Encouraging Art: the 2026 SECA Award
Some awards gain gravitas with the slow drip freight of time, and so it is with SFMOMA's SECA Award — one of, if not the, longest-running awards for artists in the Bay. Given biennially of late, it comes with a modest cash prize, a publication, a collective show at SFMOMA, and, of course, bragging rights. This week, the newest winners were happily announced: Em Kettner, Chanell Stone, and CrossLypka, plucked from these sixteen finalists:
Sholeh Asgary, Windy Chien, CrossLypka, Soleé Darrell, Hughen/Starkweather, Xandra Ibarra, Em Kettner, Charles H. Lee, Yameng Lee Thorp, Aspen Mays, Adia Millett, Lorena Molina, Tricia Rainwater, Chanell Stone, Livien Yin, Jes Young
We do love SECA's de-acronymed full name, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, which began somewhat humbly as a kind of an all dude patrons group, with the award established in 1967, six years after the Society's founding and one after it went co-ed (With $650 to SFMOMA, you too can be an official Encourager). The Society chose the award initially, but it is now selected by SFMOMAcurators — this edition byAlison Guh and Delphine Sims — from a list of nominees generated by artists, curators, experts, and gallerists (this was the most mysterious part honestly), each offering three names.
Historically, collector-patrons-Encouragers ride buses between the studios of the finalists, presumably to encourage an educated patronage. Encouragement of any kind is quite welcome these days. You don't need me to tell you that shit is anxious: five San Francisco galleries closed last year, CCA shuttering in 2027, SFAI is long gone, and whatever meager scraps thrown at art by the feds are a mere memory (and sundry ongoing tragedies and dumpster fires too many to name). And still things change, here in town, Levi's heir / Mayor Daniel Lurie just appointed Matthew Goudeau — former YBCA executive and longtime city insider — as San Francisco's first arts and culture ‘czar’, consolidating three municipal agencies into one, which is either a rationalization of bureaucracy or a consolidation of power/resources depending on your disposition. This is all to say we need every flicker of good news just as artists need every monetary award and shout out that the world and the Bay can grant them.
Back to the SECA Award, we're not entirely neutral as ArtBae named Kettner one of its inaugural SHACK15 Art Prize fellows last year, but we really dig the winners. (Sidebar, we also did a little number crunching: in the past twenty-five years of the prize, two-thirds of the winners have stayed in the Bay Area, and nearly all of them in the last decade.)
A few words on each of the winning artists, may they and all the finalists, (and truly any artist struggling to survive in the Bay) be loudly, joyously, feverishly encouraged and supported in all the ways we can.
CrossLypka (Tyler Cross, b. 1992; Kyle Lypka, b. 1987) have been life partners and collaborators for nearly a decade, shaping, lining, and firing ceramics in Oakland. Passing work between their hands — each piece begins as a drawing, curving into form, lovingly glazed, and transformed at every stage by two people whose touches are now inseparable. These impossible alphabets and medium-bending objects contour and vogue into shapely silhouettes. Cryptic signs and futuristic cave paintings charred with color, like the smoke of a candle's flame tonguing their surface but with hot chroma rather than mere carbon black. These works are firmly unresolved, slightly uneasy in their earned elegance.
Em Kettner (b. 1988) conjures miniature worlds of what she names ‘interdependence’ from her Richmond studio. Porcelain limbs break and bind together through cotton and silk threads that refuse to let go. Her figurative sculptures, along with glazed tile drawings and portals carved into smooth mahogany are a tenser twist on the votive offering — a talismanic prayer for laughing grace against the break and hurt of owning a body. Seriously unserious, still heartbreak real, a celebration of these bent and broken bodies. Materially subtle, proud in their fragility, Kettner's clay spindles and looms handspun textiles, which can bind porcelain limbs together. Caregivers morph with/into patients, lovers tangle, things into bodies into things. Kettner, who has muscular dystrophy, has described friends carrying her on piggyback: "it really feels like we become one many-limbed being" (Cultured, 2024). The erotic comedy of care — bodies knitted to each other and the furniture that holds them, those jesters and invalids and lovers all too human in refusing their assigned roles, an admirably Bartleby-ish residue.
Chanell Stone (b. 1992) snaps mysterious photographs of the Black body in landscapes, from California to Mississippi: overgrown lots, project balconies, her granny's aloe-d Los Angeles backyard, and agricultural fields haunted by the perils Black individuals, Maroon communities, and all those with darker complexions have too often faced outdoors in these American states. Lately in Stone's photos, the darkness deepens — a long swathe of shadow crosses the surface, or a rippling water obscures. Something teases at what can't be seen, or perhaps what deserves the softness of shadow. The sharp lens of a photograph pretends to write with all the light, but it just can't capture everything. Though through the artist, as here, we might submerge and perhaps admire the complicated beauty and shadowed states that hold us.