artist developed over nearly a decade of showing sculpture—frequently in Europe, where the young conceptualist found a following amongst kunsthalle directors with the resources and room to chase her ideas down the rabbit hole.

Dennison, 34, fondly recalls arriving to install solo exhibitions with nothing but a “recipe”—no art—to execute. For her, “recipe” is a flexible-enough term to include serious acts of plumbing, as evidenced by her 2017 show “Transcend” at Jan Kaps gallery in Cologne.

For Pipe Re-Route, one of the exhibition’s many interventions, the artist laparatomized the bathroom wall, redirecting the faucet to flow onto her longtime gallery's floor. You knew when people washed their hands: The dribble became a gush.

At the New Museum Triennial a year later, Dennison arrived with bundles of Floridian seagrass. She liked the hydrophyte’s wellness-industry associations and its relentless impulse to ejaculate seeds and lasso passersby into becoming unwitting messengers in their odyssey back to the sea. At some point during the triennial, the curators decided the seagrass was a little too eager, and Dennison was obliged to glue the thalassic strands down.

As an artist, Dennison revels in unexpected results, like misbehaving seaweed. The element of surprise keeps her coming back day after day to her treehouse-like studio in New York’s Financial District.

Lately, her experiments have been drifting toward her first love: oil paint. She reminisces about a devout high school art teacher who taught her to mix pigments, and an undergraduate experience at New York University that later turned her allegiances to conceptualism.

Today, her process hews more closely to the latter. It is preparation-intensive and finishes with a burst of athleticism. Some ideas start on paper, others on the screen, and then they switch, migrating from digital space to easel and back again until a satisfying composition arrives on canvas.

“[When I was working on installations], I realized art can happen very fast. That is how I work,” says Dennison. “Don't let the paint dry.” This means not being too precious, even when her current subject matter is Ovidian mythology and the symbology of flowers.

There are things in the pipeline as always, like her show at Jan Kaps this past summer, but it’s too early to know what direction the water is flowing just yet.

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Theresa Chromati, and Emma Stern.

Before they begin a new project, mosie romney pulls a tarot card. “I recently got the Chariot, [which] feels reminiscent of a spiral staircase,” they explain from their Catskills studio. “I’ve been thinking about spiral staircases as they relate to cycle-breaking and fantasy, entering other worlds … I’m making paintings about the spiritual journey and the physical journey.”

Romney grew up in New York City and studied at SUNY Purchase, where the now 29-year-old learned to appreciate the region’s hush, as well as its abundance. Nature helps clear their head, and it is this lucidity that leads the artist from conception to finished product, translating a combination of daydreamed imagery and foraged objects, many sourced from eBay, into various abstractions on canvas or mixed-media assemblages.

Romney’s creations explore the concept of existence in all forms and in all places, mythical and biological. They often meld painting and poetry, making potions out of matter and swirling them around in an ethereal truth brew. In “Rhizome St./Fugue Avenue,” their first solo exhibition with New York’s PPOW gallery this fall, the artist dispatched from a multi-timeline universe, whose characters are connected, mysteriously, to each other.

To make the series, they assembled found materials like metal studs and plastic baby figurines in a process one might liken to putting the pieces of a dream puzzle back together. The resulting paintings’ palette—at once brilliant and muted, like the arching lines that punctuate each work—forces viewers to behold and traverse a seemingly infinite expanse.

When romney is not time traveling, they are destination hopping—thankfully, never alone. “Oopsie is definitely a support dog,” they say of their Lab/pit bull mix. “Being a painter is lonely … She reminds me to take breaks, go outside. When she eats, I eat. When she needs more drinking water, I need to drink too.”

Romney doesn’t take for granted the lifestyle they’ve been able to cultivate as an artist. Having worked since they were 16, they relish not having to report to any place they don’t want to. “Now I check into my studio, and it belongs to me in a way that I haven’t experienced before. That brings me joy.”

This state of enchantment permeates romney’s canvases, which vibrate with the potentiality of a reverie. The only question is what they will dream up next.

For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Omari Douglin, Giangiacomo Rossetti, and Kahlil Robert Irving.