DALLAS, TX.- The Nasher Sculpture Center announces the winners of the 2025 Nasher Sculpture Center Artist Grant in Honor of Jeremy Strick, a program that provides annual financial support to North Texas artists through the distribution of grants that may be used to fund the purchasing of equipment and materials, travel or research, studio space, or artist-run curatorial projects.

The 2025 grant awardees are Hakeem Adewumi; Sheridan Hines; Claudia Maysen; Kris Pierce; and PRP (Permanent Research Project), an artist space run by Jake Elliot Hargrove, Michael Mazurek, and River Shell.

The winners were chosen by a jury that included artists Jesse Morgan Barnett, Ciara Elle Bryant, Benito Huerta, and Dan Jian. Nasher Curator Dr. Leigh Arnold and Nasher Curator of Education Anna Smith serve on the jury annually. Each Nasher Artist Grant awardee will receive $2000 to realize projects related to their practice.

"Since beginning the grant in 2015, the Nasher Sculpture Center has had the pleasure of seeing the depth of the artistic talent of North Texas,” says Nasher Curator and Artist Grant Juror Dr. Leigh Arnold. “This year’s winners demonstrate the sustained engagement artists have with the communities around them and the Nasher is proud to celebrate and support their contributions to building connections through art.”

2025 Nasher Artist Grants will go towards the realization of the following projects by the award recipients:

Hakeem Adewumi
Dallas, Texas
Hakeem Adewumi will use funds to expand his photographic practice into the realm of sculpture through immersive training in CNC machine operation. Resulting work will be incorporated into Adewumi’s Juneteenth House, an experimental worldbuilding project that interrogates the meaning of Juneteenth, acknowledging the haunting crisis of the holiday’s history with joy, abundance, and liberation.

Sheridan Hines
Allen, Texas
Sheridan Hines aims to dismantle the discomfort around illness, death, and trauma through installations that address societal taboos and personal history. Artist Grant funds will be applied to sculptural materials to further a body of work that merges salvaged furniture with sculpted human elements to create life-sized sculptures that tell stories of domestic intimacy and bodily vulnerability.

Claudia Maysen
Keller, Texas
Claudia Maysen plans to use the funds to support the creation of an installation featuring 18 life-size figures in the style of paper dolls set within two dioramas for her 2026 solo exhibition at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center. Maysen’s work centers on immigrants’ experiences in Texas and the artist uses the paper doll as a metaphor for the way immigrants are often flattened into stereotypes. The installation will be constructed from mixed media on paper and self-standing foam board cutouts, with a steel and wood structure for the dioramas.

Kris Pierce
Fort Worth, Texas
Kris Pierce will rekindle his 2012 sculpture series, The Red Telephone, which consisted of three custom payphones sited throughout highly trafficked areas in Fort Worth. Each phone acted as an input device inviting public confessionals that were captured to an online catalogue. Pierce’s latest iteration will shift focus to the community of Dallas and again publicly site four of his custom payphones in busy areas of the city. While conceptually identical, the newest series will be redesigned using updated technology to ensure its operation and sustainability for decades to come.

PRP (Permanent Research Project)
Dallas, Texas
PRP (Permanent Research Project) is a collaborative artist-run space that provides a supportive environment to produce and exhibit work while fostering investigation, experimentation, and discourse. Approaching its 10th year of operation, PRP has been an ongoing resource for artists who lack other means to show their work, and a catalyst for fresh ideas and community-building. Funding will support critical repairs and improvements to the exhibition space as well as support for the material needs and creative labor of participating artists.