Art Ball 2026

Victor L. Davson
Co-Founder, Aljira

The 2026 Artistic Impact Award

Victor Davson has exhibited widely throughout the northeast United States and in Great Britain, France, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba, National Collection of Fine Arts, Guyana, Newark Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey State Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, and Morris Museum. Fellowships and awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper Fellowship, three New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship Awards.

Davson was born in Georgetown, the capital of what was then British Guiana. He received a BFA degree from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York and cofounded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art to support artists outside the mainstream. His thinking is heavily influenced by the anti-colonial politics of the Caribbean, and by the intellectual powerhouses of that period. These include extraordinary writers, poets and activists such as Martin Carter, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Naipaul and Orlando Patterson. His body of work includes the Limbo Anansi drawings, Bad Cow Comin’ paintings, paintings on long playing vinyl record album covers and recent landscapes begun in 2020.

Carl E. Hazlewood
Co-Founder, Aljira

The 2026 Artistic Impact Award

Carl E. Hazlewood was born in Guyana, South America. He received a BFA with honors, from Pratt Institute, and an MA from Hunter College, CUNY. Parallel to his studio practice, Hazlewood co-founded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ in 1983. Solo exhibitions of his work include BlackHead Anansi: Constellations at Charlotte and Philip Hanes Gallery, Wake Forest University, South Carolina (2023); Racing Thoughts-Fever Dreaming at Art Basel Miami Beach (2022); and BlackHead Lyricism at Welancora Gallery in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (2022). Hazlewood has been the recipient of fellowships at the MacDowell organization (2023, 2015); the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France (2018); and the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy (2018). His fifty-two-foot-tall wall work, TRAVELER (2017), was commissioned by the Knockdown Center, Queens. Hazlewood participated in the Art Cake residency at Cordy and Ethan Ryman’s Studio Program in Sunset Park, Brooklyn (2020–22).

Hazlewood uses the structural language of abstraction as a clarifying act of progress in what he considers an unstable world. Through a suite of shapes and symbols, his work speaks to the power of resiliency through references to Anansi the Spider, a prominent character in West African and Caribbean folklore. More broady, Hazlewood’s approach to his work and life seeks to counter the insinuation that there may be limitations on what he should do or what he can achieve. Carl strives for an art and life of open possibilities, for a poetic presentness beyond time, place, race and other distracting polemics.

Aisha Glover
Global Head of Urban Innovation, Audible, Inc.

The 2026 Beatrice Winser Award

Aisha Glover joined Audible in 2020. She has served as President & CEO of Invest Newark under Mayor Ras J. Baraka, as President & CEO of the Newark Alliance and as VP of External Affairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Hunter College, a Masters of Public Administration from Baruch College and an executive leadership certificate from the Columbia Business School, School of Social Enterprise.