Rosana Paulino Wins $25K Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice
The Afro‑Brazilian artist has been recognised for her ‘dynamic, relational, and liberatory’ rethinking of colonial frameworks for science. Save to My Ocula
Rosana Paulino has won the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, awarded by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School in New York.
Paulino, who will co-represent Brazil at the 2026 Venice Biennale with Adriana Varejão, is recognised for the impact of her 2016 artist book, ¿História Natural? (Natural History?).
Combining appropriated ethnographic photographs of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Brazilians with botanical imagery, embroidery, digital printing, and hand-painted elements, Paulino’s counter-archival project aims to expose the logics of Western science that continue to shape contemporary Brazil.
The jury, chaired by Chus Martínez and comprising curators and artists Carin Kuoni, Gabi Ngcobo, and Tony Albert, and the scholar Sennay Ghebreab, were drawn to Paulino’s work for its framing of intelligence as ‘dynamic, relational, and liberatory’.
The 25,000 USD award is accompanied by an editioned artwork by Yoko Ono, along with a solo exhibition at The New School in October next year.
The Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice honours art dealer Jane Lombard’s 5 million USD gift to the Center. Past recipients include Theaster Gates, Maria Thereza Alves, and the South African collective Chimurenga, among others.
With Paulino, the Vera List Center extends its inquiry into intelligence, with this year’s Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence, reframing intelligence as ‘not bound by data or logic’, but ‘rooted in lived experience, intergenerational wisdom, and the enduring ties between body, land, and story’. —[O]
Main image: Rosana Paulino, from ¿História Natural? (Natural History?, 2016). Courtesy Rosana Paulino.
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