Image: Phoenix Art Museum
Phoenix Art Museum will host ‘In Conversation: 2025 Lehmann Emerging Artists’ on September 23, 2026, bringing together Arizona-based artists Jan Talmadge Davids and Chris Ignacio, recipients of the museum’s 2025 Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards. Christian Ramírez, the museum’s Cohn Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Engagement, will moderate the discussion, which will offer the artists’ perspectives on work presented in the museum’s Arizona Artist Awards exhibitions.
The conversation is connected to ‘2025 Arizona Artist Awards’, an exhibition on view through January 24, 2027, in the museum’s Second Floor Katz Wing. The presentation features work by Davids, Ignacio and Alice Leora Briggs, the recipient of the 2025 Scult Family Artist Award. Together, the exhibitions address themes identified by the museum as humanity, identity and fragility.
Ignacio is a Filipino-American puppeteer, producer, educator and interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines the relationship between voice, technology and identity. His work for the exhibition includes the new series ‘Everything is Ourselves’, a group of mixed-media installations and video works focused on the long tradition of animating objects, from prehistoric figures carved in clay and stone to digital avatars. The series considers how animation can express the human impulse to construct meaning, create or try on identities, and pursue cosmological understanding.
Ignacio began his puppetry career in New York in 2012, training with experimental artists at La MaMa and working across theatre, community arts and livestream media. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2023 as a puppeteer in ‘Florencia en el Amazonas’, directed by Mary Zimmerman. His Phoenix work has included media design for Ballet Arizona, Arizona Broadway Theater, Arizona Opera and Childsplay. He holds an MFA in Theatre/Interdisciplinary Digital Media from Arizona State University, where he teaches motion capture and 3D animation, and serves as creative producer for the T. Denny Sanford Harmony Institute.
Davids works in clay and mixed media, drawing on childhood landscapes and local ecologies to explore place-making, fragility and vulnerability. At Phoenix Art Museum, she expands her series ‘repair(ian)’ through video and porcelain works informed by observations of flora, wild clay and the natural landscape. The works are described by the museum as elegies for landscapes that shape identity and belonging, and as reflections of the tension between lamentation and hope, fragility and strength in environments affected by climate crisis and agricultural abuse.
Born in Tucson and raised in southeastern Arizona, Davids studied at the University of Arizona and California State University at Long Beach before completing an MFA at Arizona State University’s Herberger School of Art and Design. Her work has been shown at venues including the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum in Long Beach, Tempe Center for the Arts and the Tucson Museum of Art. The Lehmann awards, presented annually by Phoenix Art Museum, provide recognition and financial support for emerging professional artists working in Arizona. Each award includes a $10,000 prize, a group exhibition at the museum and a lifetime PhxArt Membership.
