The multinational electronics company LG and the Guggenheim New York have named the conceptual artist Trevor Paglen as the recipient of the 2026 LG Guggenheim Award. The artist will receive an honorarium of $100,000.
Paglen, who is based in New York, works across multiple formats including photography, writing, digital art, sculpture and more. However, it is his works that attempt to visualise the systems and boundaries of mass surveillance, communications infrastructure and computer imaging that have made him one of the most influential US artists of his generation.
Trevor Paglen, Faces of ImageNet, 2022. Interactive video installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; Pace Gallery, New York; and Paglen Studio, Brooklyn. © Trevor Paglen
“We’re living through a profound transformation in our relationship to images,” Paglen said in a statement. “Images, sensing systems, algorithms and the infrastructures around them have become active participants in the world—shaping decisions, identities, cultures and histories.”
In selecting Paglen, the LG Guggenheim Award jury praised his ability to bring “legibility and public access to opaque and often inaccessible technologies, while resisting dominant corporate narratives and foregrounding broader societal and ethical considerations”. The jury for this year’s award included Mami Kataoka, the director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; Melanie Lenz, the curator of digital art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; Rasha Salti, a researcher, writer and curator of art and film, and curatorial advisor to the late Koyo Kouoh; Noam Segal, the LG Electronics associate curator at the Guggenheim in New York; and Eugenio Viola, the former artistic director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá. The LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative was launched in 2022 as a five-year collaboration between the two organisations.
Trevor Paglen, Orbital Reflector, 2018. Mylar, aluminum and solar panels. Courtesy Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; Pace Gallery, New York; and Paglen Studio, Brooklyn. © Trevor Paglen
Paglen will deliver a hybrid lecture and performance titled “The Lizard People Are Here!” at the Guggenheim in New York on 18 May. The event’s title winks at conspiracy theories and paranoia, but its underlying point is sober: the systems Paglen documents are not the stuff of fringe imagination but of daily, largely unexamined life. His new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, will be released by Verso the following day.
The award’s past recipients are Stephanie Dinkins (in 2023), Shu Lea Cheang (2024) and Ayoung Kim (2025). One further artist will be recognised in 2027, the initiative’s final year.
