Lorna Simpson Wins 2027 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, €100,000 Cologne Acquisition

Lorna Simpson has won the 2027 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne will spend €100,000 (about $105,000) acquiring a work by the American artist for its permanent collection. The museum, which sponsors the annual award, will also stage a solo exhibition of Simpson's work next year, accompanied by a publication.

The decision came from a jury made up of Naomi Beckwith — deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and artistic director of documenta 16 — together with the Museum Ludwig board.

Simpson pioneered a new approach to conceptual photography, and the prize citation frames her as an artist the museum wants in its American holdings. "Her multifaceted body of work will provide, in the jury's view, an important impetus for the Museum Ludwig's collection of American art," the museum said in a statement.

Who is Lorna Simpson, and what does the prize change for her?

Born in Brooklyn, Simpson rose to international renown in the 1990s with multilayered photographs that pair images with fragmented text. From there her practice widened to film, painting, drawing, and sculpture. The through-line: work that blurs the boundaries between mediums while staying focused on inner worlds and popular perceptions of Black women.

What the prize changes is her standing in Germany specifically. Established in 1994, the Wolfgang Hahn Prize honors established contemporary artists with internationally recognized bodies of work who are not yet widely known in Germany. Previous recipients include Lee Ufan, Francis Alÿs, Kerry James Marshall, Betye Saar, Frank Bowling, and Haegue Yang. Simpson joins a roster that has consistently signaled which artists European institutions intend to collect and show at scale — and she gets a museum-grade acquisition plus a solo exhibition in Cologne to anchor that shift.

Why Museum Ludwig already knows her work

The connection isn't new. Simpson's two-part photo-text work ID (1990) appeared in the museum's 1999 group exhibition "Art Worlds in Dialogue (Kunstwelten im Dialog)."

The piece shows two portraits of a Black woman. In one, she turns her back to the camera; a plaque bearing the word "identity" is mounted alongside the image. The other portrait reveals only the crown of her head, which resembles the Earth emerging from deep space. A plaque engraved with the word "identify" sits over this image.

The museum's 1999 catalog text went further, comparing ID to the Black Madonna of Cologne — a famous wooden statue and site of pilgrimage housed in a 17th-century church near the institution. That local resonance gives the new acquisition a historical anchor: Simpson's work has already been read against the city's own devotional imagery.

How the acquisition fits the collection

The museum's statement lays out a collecting logic, not just an honor. The acquisition "will further develop the positions in Pop Art and its use of media-influenced imagery, which Peter and Irene Ludwig acquired early on and in considerable depth," the statement continued.

The museum also described Simpson's work as "a bridge" to the practices of Diamond Stingily and Carolyn Lazard, whose works newly entered the collection through the Junger Ankauf initiative (a program for recent purchases by the museum). Both artists, the statement noted, "reflect on the self-image of African American women."

In practical terms, that means Simpson's piece will sit in dialogue with three strands at once:

• The Ludwig founders' deep Pop Art holdings and their interest in media-driven imagery
• Newer acquisitions by Stingily and Lazard
• The museum's existing American art positions, which the jury says her work will now push forward

What happens next

The €100,000 goes toward a single acquisition for the collection, and the solo exhibition follows next year with an accompanying publication. For a museum that has spent decades building its American art narrative, Simpson becomes the newest hinge — an artist whose photo-text experiments of the 1990s now link the Ludwigs' Pop-era collecting to a generation of contemporary artists examining how Black women are seen and how they see themselves.