Applications will open from July 1-November 1, 2026.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The African Methodist Episcopal Church Publishing House and Sunday School Union announces the inaugural Henry Ossawa Tanner Prize for Art and Justice. The African Methodist Episcopal Church has from its founding understood art to be among the means by which a people preserve themselves and pass their history and traditions forward. This hour calls for the artist’s witness, which reaches the heart and the mind together and carries forward what a people most need to see and to re-member.
Tanner was a son of African Methodism, born and reared inside its long struggle for the liberation and empowerment of the people it served. His father, Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was an early editor of The Christian Recorder and was elected to the episcopacy in 1888. His mother, Sarah Miller Tanner, is believed to have escaped slavery on the Underground Railroad as a child. Inspired by the 1856 Battle at Osawatomie, a direct action between a small band of free-staters led by abolitionist John Brown who stood against the pro-slavery raiders who came to burn the town, Tanner’s middle name Ossawa further inscribed the struggle for liberation in him and his work. Tanner trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as the only Black student of his year, was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1923, and was elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design in 1927 as the first Black artist to receive that distinction.
The Tanner Prize will award one grand prize of ten thousand dollars and four honor prizes of twenty-five hundred dollars each. All five winners will exhibit at the AMEC Publishing House in Nashville and appear in a catalog published from this house and distributed across our connection and beyond. Submissions are welcome in any medium contemporary artists work in, from painting and photography to installation, film, performance, and the digital arts.
The Prize seeks work that renders the world Africans and African Americans now inhabit with the kind of seriousness Tanner brought to his own age. The Prize seeks artists prepared to do for our time what he did for his, and to help the church and the world see what is before us.
The call opens on July 1, 2026. Submissions close on November 1, 2026. The exhibition opens in the spring of 2027.
We undertake this work in the conviction that art made by artists who have been schooled in suffering and sustained by faith carries a particular power to name what is happening in a moment of historical violence while holding what endures within a people whose dignity is under assault and, in so doing, turning the attention of the wider world toward both at once. Henry Ossawa Tanner exercised this power across the whole of his career, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church recognizes in his example the kind of witness that the present hour requires. The artists who can carry that witness forward are already at work, and the Tanner Prize exists to identify them, to provide a setting in which their work can be received with the seriousness it deserves, and to place that witness before the church and the wider world.
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Contact:
Roderick D. Belin
African Methodist Episcopal Church Publishing House and Sunday School Union
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