Jessica Stockholder
March 17, 2026 | The American Academy of Arts and Letters
Each year the American Academy of Arts and Letters honors over 70 architects, visual artists, writers, and composers with awards accompanied by monetary prizes.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Award of Merit Medal is given each year, in rotation, to outstanding American painters, short story writers, sculptors, novelists, poets, and playwrights. The first Award of Merit Medal for Sculpture was given in 1943.
This year, the Award of Merit Medal in Sculpture is being given to Jessica Stockholder.
Jessica Stockholder (b. 1959, Seattle, Washingon) studied painting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and received an MFA from Yale University. Stockholder is a pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations that have become a prominent language in contemporary art. Her site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Stockholder’s complex installations incorporate the architecture in which they have been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, and even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape.
“I began, and still do begin, with a love for color and unrelenting interest in the intersection of a pictorial way of looking, (or thinking,) with the physical matter of the body and the materiality of things in space.” – Jessica Stockholder