ARTnews Names Maren Hassinger 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

By Grace Kim

Maren Hassinger has won the ARTnews Awards 2026 Lifetime Achievement honor, recognized for her retrospective "Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing" at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which runs June 6 through November 29, 2026. The award goes to an influential living artist who has had a retrospective or survey exhibition at a major US museum.

For five decades, Hassinger has made elegant, spare sculptures from a striking range of materials: wire rope, pink plastic bags, newspaper, rose leaves. These are objects that could easily be bent, twisted, or broken — in another setting they might read as flimsy. Instead, she sculpts them so they appear firm, monumental, and alive.

What drives the work?

Motion is the constant. Across installations, performances, films and drawings, Hassinger repeatedly imbues static objects with a sense of movement, as if they are shifting before our eyes. She often does this by referring to the natural environment, invoking trees and water through works that appear to undulate because of the way she installs them.

The BAMPFA retrospective, billed as the most expansive show of her art to date, positioned Hassinger as a key figure in the transition away from Minimalism (the 1960s movement of stripped-down geometric forms). In the 1970s she began working with wire rope that she partially pulled apart. The industrial material matched a broader New York tendency at the time, when sculptors transformed steel, firebricks, and fluorescent lights into large, often heavy artworks.

Hassinger's approach differed in two ways, according to the award citation: overt allusions to the human body and an intentionally light touch.

A choreographer in sculpture

Her collaborations with artists like Senga Nengudi and Ulysses Jenkins are now well-known. But the BAMPFA show pushed a different point: Hassinger as a performance artist in her own right. She originally sought to become a dancer before settling on sculpture during her education. Her sculptures, the exhibition argued, translate choreographies that could not be permanently viewable within gallery spaces.

Ephemerality sits at the core of that body of work. The BAMPFA exhibition highlighted it prominently through pieces using pink plastic bags and old newspapers — objects that might easily be thrown in the trash but that Hassinger treats as worthy art materials. Ranging from large-scale installations to intimate weavings, she consistently makes beauty of what could be treated as refuse.

In the exhibition catalog, speaking with curator Lowery Stokes Sims about the newspaper pieces, Hassinger put it plainly: "Well I don't want to look at something ugly. I want things to be as finished and pleasant as possible. And why not?"

Who else was nominated?

The award's other nominees spanned museums across the country:

• Coco Fusco — "Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island" at El Museo del Barrio, New York (September 18, 2025–March 1, 2026)
• Suzanne Jackson — "Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (September 27, 2025–March 1, 2026), traveling to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (May 14–August 23, 2026) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (September 26, 2026–January 18, 2027)
• David Lamelas — "David Lamelas: The Machine" at Dia Chelsea, New York (March 6, 2026–January 16, 2027)
• Martin Puryear — "Martin Puryear: Nexus" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (September 27, 2025–February 8, 2026), traveling to the Cleveland Museum of Art (April 12–August 9, 2026)

What does the award change for Hassinger? It caps a moment of institutional consolidation: the field's most expansive account of her career is on view at BAMPFA through November 29, 2026, and the prize formalizes her standing as a central figure in the shift away from Minimalism — one whose influence now anchors the museum narrative of that transition.