Fall Feast & Legacy Awards 2026

Join us for CARA's fourth annual Fall Feast & Legacy Awards on Thursday, October 15, 2026.

This year, we are thrilled to honor Steffani Jemison and Joan Shigekawa for their enduring contributions to art.

Tables and a limited number of early-bird tickets are now available.

CARA’s annual Fall Feast & Legacy Awards celebrate artists, collaborators, patrons, and friends while raising critical funds for our field-expanding work across research, publishing, exhibitions, fellowships, and public programs.

Presented each year at the Feast, CARA Legacy Awards honor two artists or arts advocates whose practices have meaningfully shaped how art, history, and culture are understood, experienced, and shared. Each recipient receives an unrestricted $10,000 grant in support of their ongoing work and legacy.

If you are unable to attend but would like to make a donation or underwrite an artist's ticket, you may do so at the link below.

Steffani Jemison (b. 1981, Berkley, California/US, living and working in Brooklyn, New York, US) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. In dialogue with interlocutors (living and ancestral), her work connects mark-making, gesture, proposal, projection, movement, and document.

Steffani Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, DE; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, FR; CAC Geneve, CH; JOAN Los Angeles, US; Mass MoCA, North Adams, US; Jeu de Paume, Paris, FR; CAPC Bordeaux, FR; MoMA, New York, US; LAXART, Los Angeles, US and other venues. Significant group exhibitions include New Humans, New Museum, New York, US, 2026; Flight Into Egypt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US, 2024; Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, US, 2021/22; and the Whitney Biennial, New York, US, 2019. Jemison’s work is part of many public collections, including the MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, US; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., US; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, IT; and the Art Institute of Chicago, US. Her novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022; she has also written for Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail.

Joan Shigekawa served as Acting Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the Obama Administration. In 2023, she was awarded the nation’s highest honor in the arts, The National Medal of Arts, by President Biden “for a lifetime of service to art in America.”

As an officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, Ms. Shigekawa led domestic and international programs in the arts, including the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, Creativity in a Digital Age, and the foundation’s Greater Mekong Sub-Region Collaborative Artist Exchange. During her tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she served as the Director of the International Production Laboratory at the Program for Art on Film, a partnership with the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Ms. Shigekawa is an emerita board member of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, a founding member of the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), and a trustee of United States Artists, which supports individual artists in the visual, performing, media, and traditional arts.

Ms. Shigekawa served as a Mayoral appointee to the New York City Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, and as a trustee of the New York State Council for the Humanities, the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the New York Foundation for the Arts, Grantmakers in the Arts, and Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media.

Graphic Identity: The Rodina; Interlope Script Typeface: Gabriel Dubourg