With these words, Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, accepted the Gold Award: Artist Icon at the inaugural Art Basel Awards Night in Miami Beach. Her presence set the tone for an evening that brought together artists, collectors, curators, and cultural leaders from across the world.
Art Basel Miami Beach is now over, but the Awards Night remains one of the week’s standout events. Hosted by Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and presented in partnership with BOSS, it gathered more than a thousand guests inside the Frank Gehry–designed New World Center for a program devoted to honoring excellence across the entire art ecosystem. Among the awardees were Nairy Baghramian, Ibrahim Mahama, Saodat Ismailova, Formafantasma, Candice Hopkins, RAW Material Company, and Meriem Bennani, who received the first BOSS Award for Outstanding Achievement.
Within this expansive group, Vicuña’s recognition as Icon emerged as a defining moment. As Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin, noted: “We were thrilled to see Cecilia recognized at the inaugural Art Basel Awards. Winning in the Icon category felt especially fitting for her. Everybody listens when she speaks. She has that unique voice which says something everybody recognizes.”
Cecilia Vicuña, La Habana, 1978/2024, oil on canvas, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London. © 2025 Cecilia Vicuña/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Born in Santiago in 1948, Cecilia Vicuña was exiled in the wake of Chile’s 1970s political upheaval. Her career has spanned more than half a century and has recently included a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and a Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, among multiple other major museum exhibitions across the world. Her practice integrates poetry, performance, conceptual art, textile craft, and Indigenous knowledge, a lifelong search for memory, resistance, and ecological justice.
The Awards Night made clear that Art Basel intends to honor those who move the field forward, artists, curators, and cultural practitioners whose work engages the most urgent questions of our time. In recognizing Cecilia Vicuña alongside this wide-ranging cohort, the evening set a meaningful precedent for what these honors aim to become.
Swizz Beatz and Khalid
Noah Horowitz, Ibrahim Mahama, Mohammad Al Faraj, Alessio Antoniolli, Robert Leckie, Vincenzo De Bellis, Candice Hopkins, Cecilia Vicuna, Nairy Baghramian, Joel Wachs, Marie Helene-Pereira, Andrea Trimarchi, Simone Farresin, Meriem Bennani, Saodat Ismailova and Marco Falcioni
Princess Alia Al-Senussi
Kelsey Lu performing
David Maupin and Stefano Tonchi
Anne Pasternak
ASAP Ferg
Vincenzo De Bellis and Nairy Baghramian
Hank Willis Thomas