2026 Aperture Gala
Honorees
Deana Lawson
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Thursday, November 5, 2026
6:30 p.m.
American Museum of Natural History
200 Central Park West
New York City
Cochairs
Dr. Kathryn Beal
Allan and Anna Chapin
Catherine Gund and Anna Traggio, in memory of Agnes Gund
Dr. Bruce M. Halpryn and Chas Riebe
Lyle Ashton Harris
Arthur Jafa
Judy Glickman Lauder
Lisa Rosenblum and Georgina Celebic
Thomas R. Schiff and Mary Ellen Goeke
Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović
The Aperture Gala is an annual celebration that brings together our vibrant community of artists, philanthropists, writers, editors, collectors, and other leaders in the field.
As Aperture’s most significant fundraising event of the year, it provides vital support for our programming and publications, in pursuit of our mission to create insight, community, and understanding through photography.
The Aperture Gala is an annual celebration that brings together our vibrant community of artists, philanthropists, writers, editors, collectors, and other leaders in the field.
As Aperture’s most significant fundraising event of the year, it provides vital support for our programming and publications, in pursuit of our mission to create insight, community, and understanding through photography.
For more information, please contact the Gala office at Bowen & CO., 914.231.6180; aperture@bowenandco.com.
This year, we look forward to paying tribute to Deana Lawson and Hiroshi Sugimoto at the American Museum of Natural History, in the heart of the neighborhood we will soon call home. The 2026 Aperture Gala comes at a pivotal moment in our seventy-four-year history and stands as a testament to the spirit of community that anchors and inspires our work.
Deana Lawson is one of the most influential photographers of her generation. In meticulously staged portraiture, assemblages, and otherworldly holograms, Lawson has created a visionary language to contemplate identity and ritual, establishing a body of work where lived and imaginary experiences blur and interpretations are never fixed. Lawson guest edited Aperture’s Fall 2024 issue, “Arrhythmic Mythic Ra,” which refracts themes of family, social history, and the astrophysical through past and contemporary photography. Her work is the subject of the acclaimed Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018).
Across a six-decade career, Hiroshi Sugimoto has redefined the metaphysical possibilities of the still image. Through photography, architecture, sculpture, and performance, he has continuously probed the limits of perception and time in formally rigorous, experimental projects such as Seascapes or Theaters, his landmark series of long-exposure black-and-white photographs. Soon after his arrival in New York, in 1974, he began Dioramas (1975–ongoing), his first photographic series: large-format images of the habitat dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History.
Honorees
The photographs of Deana Lawson (born in Rochester, New York, 1979) engage documentary traditions, yet her directorial hand bridges imagined and lived realities by obscuring and reconfiguring meaning through choices of environment, pose, objects, and dress or undress. She holds a BFA in photography from Pennsylvania State University and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. Lawson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, which allowed her to photograph in the Dominican Republic, DRC, Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, and South Africa. In 2020 she became the first photo-based artist to receive the Hugo Boss Prize, and Centropy, her 2021 solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, marked the final iteration of the prize. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, London; Brooklyn Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pinault Collection, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (2018) was named by The New York Times Magazine and Time as one of the best photobooks of that year. She teaches at Princeton University and lives and works between Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
Since the 1970s, Hiroshi Sugimoto (born in Tokyo, 1948) has explored ideas of time, empiricism, and metaphysics through surreal and formalist photographs. He holds a BA from Saint Paul’s University, Tokyo, and a BFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Los Angeles. In 2009, he founded the Odawara Art Foundation, Japan, to advance traditional Japanese and international contemporary performing arts; in 2017, the foundation opened the Enoura Observatory, which the artist designed. Sugimoto’s photographs are held in collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and Tate Gallery, London. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at Hayward Gallery, London (2023); Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art (2020); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2018); and Palace of Versailles, France (2018). Sugimoto’s numerous awards include the National Arts Club Medal of Honor in Photography (2018); Centenary Medal, Royal Photographic Society (2017); Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2013); Praemium Imperiale (2009); Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2001); International Center of Photography Infinity Award (1999); Mainichi Art Award (1988); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980). Sugimoto’s work has been written about extensively, including in Aperture magazine, and in 2016, Aperture copublished Hiroshi Sugimoto: Black Box. He splits his time between Tokyo and New York.
