The inaugural winner of Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center‘s Nasher Prize is Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Based on her selection by an international jury, Salcedo will be presented with a $100,000 prize in a ceremony to be held in Dallas on April 2, 2016.

“I believe my task as an artist is to make connections—to connect worlds that normally are unconnected, like art and politics, like the experience of the lost lives of victims of political violence with the experience and memories of the viewers who approach or contemplate the work—and I think the prize will widen this audience,” Salcedo said in a statement.

On the jury panel were sculptor Phyllida Barlow; Lynne Cooke, a senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Steven Nash, the founding Nasher director; Okwui Enwezor, director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst and curator of the 2015 Venice Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo chief curator Yuko Hasegawa; Nicholas Serota, director of London’s Tate; and art historian Alexander Potts.

Doris Salcedo,
Installation view, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1998–99.
Photo: Herbert Lotz
Reproduced courtesy of the artist; Alexander and Bonin, New York; and White Cube, London.

“We wanted to choose someone whose work was not only innovative, challenging, and significant, but also someone whose work continues to take risks, and address the changing contemporary conditions,” said Serota in a statement on the jury’s decision.

“Over the course of the past 30 years, through her use of meaningful, everyday materials, often in unexpected and socially-charged public spaces in her native Colombia and elsewhere around the world, Doris Salcedo has created a body of work that is both aesthetically striking and politically resonant,” added Nasher director Jeremy Strick in a statement.

Doris Salcedo, Untitled (1995) at White Cube during Expo Chicago 2015
Photo: Ben Davis

A retrospective of Salcedo’s work is currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York after a successful run at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Her work has been the subject of exhibitions at the New Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Modern, where she created a 548-foot-long crack in the Turbine Hall floor for 2007’s Shibboleth.

Tomorrow night, Salcedo will be on hand at the Guggenheim for an inter-disciplinary symposium touching on art history, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and other issues connected to her artistic practice.

Exhibition curator Katherine Brinson will be joined by a panel of speakers that include California Polytechnic State University art and design professor Elizabeth Adan, Philadelphia Museum of Art contemporary art curator Carlos Basualdo, and Stanford University art history department chair Alexander Nemerov, among others.

“Doris Salcedo” is on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from June 26–October 12, 2015.