Meet the First 10 Winners of Chanel’s ‘Next Prize’ for International Artists

By Angelica Villa for ARTNews

CHANEL HAS NAMED the inaugural winners of its Chanel Next Prize, a new biennial award that the French label founded in March 2021 to support 10 international artists and creatives working across fi lm, music, performance and visual art. The prize was founded as part of a larger initiative termed the Chanel Culture Fund, established earlier this year (2021) in the wake of the pandemic to expand the luxury label’s backing of the arts.

The award is given to artists who the fashion label believes are redefi ning their respective fi elds. In a statement, Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture, explained that the prize falls in line with the legacy of the label’s founder, the late Gabrielle Chanel, who supported avant-garde artists of her era. “We extend Chanel’s deep history of cultural commitment—empowering big ideas and creating opportunities for an emerging generation of artists to imagine the next,” she said.

Each winner will receive €100,000 ($113,000). With it comes access to a network of mentors selected by the brand over the next 20 months. Each recipient will be allowed to allocate the prize funding to any project of their choosing.

Under the Chanel Culture Fund, Chanel will also partner with a number of institutions to establish other awards and back exhibition programming. Among Chanel’s collaborators are Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Underground Museum in Los Angeles, and GES-2, a newly opened contemporary art center in Moscow.

The 10 recipients of the prize were selected by actress Tilda Swinton, artist Cao Fei, and architect David Adjaye. Each artist