We are thrilled to announce Sky Hopinka as the recipient of the 2026 Rappaport Art Prize!

Established in 2000, the Rappaport Art Prize is an annual art award presented to a contemporary artist with strong connections to New England by deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum through the support of the Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, WA and Palm Springs, CA. In Portland, OR he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms of media.

More About Sky Hopinka

His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial, the 2021 edition of Prospect.5, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial in South Korea and the Göteborg International Biennial in Switzerland in 2023.

He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies–Bard College in 2020, at LUMA in Arles, France in 2022, and in 2024 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA and Kunsthalle Friart in Switzerland.

His films, videos, and photographs are in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, The Whitney Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center amongst others.

He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018–2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, and was a winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and Cambridge, MA and is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Attend Sky Hopinka’s Rappaport Art Prize Lecture for FREE on Thursday, October 8, 2026 at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln.