The Ruth Foundation, based in Milwaukee, has named five artists as recipients of its 2026 Ruth Awards—$100,000 grants disbursed over two years with no strings attached. The money arrives at a moment when artists across disciplines are navigating tighter funding landscapes, making unrestricted support a rare and significant lift.
Yuji Agematsu collects debris from New York City streets—bottle caps, cigarette butts, broken glass—and transforms them into miniature sculptures of startling delicacy. His work recently appeared in a two-venue exhibition at the Judd Foundation in SoHo and at Gavin Brown's Harlem gallery. There's something quietly radical about taking the city's refuse and asking viewers to see it as material worthy of sustained attention.
Ranu Mukherjee works across painting, film, installation, and performance, weaving together Indian textiles, pigments, animation, and choreography into pieces that refuse easy categorization. Her work has circulated through the 2022 Singapore Biennial, the 2019 Karachi Biennale, and solo shows at the de Young Museum and 18th Street Arts Center—a trajectory that speaks to her ability to build conversations across continents.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxWill Rawls is a choreographer whose work has been presented at MoMA, the Whitney, ICA Los Angeles, and MCA Chicago. Last month, he staged a performance at Performance Space New York alongside an exhibition at The Kitchen, continuing a practice that treats dance and visual art as inseparable.
Ellen Sebastian Chang has spent five decades as a director, dramaturge, writer, and educator. Her debut play premiered in 1982; in 1986, she co-founded Life on the Water, a film production company. Her career arc represents the kind of sustained, multifaceted creative practice that institutions often overlook in favor of emerging talent.
Anna Martine Whitehead's performance work—including the three-act opera "FORCE!"—has been shown at MCA Chicago, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and REDCAT in Los Angeles. She's also an author, having published "TREASURE | My Black Rupture" in 2016.
Kim Nguyen, the Ruth Foundation's program director, noted that the award exists to acknowledge "the necessity of supporting rigorous creative practice, critical thinking, and the freedom of artistic expression." In a funding ecosystem often shaped by market forces and institutional trends, that kind of unrestricted support—$500,000 total across five artists—creates space for the work that might not fit neatly into a grant application's narrative arc.
The Ruth Foundation has been making these awards since 2013, recognizing that artists need resources to sustain their practice, not just launch it.
