Coco Klockner Wins ARTnews 2026 Emerging Artist of the Year

ARTnews has named Coco Klockner its Emerging Artist of the Year for 2026, citing two New York presentations: her solo show "In Practice: Coco Klockner" at SculptureCenter (October 18–December 22, 2025) and her contribution to "Greater New York 2026" at MoMA PS1 (April 16–August 17, 2026).

The award recognizes an artist having a first significant gallery or small nonprofit solo show, or making an important contribution to a biennial. Klockner has done both within a single year.

What did the winning work actually look like?

The SculptureCenter show centered on one ambitious installation, null dialogue (2025), built from subwoofers, construction fill, an amplifier and other materials. A motion detector at the entrance — easy to miss — set off the work's soundtrack, which Klockner has described as "an undisclosed conversation between lovers." The words were heavily edited and difficult to understand, and the exhibition offered little explanatory text. A machine emitted fog every three minutes, filling the space with haze. Depending on when visitors arrived, null dialogue may have been heard before it was seen.

Klockner has said she approaches making sculpture "as though it were in transition," a phrase that captures the shape-shifting quality of her work since her first gallery show in 2018. She has also described drawing influence from the notion of thinking of "sounds as objects."

At MoMA PS1, she gave that idea new form with Glottoplasty (2026), an installation of plastic storage drawers embedded with speakers playing sliced and sutured excerpts from trans oral archives. As with null dialogue, the words were nearly impossible to parse, even when played loudly. The work suggested an effort to simultaneously reveal and conceal.

Both presentations carried an implicit interest in the body. Glottoplasty takes its name from a medical procedure used to raise the pitch of one's voice. null dialogue was accompanied by an untitled work made of a plastic mouth retractor, wood filler and 935 silver. At both venues, visitors could physically feel the rumbling of the art while standing before it.

Who else was nominated?

The ARTnews shortlist for Emerging Artist of the Year included:

• Eric Gyamfi, for "Eric Gyamfi: Exposure: Black Queer Visual Constellations" at Brown Arts Institute, Providence (April 16–June 15, 2026) and contributions to "If the word we: 59th Carnegie International" (May 2, 2026–January 3, 2027)
• Blas Isasi, for "Currents 125: Blas Isasi" at the Saint Louis Art Museum (February 6–August 9, 2026)
• Emma McCormick Goodhart, for "sottobosco (climate remix): CAVE 0 by Emma McCormick Goodhart" at SculptureCenter, New York (December 11–22, 2025)
• Christelle Oyiri, for "Christelle Oyiri: Belief May Vary" at Amant, New York (March 19–August 19, 2026)

What does the award change?

For an artist still early in her gallery history, the prize arrives between two institutional shows that jurors read as a coherent project: sound treated as sculpture, and speech deliberately obscured. Whether Klockner's deliberately illegible works convert award attention into broader institutional reach will show in what she makes — and where — after "Greater New York" closes on August 17, 2026.