Stephanie Dinkins Named Inaugural Recipient of the LG Guggenheim Award

• The trailblazing Brooklyn-based artist, educator, and artificial intelligence practitioner aims to create equitable social and technological ecosystems.
• The Award is part of the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, a five-year, multifaceted collaboration designed to research, honor, and promote artists working at the intersection of art and technology.

SEOUL, South Korea, May 20, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — The Guggenheim and LG proudly announce Stephanie Dinkins as the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award recipient. The Brooklyn-based artist, educator, and pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) practitioner, whose career spans over twenty years of artistic inquiry, is the first awardee to be recognized as part of the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative; a five-year, multifaceted collaboration designed to research, honor, and promote artists working at the intersection of art and technology. Selected by an international jury of experts in the field, Dinkins will receive an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000 in celebration of her groundbreaking achievements in technology-based art.

“Stephanie Dinkins’ artistic range, engagement with socio-cultural values, and leading artificial intelligence explorations are crucial reflections of the evolving future of technology-based art. It’s the Guggenheim’s honor to support her extraordinary work through this award,” stated Naomi Beckwith, Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Guggenheim.

“LG congratulates Stephanie Dinkins, and hopes this recognition will meaningfully advance her future endeavors,” said Seol Park, Head of Brand Management at LG Corp. “The $100,000 honorarium is accompanied by a physical award whose sculptural form represents the potential for technology to inspire new and unexpected artforms,” explained Park.

Dinkins’s participatory and immersive works aim to create equitable social and technological ecosystems through public engagement, storytelling, and a hands-on approach to technology. Her long-running experiments with AI center memory, intimacy, poetics, and playfulness as strategies to reconstruct AI models and their integrated tools—in particular natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), by which computers encode words into data for self-training, as well as deep learning (DL), which takes inspiration from neural networks to better imitate human thought processes. By anchoring her practice in small data rather than vast quantities of information, Dinkins develops reparative models for AI centered not on instrumentalization but rather on socially driven and culturally sensitive values such as care and attentiveness.

“I am grateful to LG and the Guggenheim for their support of artists who are using technology to foster positive change. I believe that art has the power to inspire and provoke, and I am committed to using my work to raise awareness of important issues and to promote social justice,” said Stephanie Dinkins.

Whether through chatbots, virtual and augmented reality, or gallery experiences, Dinkins addresses marginalized groups, such as people of color, LGBTQIA+ communities, women, and disabled people, who are excessively affected by poor code design. Her body of work advances transparent, redressable AI systems by cultivating digital literacy and online representation among these largely unprotected populations–foreshadowing the most urgent discussions about social justice and technology in the present day.

Dinkins (b. 1964, Perth Amboy, NJ) is the Yayoi Kusama Professor of Art at Stony Brook University, NY, where she founded the Future Histories Studio as part of the DISCO Network, an interacademic web incorporating social sciences and artistic approaches to promote online equity and safety for impacted communities. She holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions include Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data, Stamps Gallery, Ann Arbor, MI (2021, traveled to Queens Museum of Art, NY); In Search of the Present, Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2021–22); FUTURES, Smithsonian Museum Arts and Industry, Washington D.C. (2021–22); Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art, Buffalo AKG Museum, NY (2022); BioMedia: The Era of Life-Like Media, ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (2022); and The Imitation Game, Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2022). She has also exhibited at De Young Museum, San Francisco (2020); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2019); and Ford Foundation Gallery, New York (2018, 2023). Her work has also been supported by the Onassis Foundation (2021); Nokia Bell Labs (2019–21); Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence; Facebook (Meta) FAIR (2021–22); the Artist Fellow program of the Berggruen Institute (2020); Creative Capital (2019); Soros Equality Fellowship (2018); and many others. Dinkins lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

The jurors for the 2023 LG Guggenheim Award are Legacy Russell, Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen, New York; Tina Rivers Ryan, Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Nat Trotman, Curator, Performance and Media, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Xiaoyu Weng, independent curator and writer; and Anicka Yi, artist. 

Stephanie Dinkins will be celebrated in this year’s YCC Party, presented by LG Display. The LG Guggenheim Award and the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative is made possible by LG.

Jury Statement

“We are pleased to offer the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award to artist and educator Stephanie Dinkins. Among the truly impressive group of nominees we considered, Dinkins stood out for her singular and exceptional work in the field of artificial intelligence. Dinkins’s longstanding and internationally recognized practice is deeply centered in ethics of care and social equity, exploring new models for machine learning based not in extraction but in engagement. Her inclusive and collaborative approach powerfully advocates for transparency, participation, and access around AI technologies, especially among communities at greatest risk of being abused by them. Through a range of media that includes interactive installations, sculpture, video, and web projects, as well as writing and community workshops, Dinkins steadfastly focuses on family structures, oral histories, and small data. By enacting change locally, her works claim, we can envision new technological ecosystems at a global scale. 

“As artificial intelligence dominates public discourse around technology and increasingly impacts the daily lives of people all over the world, we applaud Dinkins for the urgency and optimism of her investigations. We are honored to support her groundbreaking practice through this transformational Award.”

About the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative

Founded in 2022, the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative is a five-year, multifaceted collaboration between the Guggenheim and LG designed to research, honor, and promote artists working at the intersection of art and technology. Unique in its areas of concentration and approach, the initiative is an unprecedented investment in technology as an artistic medium. It will allow the Guggenheim to broaden its investigations into this innovative field, providing essential support to the visionary artists who inspire new understandings of how technology shapes, and is shaped by, society.

The initiative is also supported by the appointment of Noam Segal as LG Electronics Associate Curator. Focusing on research, Segal holds an active role in developing the Guggenheim’s engagement with technology-based art, producing scholarship and public-facing content that will strengthen the goals of the multifaceted initiative across the museum’s departments.

About LG

LG is a technology innovator and global leader in consumer electronics, chemicals, and automotive components. Founded in 1947, LG was a driving force behind South Korea’s modernization. The company produced South Korea’s first radio and television sets, and today is a global leader in organic light-emitting displays (OLED), electric car batteries, and advanced industrial plastics. The LG group of companies employ over 280,000 people in more than 60 countries that together generate USD 150 billion in annual revenue. LG Corporation (LG Corp.) is the holding company for industry-leading LG subsidiaries, such as LG Electronics, LG Display, LG Energy Solution, LG Chem, to name a few. For more information about the LG group of companies, visit lgcorp.com.

About the Solomon R. Guggenheim

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was established in 1937 and is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of modern and contemporary art through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publications. The international constellation of museums includes the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; and the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. An architectural icon and “temple of spirit” where radical art and architecture meet, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is now among a group of eight Frank Lloyd Wright structures in the United States recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. To learn more about the museum and the Guggenheim’s activities around the world, visit guggenheim.org.

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May 19, 2023

For additional information:

Suhoon Choi
LG Corp.
+82 2 3773 2171
lgpr@lg.com 

Sara Fox
Guggenheim Press Office
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation
212 423 3840
pressoffice@guggenheim.org