2026 Mid-Career Artist Intiative Recipients
We are thrilled to announce the recipients of this year’s BAXTER ST Mid-Career Artist Initiative! Congratulations to artists Azikiwe Mohammed, Jiatong Lu, Kara Springer, and Sara Bennett! Each artist will present a solo exhibition at BAXTER ST at CCNY and will also be part of our robust programming, including a public conversation, a video interview, and one-on-one meetings with a BAXTER ST Art Advisory Board Member and BAXTER ST staff.
Support for the Mid-career Lens-based Artist Initiative is provided by the Mellon Foundation.
AZIKIWE MOHAMMED
Azikiwe Mohammed is a crafter who builds physical spaces that include Blackness and the stories of the people of this land. Sometimes that land is physical, and other times it lives in our bodies. These attempts at land shapings come through sculpture, sound, photography, performance, video, and painted objects and have landed both nationally and internationally. He has been featured in extensively in the press including but not limited to I-D, Artforum, Artnet, Vogue, Forbes, Art 21, BOMB and Hyperallergic.
JIATONG LU
Jatong Lu is a visual artist working across photography, video, and archives. Bom and raised in Northwest China and currently based in New York, she holds an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from S VA. Her work centers on people living outside dominant narratives. Moving between individual experience and public history, her practice examines how personal and collective trauma, systemic forces, and social inequality shape human life. Jiatong’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in New York, Chicago, Tucson, and Richmond in the United States, as well as in London, Berlin, Rome, Brussels, Shanghai, and Beijing. Her awards include the Award of Excellence from the 2025 Alexia Vision Grant, the 2024 JGS Fellowship for Photography from NYFA, the Winner of the 2024 LensCulture Art Photography Award, and the 2019 NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography.
KARA SPRINGER
Kara Springer works with photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions to explore systems of infrastructure and structural support. She studied and practiced industrial design in Toronto and Paris before receiving a University Fellowship to pursue an MFA in Sculpture at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the National Gallery of the Bahamas; the National Gallery of Jamaica; and the Museum of Applied Arts, Frankfurt. She is an alumna of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work has been acquired by Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, the Remai Museum of Modern Art in Canada, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
SARA BENNETT
SARA BENNETT, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, is a former public defender who primarily photographs women with life sentences, both inside and outside prison, as a way to draw attention to the problems of mass incarceration. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries, including group shows at Blanton Museum of Art’s Day Jobs, MoMA PS1’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and the Museum of the City of New York’s New York Now: Home, and at solo shows including the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, Photoville in Brooklyn, New York, and Rotterdam Photo 2023. Her work is in the collection of, among others, the John Hays Library at Brown University, the Cantor Museum of Arts at Stanford University, and the Museum of the City of New York, and has been featured in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker Photo Booth, and Variety & Rolling Stone’s American (In)Justice. She is the 2023 Emerging Laureate of the International Women in Photo Association.
