Mildred Howard Wins $25,000 Artist Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Names Environmental Art Grants, and More: Industry Moves for September 2, 2026

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

Industry Moves

Mildred Howard Wins Artists’ Legacy Foundation 2026 Artist Award: The Bay Area artist, who is currently the subject of a retrospective Oakland Museum of California, will receive $25,000 from the Oakland-based nonprofit. Created via a bequest from sculptor Viola Frey, the annual prize honors “a painter or sculptor who has made significant contributions to their field and whose work shows evidence of the hand,” per a release. Past winners include Suzan Frecon, John Outterbridge, Howardena Pindell, and Mary Weatherford, who sat on this year’s jury.

Anonymous Was A Woman Announces 2026 Environmental Art Grants: Administered in partnership with the New York Foundation for the Arts, the 2026 cycle will give $498,180 to 27 projects led by women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming artists. The winning projects range from a floating food forest on a barge by Mary Mattingly to a nomadic dome for the exchange of Somali ancestral knowledge and contemporary art. The full list of awardees can be found on the AWAW website.

P.P.O.W Names Trey Hollis as Managing Partner: Hollis joined the New York gallery in 2016 and most recently held the title of senior director, overseeing P.P.O.W’s art fair participation. In a statement, cofounder Wendy Olsoff described Hollis as an “integral part” of the gallery who is “an exceptional manager who understands the many complexities of running a gallery.”  

Galería RGR Now Represents César Paternosto: The Mexico City gallery will present its first exhibition with the artist this week as part of GAMA Week. Since the late 1960s, Paternosto has been working in abstraction, producing works in which he paints the front of the canvas white and adds abstract marks on its sides.

Guillermo García Cruz Joins the Roster of Proyectos Monclova Gallery: Based between Miami and Budapest, the Uruguayan artist draws on the histories of Concrete Art and Constructivism to create his abstractions. His solo exhibition opening this week at Proyectos Monclova will be his first in Mexico City. 

Kotaro Nukaga Takes on Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka: The artist was featured in the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and is currently included in this year’s Venice Biennale. Her prints, sculptures, and installations “respond to questions of climate change, mental health, and survival,” per a release. The Tokyo gallery first showed the artist’s work in March in a two-person exhibition.

Philadelphia Museum of Art Makes Two Hires in Modern and Contemporary Art Department: Joanna Robotham, who is currently curator of modern and contemporary art at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, will be the new John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Curator of Contemporary Art, while Colm Peare, previously an assistant curator at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, will be assistant curator of modern and contemporary art.

The Big Number: $30 M.

That’s the pre-sale estimate for Wassily Kandinsky’s Das bunte Leben (The Colorful Life, 1907), which will hit the block at Christie’s London on October 14. The work was restituted in 2023 to the heirs of Albert Lewenstein and Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann, who had loaned it to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for safekeeping prior to fleeing the Netherlands ahead of the country’s Nazi occupation. It was sold at auction in 1940 by the Nazis; the Bavarian State Bank purchased the painting in 1972 and loaned it to the Lenbachhaus in Munich.

Read This.

In a lengthy New Yorker profile, writer Laura Preston notes that Susan Te Kahurangi King may be New Zealand’s “greatest living artist.”  KAWS, who has long been collecting King’s work, described her work as “some of the best drawings. Period.” It might also surprise some readers that King, who was born in 1951 and does not speak, read, or write, made some of her earliest mature works in the late 1950s and ’60s, when she was a child. Working from the remote town of Te Aroha, King’s work from the period has drawn comparisons to Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Peter Saul, though it’s unlikely she knew of their work. Preston goes into great detail of King’s journey of an artist, from her upbringing and her 16-year break from artmaking to her return to drawing. My favorite part describes how King makes her art: “King had sharpened them in her own eccentric way: not just at one end but at both, hacking down the wood with a kitchen knife to expose a long rod of lead, then gouging into the lead where it met the wood to produce a tip that flared like a club.” —Maximilíano Durón, Senior Editor