ROCKLAND, ME.- The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation announced the recipient of it’s $50,000. 2026 Visual Arts Award. The vision of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation is to encourage, expand, and sustain the courageous and imaginative dialogue that is fundamental to the arts. The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation celebrates the value of art to transcend cultures and connect with communities. Through its programs, the Foundation supports the exploration of the common ground that art occupies, the way it engages people, and its ability to reveal our shared human experience. Given that, the four esteemed jurors and the Foundation could not be more pleased with the selection of Tania Bruguera, a brave and innovative artist cites Donna McNeil, Founding Executive Director
Tania Bruguera (Cuban, b. 1968) is an internationally renowned contemporary artist, activist, and cultural strategist focused on performances and installations that scrutinize political power dynamics and their implications for social justice. With a career spanning over three decades, she has continuously pushed boundaries by exploring how art can intersect with everyday political realities, aiming to empower individuals to become active citizens rather than passive spectators. Bruguera's artistic practice catalyzes social and political change, leveraging themes such as power, migration, censorship, and repression to ignite dialogue and action.
Focused on socially engaged art and institutional critique practice, Bruguera has introduced concepts like Arte til (art as a tool), Political timing-specific art, Art for the Not Yet, and Est-tica, providing frameworks for artists to address pressing social issues effectively. Through long-term projects like Ctedra Arte de Conducta, Immigrant Movement International, and Institute for Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR), she has challenged institutional norms and reshaped collective memory, education, and politics. Bruguera has been recognized with prestigious awards such as an Alpert Award, Robert Rauschenberg Award, Prix de Rome of the American Academy, among others. Her work has been showcased worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, biennales, and theater festivals, including prominent venues like the Malta Biennale, Tate Turbine Hall (2018), Documenta (2002,2022), and the Venice Biennale (2001, 2005, 2009, 2015). She had solo projects at MoMA, Queens Museum of Art, Centre d’Art Pompidou, Van Abbemuseum, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporneo (MUAC) in Mexico, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana.
Tania's work is necessary. She challenges our relations to art, activism, and power—it probes at how we participate within, skirt around, or stand against these systems. In her hands, art becomes a tool not only to express the personal, but something that activates the energy within all of us as forces for change. As a past Ellis-Beauregard Foundation visual art fellow, it has been an honor to take part in this process and to reaffirm Tania's decades of powerful, ever-relevant work. I hope this recognition offers the same sense of freedom and grounding that it offered me. - Hai-Wen Li, 2025 Visual Arts Awardee.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award. Art flourishes when people and institutions believe in its power to open new ways of seeing, thinking, and acting in the world. This recognition is both a stimulus, an encouragement, and a responsibility to continue making and sharing art.” Tania Bruguera
Over a career that has spanned decades, Tania Bruguera has fearlessly and unflinchingly interrogated and exposed dominant structures of power and authority, holding a mirror up to injustice, repression, and inequality in her home country of Cuba and in the world writ large. A towering figure working at the intersection of contemporary art and activism, Bruguera's poetic and incisive work in performance and installation demonstrates that politics and aesthetics are not mutually exclusive and that art can truly change the world. Gordon Wilkins, Robert M Walker curator of American Arts Addition Gallery of American Art.
Tania Bruguera's consistent critiques, diverse forms, and immersive experiences speak to the urgency of our time. This award is a call for her to continue to move viewers to be participants inside and outside of the art world. Bridget Cooks, Professor of Art History and African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
