May 16, 2026, 6- 9PM
25 Dederick Street, Kingston, NY
Tickets are now on sale for the 2026 CPW Vision Awards Gala! CPW’s annual Vision Awards ceremony recognizes four exemplary artists at a fabulous gala event, and also raises funds for CPW’s general operations.
Each of the honorees has had a significant impact on the field of photography, and will be celebrated in person at a dinner event on May 16, 2026, at CPW’s headquarters at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston.
These are the 2026 honorees:
Lifetime Achievement: Danny Lyon
Photographer of the Year: Mickalene Thomas
Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer: Sridhar Balasubramaniyam
Photobook of the Year: Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination (Museum of Modern Art, 2026), edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Meet our Honorees: Bios
Lifetime Achievement
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942)
Danny Lyon is a legendary American photographer known for his intimate and extended documentary series depicting social outsiders and dissident subcultures. Covering the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South in the 1960s, Lyon adopted a fervently political, antiracist position. He became the official photographer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and marched with John Lewis and Julian Bond, documenting protests and flagrant discrimination. Lyon later photographed motorcycle gangs in the Midwest, inmates in the Texas penal system, and workers dismantling historic buildings in Lower Manhattan. These photographic series became immensely influential photobooks, including The Movement (1964), The Bikeriders (1968), The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), and Conversations with the Dead (1971). Lyon is also a prolific writer and filmmaker who has received two Guggenheim Fellowships. Major retrospectives of Lyons’s work have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Photographer of the Year
Mickalene Thomas (American, b. 1971)
Mickalene Thomas’s photographic images mirror the themes she explores in her painting, printmaking, collage, video, sculpture, and installation work. Often positioning beautiful Black women in repose amidst lush domestic settings, Thomas blurs the distinction between private and public, object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary. All About Love, her elaborate traveling retrospective was one of the key cultural events of 2025 and demonstrated the full range of Thomas’s art, from photography to film to installation. Her 2024 exhibition, Portrait of an Unlikely Space at the Yale University Art Gallery featured early American portraits of Black women, men, and children hanging on walls, standing within cases, and resting atop furniture. Her work is held in numerous collections including the Whitney Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her prizes include a MoCADA Artistic Advocacy Award (2015), and an Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2013).
Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographer
Sridhar Balasubramaniyam (Indian, b. 1989)
Sridhar Balasubramaniyam is a visual artist based in Chennai, whose work in photography and video explores the intricate relationship between body and land. His project Body and Land, documenting theater artists’ interactions with landscape, reflects his deep engagement with the folk performances, tribal weddings, and theatrical productions of southern India’s Dravidian communities. In his series Manarsuzhal (“sand whirl”), Balasubramaniyam wandered across Tamil Nadu for several years, recording moments on the edges of daily life—from a farming family’s damp clothes drying before a quarry-fractured mountain to bees nesting inside electric bulbs. The images meditate on impermanence, belonging, and the quiet endurance of the land, bearing witness to a layered and contradictory Indian landscape shaped by resilience and change. His work has been shown at the Alkazi Theatre Archives, at the National Portrait Gallery in London and more recently at India Art Fair.
Photobook of the Year
Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination (Museum of Modern Art, 2026), edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo
This landmark publication accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art. It documents the myriad ways in which individual photographers and commercial photo studios captured portraits of African citizens at a moment of historic pivotal change–when they were building the civil rights movements that undertook the messy, often deadly work of decolonization. Featuring more than 100 photographs by renowned artists of the time, such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Jean Depara, and by contemporary artists of African descent, such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, this richly illustrated publication manifests the construction of Africa as a political idea. With an introduction by curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, excerpts from landmark texts by V.Y. Mudimbe and Brent Hayes Edwards, and a conversation between Yasmina Price and Momtaza Mehri, Ideas of Africa highlights the potential of the photographic portrait as both a creative endeavor and political mechanism.
“We are especially proud this year to celebrate an exceptional and diverse group of honorees for the 2026 CPW Vision Awards,” said Brian Wallis, CPW Executive Director. “Each recipient has re-drawn the boundaries of global image making, inviting us to see afresh the history of photography and to consider how the medium shapes our sense of beauty, personal identity, politics, and social transformation.”
For twenty-two years, CPW’s Vision Awards have been a mainstay of the nonprofit’s programming. Initiated in 2004, the awards first honored CPW Executive Director Colleen Kenyon and her sister Kathleen Kenyon (whose self-portraits and collages were on view at CPW in the exhibition My Sister, My Self: Photographs by Colleen Kenyon and Kathleen Kenyon), and artist John Dugdale. Among the recent recipients are photographers Nan Goldin, An-My Lê, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dawoud Bey, Sally Mann, and Carrie Mae Weems. This year’s ceremony will be the fourth the organization has staged in its newly renovated headquarters, a 40,000-square-foot historic cigar factory in Midtown Kingston.
In addition to supporting CPW’s general operations, proceeds from the 2026 Vision Awards gala will support Woodstock AIR, CPW’s renowned artist residency, now in its 27th year. Woodstock AIR supports artists of color working with photography and expanding the critical dialogue around diversity, race, and identity in the context of social justice.
We can’t wait to celebrate with you!