05/14/2026
The Addison Gallery of American Art is delighted to announce that Cynthia Talmadge will be the third recipient of the Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. Prize, awarded by the Addison Artist Council (AAC)!
The AAC builds on the Addison’s nearly century-long commitment to championing living artists by providing important institutional support to emerging and underrecognized American artists. Through the initiative, the Addison will organize the first solo museum exhibition of Talmadge’s work, opening in fall 2027, with an accompanying publication, an artist’s residency, and an acquisition of the artist’s work for the museum’s permanent collection.
Working in painting, photography, and installation, Talmadge (b. 1989, New York, NY) draws on tabloid culture and the darker undercurrents of contemporary Americana. Tinged with fantasy and desolation and born out of deep historical research, her work betrays a fascination with heightened emotional states, mediated portrayals of those states, and, particularly, the places where both converge.
Talmadge holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in New York City. While primarily a painter, she works across several mediums, using a variety of techniques to bring to life a body of work that is simultaneously fact and fiction, dramatic and melodramatic, cerebral and kitschy. Whether depicting the interiors of famous psychiatric hospitals and celebrity rehab centers, high society funeral parlors, deserted liberal arts college campuses, or even Marilyn Monroe’s imagined storage unit, Talmadge’s shimmering pointillist paintings composed of sand or oil paint, as well as her room-sized installations, possess a visual and psychic tension and wit that keeps meaning evasive and viewers captivated. Transforming physical spaces into psychological ones and vice versa, Talmadge spins narratives that offer insight into the psychology of society at large and our current cultural moment.
“Cynthia Talmadge is an ideal choice to receive the Hayes Prize. The artist’s conceptually layered practice, its rootedness in history and culture, and her enthralling storytelling will resonate with students and in the wider community. We are proud to support artists like Talmadge who are making exceptional contributions in the visual arts, at a moment in their career when such support can have a lasting impact,” said Allison Kemmerer, the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art.
“Receiving the Hayes Prize is a dream come true. I am deeply honored and grateful for this vote of confidence in me as an artist. The Hayes Prize will give me the opportunity to explore one of my most ambitious and dear projects, something that I’ve been researching and conceptualizing for over a year now. I can’t wait to get started at the Addison,” said Talmadge.
Photo by Charlie Rubin.
