The XENO PRIZE for Performance Art and Artists’ Books
The XENO PRIZE for Performance Art
- Hyperallergic article about the XENO Prize.
The 2026 XENO PRIZE for Performance Art recipient will be selected from among proposals for the 2026-27 Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art (deadline April 1, 2026), to receive $5000 in support of new work by an early-career LGBTQ+-identifying performance artist working in one of the 27 United States where, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, laws and policies restrict gender-affirming care.
The XENO PRIZE for Artists’ Books
The 2026 XENO PRIZE for Artists’ Books will be selected from submissions to an Open Call for Proposals issued March 1, 2026 to receive $5000 to publish one artist’s book on the topic of book banning/burning in an edition of at least 100 copies. The deadline of this application is July 4, 2026.
For eligibility requirements and the application, please visit our Submittable page. For other questions, please contact proposals@franklinfurnace.org
EYIBRA [he/they]
https://www.instagram.com/eyibra/
Project Description
“DOMINA” is a six-hour durational performance that stages an unfolding struggle between fragility and force, intimacy and domination. At its center, a trans woman moves through a charged landscape where bodies, heat, and endurance become sites of resistance. The work invokes the weight of cisheteropatriarchal structures and the precarious, often brutal, conditions faced by queer and trans communities in a society that grows ever more hostile. Through acts that blur ritual and confrontation, spectators are drawn into an uneasy complicity—no longer outside observers but implicated participants. DOMINA refuses singular meaning: it is at once a lament, an uprising, and a visceral meditation on survival, power, and the possibility of liberation.
Biography
EYIBRA (formerly known as Abraham Brody) is a performance artist, multidisciplinary artist, and choreographer. His practice explores gender identity, and power dynamics, centering decolonial and anti-patriarchal perspectives. Through his work, EYIBRA uses the human body as a space of transformation, confronting systems of oppression and exploring themes of resilience and vulnerability.
A former collaborator of Marina Abramović, EYIBRA has worked with artists such as Lukas Avendaño, a muxe artist from the Zapotec Nation of Mexico. He is a member of the MUXX collective, based in Mexico, which received the Art + Technology Lab Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2022. His work has been presented at institutions and festivals including the Barbican Centre London, Kampnagel Hamburg, Fondation Beyeler Basel, Pace Gallery, BRIC Arts New York, François Ghebaly Gallery, Teatro de la Ciudad de México, and Festival Ceremonia México, among others.
Recently, EYIBRA presented his solo exhibition ‘TRASHUMANCIA’ at the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda, Mexico City, where he continued his exploration of identity, migration, and the body through audiovisual installations and performance. His work challenges dominant narratives and seeks to create spaces for reflection, resistance, and collective healing.
Sue Jeong Ka [she/they]
Project Description
Index of Pressure traces latent fingerprints on American prisons’ banned books to reveal how censorship traverses bodies and institutions. This project focuses on books by women of color, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and erotic romance novels by Zane, prohibited not for sexually-liberal content alone but due to racial and sexual biases of prison censors. When these books are intercepted, only the sender and censor touch them, rendering them legally and physically untouchable for the incarcerated reader. Reading is interrupted before it can occur, leaving disrupted communication.
As a queer Asian woman, my body has long existed outside the American legal imagination; Asian migration was structured around male labor while women were excluded, and queer Asians were banned from entering the US until 1987. This history informs my examination of erasure, refusal, and the question: if speech is denied, can the fingertip still leave a record?
Using forensic methods, including ninhydrin reactions, fingerprint powders, and digital scanning, I will lift amino acid, sweat, and oil residues left by fingertips that handled these banned books, visualizing them as both data and poetic index. These traces will be printed using risograph and offset methods to produce a 100-copy artist’s edition book combining fingerprint images, rejection letters, and maps of facilities where these books were banned. Drawing from the Indigenous philosophy, “stones remember,” I approach each printed page as a surface holding memory through contact. Index of Pressure transforms touch into archival transmission, exposing how censorship marks flesh, knowledge, and desire.
Biography
Sue Jeong Ka is a visual artist whose practice challenges systems of censorship, surveillance, and institutional control. Working with banned materials, redacted archives, and bodily data, she examines how institutions shape visibility along lines of race, sexuality, and legal precarity. Her projects often unfold in public contexts, using data to question how individuals are made legible, exposed, or erased within larger systems. Through installation, performance, and research-based media, she interrogates how knowledge is produced, who is rendered visible, and what is left out. For Ka, art becomes a method of remembrance, recovering the voices and presences of those pushed to the margins.
Ka is an alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and Hunter College. She has held residencies and fellowships with the Drawing Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Artists Alliance Inc., the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Queens Museum, The Laundromat Project, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. She is developing a public art project examining how carceral censorship and the redlining of information access operate in California, with implications extending across the US, in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library, UCLA, and NYC Books Through Bars.
2025-26 Artists’ Books finalists:
Alexander D’Agostino and Evan Starling-Davis.
2025-26 Artists’ Books panelist:
Buzz Spector’s art makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. His solo museum exhibitions include The Art Institute of Chicago; Huntington (WV) Museum of Art; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; Orange County Museum of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum; and many other museums and galleries. Spector was co-founder of WhiteWalls: a magazine of writings by artists, in 1978, and edited the publication until 1987. His art criticism has been published in American Craft, Artforum, Brooklyn Rail, and New Art Examiner, among other magazines and journals.
Naima Lowe
Project Description
Late Bloomer is a constellation of auto-mythographic performance works about desire and ambition using music, text, drawings, voice, and collaboration. I premiered a 45-minute theatrical production (with direction by Asher Hartman) as part of the Mabou Mines SUITE/Space Residency in January 2024 featuring lyrically raunchy storytelling about a tawdry affair with “The Old Man Who Has Agreed To Be The Human Embodiment of My Ambition.” The piece included a collaboratively devised score, raucously and lovingly played by The Late Bloomer Band – kara lynch (violin/pedals/vocals) and Jordan Wright (keyboards/synths/trombone/vocals). Their lushly layered, cinematic, accompaniment expounds an eerily familiar Motown melody. If you recognize the song, Tainted Love, you probably don’t know it was originally sung by Gloria Jones, a Black woman who never enjoyed the fame afforded the white boys who covered it. We’ll return to New York in 2025 to present new acoustic iterations of the work exhibited alongside a series of works on paper called Rehearsals: hungry, consuming, gestural, erotically abstracted mouths fervently and compulsively repeated in dense, textured, color-saturated crayon and watercolor.
Biography
Naima Lowe makes performances, texts, drawings, installations, and videos using transgressive and radical traditions of Black utterance. She rigorously cultivates and protects her intuitive sensibilities; fed by a deep intellectual and familial allegiance to the liberatory ethos of improvisation. She uses the specificity of her personal and family history to create works about desire and longing; amplifying and abstracting emotional states to unsettle the perceived boundary between mind, body, spirit, and one another.
Naima has a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Temple University. Her work has been shown at Anthology Film Archive, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, National Queer Art Festival, The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, and the Henry Art Gallery. She’s held residency fellowships at The Bemis Center, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and The Lighthouse Works. Naima was a 2023-24 Mabou Mines SUITESpace Resident, and previously she was a 2021-2022 Mid America Arts Alliance Interchange ArtistFellow, recipient of the 2022-23 Mid America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Award, and a recipient of a 2022 Jazz Road Creative Residency. Naima resides in Tulsa, within the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation, where she spends her time being free and talking to animals.
Photo by Marion Aguas
Mel Watkin
Project Description
My 1964 book entitled “Girls Can Do Anything” was confiscated and destroyed by my 4th grade teacher which was devastating for my budding artist self at age 10. The original was inspired by my Mom, who was a lawyer—unusual in 1964 — and by my own experience being denied a paperboy job because I was a girl. Currently, I am creating a new annotated version. The original consisted of 22 stick figures on newsprint showing what “girls” could do: including a policeman, Chef Julia, a scientist and a prostitute. (How I knew what a prostitute was at age 10 in 1964 is beyond me.) The prostitute was one of three “girls” that caused the confiscation and destruction of the book. And caused my mother to be called to the principal’s office. Since I didn’t know about gender-neutral terms in 1964, all the job titles end in “man,” spaceman, fireman, etc. Also, all the “girls” have bouffant hairdos and serious expressions like my Mom. The 2024 version is intentionally messy, like me then and now, but it also shows how my Mom would literally cut and paste her legal text edits using scissors, glue, and tape. While I have created a number of artists’ books over the years, for this proposal, I uploaded five pages from Girls Can Do Anything – a work in progress. Currently, the book, drawn on mulberry paper, is 44 pages long including front and back cover.
Artist Bio
Mel Watkin’s work has been shown nationally with solo exhibitions at Franklin Furnace Archives, New York, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, and A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. Recent group exhibitions include the American University Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan and Longue Vue House and Garden, New Orleans. In 2023, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago exhibited three commissioned map-based works and the Southern Illinois Cancer Institute commissioned eight small works on paper. Watkin’s work is in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Illinois State Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas at Lawrence, the Book Art Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Franklin Furnace Archives, among other venues. She create a permanent public artwork fabricated in collaboration with Franz Mayer of Munich, Germany for the “C” Concourse at St. Louis International Airport. Grant awards include a 2000 and 2022 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Critical Mass grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and a Pyramid Atlantic artist’s book award. Her residencies including the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, Illinois, and Palazzo Rinaldi, Noepoli, Italy.
2024 XENO Book Finalists
2024 XENO Book Panelist
SABRINA JONES
Sabrina Jones creates comics and graphic novels on social justice and radical history. Her books include Race to Incarcerate and Our Lady of Birth Control. She is a co-editor and contributor to World War 3 Illustrated, including the latest issue: My Body/Our Rights. She has published graphic biographies of Margaret Sanger, Isadora Duncan, Walt Whitman, Jane Jacobs, FDR and Jesus.
See more at www.sabrinaland.com and on Instagram @sabjonze
Alex Mari
https://amberry03.wixsite.com/portfolio
Project Description
Link to the video: https://vimeo.com/1118746450
Rapture-trap is an endurance project examining the breaking of intergenerational trauma. Through performance and installation, I visually map the cycles of disruption and the intentional labor of healing to denounce the trap of passive savior-rapture. Inspired by my chronic health illnesses as a qtbipoc, I use my corporeal body that experiences exercise intolerance to navigate the installation. Every fall alters the ‘genetic’ composition of the sculptural landing below. These perpetual alterations reveal how unhealed traumas are passed down over time. The ultimate form is determined by physical and mental stamina and/or assistance as a critique of uninclusive systems. The repetition of resilience and recovery represents the speculative work across generations: healing ancestral past, present, and future.
Biography
Alex Mari (they/she) is a conceptual and durational performance artist from Atlanta. Their current body of work explores how invisibility, voids, and ruptures can stimulate a new and flexible understanding of societal norms. They use a liminal process when re-imagining society through body, narrative, endurance, ritual, objects and tasks, installation, writing, video, and digital ephemera. They received their MFA from SCAD-Atlanta in 2013 and have shown work across Atlanta including MINT Gallery, whitespace, Echo Contemporary, ACA Sculpture Gallery, and Mason Murer Fine Art, among others. They have performed in the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival and in Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival. They have also performed and shown work nationally and internationally in Seattle, NYC, Berlin, London, Monrovia, Fez, Puri, and most notably at the Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing. They’ve received awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Burnaway’s Southern BIPOC Artist Grant, and National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Fellowship. They recently finished a Fellowship with Emory University’s Arts and Social Justice Fellows Program in 2022. Mari continues her conceptual practice as a 2023-2025 Artist-in-Studio resident with The Creative’s Project in Atlanta and Fall 2023 Boundaries + Borders KODA resident in NYC.
Nick Thornburg
Project Description
“Forbidden Resonance” is the title of my artist’s book proposal for the 2023 XENO Prize for Artists’ Books, developed as a response to the distressing rise of book banning and burning. As an autistic artist, I aim to illuminate the correlation between forbidden and rejected knowledge and the historical suppression of autistic voices. This project intertwines evocative artwork, personal narratives, and testimonies from an autistic perspective. Through wonderfully autistic mixed-media pieces, it strives to reveal the unseen, ignored, and forsaken perspectives of the autistic experience and the immense cost autistic individuals have paid for belonging to this marginalized community. The book will touch on alternative approaches to communication, non-conventional learning styles, and marginalized narratives challenging the mainstream autism discourse, among other topics. By emphasizing forbidden knowledge, “Forbidden Resonance” challenges societal norms and advocates to fully accept neurodiversity, open discourse, and empathy. It aims to expose the consequences of marginalizing autistic voices and ignite conversations about inclusivity and social justice. This project aligns with the XENO Prize’s mission to protect vulnerable artistic forms and challenge cultural bias. It amplifies the resilience and creativity of autistic individuals, reclaiming their narrative and celebrating their contributions to society while challenging the notion that knowledge is something to be feared and suppressed. Through “Forbidden Resonance,” readers will confront discomfort, engage with forbidden truths, and appreciate the richness of the silenced spectrum. This urgent call aims to dismantle barriers and foster a future that embraces an open society, cherishing the profound diversity of human experience.
Artist Bio
Nick Thornburg is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Wyoming, After earning Bachelor of Arts degrees in Cinema & Comparative Literature and Theatre Arts from The University of Iowa, Thornburg went on to produce work featured on the independent screen and stage, overseas at the Prague International Theater Design Quadrennial Exhibition, and at various institutions and exhibition spaces in the United States, including the Yellowstone Art Museum, the State Historical Museum of Iowa, the Wyoming State Capitol, and the White House Visitor Center. Thornburg is also the 2018 winner of the Spirit of Wyoming art competition in Jackson, a three-time recipient of Best in Show at The Nicolaysen Art Museum‘s annual art gala, and a recipient of numerous other awards. Thornburg’s work is also part of The Nicolaysen Art Museum’s permanent collection.
COREEN SIMPSON
Coreen Simpson (American, b. 1942, NYC) is a photographer and jewelry designer. She has been honored in both fields throughout her career. In 1978, as Assistant Curator of Photography at The Studio Museum in Harlem, she made dynamic portraits of fellow artists in her small office/studio. Making jewelry supported her art and in 1990 she created her signature collection ‘The Black Cameo® for women of color. It is the first American modern cameo pin honoring the strength, beauty and resiliency of the black woman. Her B-Boy series of hip-hop style landed her ‘impact visuals’ on New York’s Broadway stage for the l996 Tony Award-winning musical, ‘Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk’. Ms. Simpson’s images are represented in The National Gallery of Art, Wash. D.C., The Smithsonian Museum of African-American Culture, Wash. D.C., The Library of Congress, Wash. D.C., The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, The Museum-Over-Holland, Amsterdam, Netherlands, The International Center of Photograph (ICP), NYC, Le Musee de la Photographie a’ Charleroi, Belguim and the permanent collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem & The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYC. among other institutions. She is a fellow of LIGHTWORK (Syracuse University), NYSCA (New York State Council for the Arts), NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) and Franklin Furnace’s (1983 commission) and the ‘2021 Humanities N.Y. grant “Her Eyes Only. Her documentary photo installation on the conceptual artist, David Hammons, was exhibited this year at the JAM exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art, NYC.
Ms. Simpson studied at F.I.T. and The New School, NYC.