Erick Alejandro Hernández, Painter Who Explores Immigration and Assimilation, Wins $20,000 DAG Prize

Erick Alejandro Hernández, the Cuban-born US-based artist known for his paintings which address immigration, grief and displacement, has today been named the winner of the second annual DAG Prize for Visual Art.

Hernández, who is now based in Connecticut, uses his practice to explore how traditional painting techniques can be altered to better hold complex individual and collective histories. As a recipient of the US-based award for emerging to mid-careers artists, he receives a prize of $20,000. 

Douglas Graham, one half of the duo who founded prize, told Ocula that the artist’s work “spoke to us immediately in a way that felt unfamiliar”. “There’s a sense of shared experience, but also something generational and discomfiting that we really responded to,” he said.

“His style is both technically precise and loose, with a striking mastery of colour that underscores these stories of loss and assimilation and exile. The work is powerful and sometimes bleak and speaks to DAG’s mission to champion originality in a homogenous world.”

Hernández graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in painting in 2017 and has since exhibited across America, including at Perrotin’s New York location in 2023. However, as per the award’s stipulations, he is yet to receive another major prize or widespread recognition.

According to Douglas’s co-founder, musical collaborator and partner Alyssa Graham, this focus on emerging artists and on ideas that challenge “predictability and mediocrity” is currently particularly vital within the United States. “Establishments are always resistant to change, and that works against new and unique voices,” she said.

“Add to that the defunding of arts organisations like the National Endowment for the Arts and the de-emphasising of the arts at US universities—these shifts have silenced a lot of artistic voices.”

Launched in 2025, the DAG prize is aimed at generating significant innovation, and at “supporting voices that might otherwise get lost”. The award is intended to facilitate a specific project or exhibition that represents a new direction for the winning artist’s work, with funds available for materials, studio space, exhibition costs, and travel for research.

Discussing the award’s aim of pushing back against “herd mentality” and “manufactured hype”, Alyssa said: “What a few curators or high-profile collectors value sets the standard that others feel they have to follow. Our hope is for the DAG prize to break that cycle, so that artists who’ve been overlooked by the power brokers of the art world can enter the conversation. 

“We’re not against fanfare or fashion, but these things should expand our language and landscape, rather than limit them to the tastes of a few gatekeepers.”

In securing the prize, Hernández beat fellow finalists Sarah Trigg and Marc Newsome. Trigg, a New York-based painter and sculptor, explores home, shelter and transformation in her works, employing a wide range of natural-seeming textures. Houston-based Newsome, meanwhile, is a photographer and filmmaker whose long-term project I Love 3rd Ward documents gentrification and displacement across a historically Black neighbourhood.

The DAG Prize also awards $20,000 to winners in two additional categories. Luz Elena Mendoza has received the prize for music, and Tegan Nia Swanson the prize for literature.