Image: Phoenix Art Museum, New York
Phoenix Art Museum will open two exhibitions tied to its 2025 Arizona Artist Awards on July 29, 2026, beginning with a reception at 5 pm and an artist talk at 6:30 pm by Alice Leora Briggs. The exhibition pair includes 'Alice Leora Briggs: NOW WHAT?' and the 2025 Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards exhibition, which features work by Jan Talmadge Davids and Chris Ignacio. The exhibitions are scheduled to remain on view through January 24, 2027.
The museum describes 'NOW WHAT?' as bringing together work on paper, a site-specific installation, and Briggs’s signature sgraffito compositions. In the exhibition material, Briggs’s work is linked to recurring themes of mortality and human frailty, which the museum says she uses as means to discover clarity and empathy. The opening-night lecture will give Briggs a chance to discuss her process and the works included in the exhibition.
The 2025 Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards exhibition places Davids and Ignacio in adjacent galleries alongside Briggs’s presentation. Ignacio will premiere a new series, 'Everything is Ourselves', drawing on puppetry and performance traditions to consider how animated objects function as extensions of identity. Davids will present work from 'repair(ian)', a series that poetically reinterprets the flora and fauna of the San Pedro River in Southern Arizona.
Phoenix Art Museum organizes the Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards exhibition and curates it through Christian Ramírez, the Cohn Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art and Director of Engagement. The museum’s exhibition page says the 2025 Arizona Artist Awards recognize Arizona-based contemporary artists whose work explores humanity, identity, and fragility. The awards program includes the Scult Family Artist Award and the Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards.
Briggs is identified by the museum as the 2025 Scult Family Artist Award recipient. The exhibition page says she is based in Tucson and investigates human frailties through drawings, woodcuts, letterpress broadsides, site-specific installations, and books. Her publications include 'Dreamland: The Way Out of Juárez' and 'Abecedario de Juárez: An Illustrated Lexicon', and the museum notes that her work is held in more than 35 public collections.
Davids and Ignacio are both presented in the museum materials as Arizona-based artists working across media and disciplines. Davids works in clay and mixed media to explore childhood landscapes, local ecologies, and ideas of place-making, while Ignacio is described as a Filipino-American puppeteer, producer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the intersection of voice, technology, and identity. The museum says the exhibitions are part of its Arizona Artist Awards program, which has awarded more than $350,000 to more than 200 Arizona-based artists since 1986.
Tickets for the July 29 opening-night lecture are free for members and $5 for the general public. The event is listed at Phoenix Art Museum, 1625 North Central Avenue, Phoenix, with the artist reception at 5 pm and the talk by Briggs at 6:30 pm.
