OMAHA, NEB.- Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts announced multidisciplinary artist Kambui Olujimi as the 2025 recipient of its annual Ree Kaneko Award. As part of Bemis Center’s Alumni Program, this prestigious award provides $25,000 in unrestricted financial support to increase the capacity of a Bemis alum’s practice.
Olujimi first joined the Bemis community as an artist-in-residence in 2009 and later returned as a participating artist in the group exhibitions Time + Space: Futures in 2016 and All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy in 2021. Over the years, his interdisciplinary practice — spanning painting, sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video, and performance — has gained national and international recognition for its incisive examinations of history, myth, and the social conventions that shape collective memory.
Working across mediums, Olujimi excavates the language and aesthetics of cultural “inevitabilities,” rendering them visible and questioning their assumed permanence. His works have premiered at major institutions and festivals worldwide, and he has received numerous fellowships, grants, and residencies supporting his evolving practice.
Olujimi will return to Omaha to participate in a public artist talk on April 2, 2026.
Reflecting on his relationship with Bemis Center, he shared: “I loved my time at Bemis — the camaraderie, the conversations and space to play at a scale I couldn’t access in my hometown. One of the greatest gems from Bemis wasn't the work I made for exhibitions, but the large-scale experiments and dialogues with curators and other fellows. And we have continued many of those conversations 'til this day."
“Kambui’s trajectory beautifully illustrates what sustained support can make possible,” said Chris Cook, Bemis Center Executive Director. “From his residency in 2009 to his exhibitions here and the remarkable body of work he’s developed since, Bemis has been one of many touchpoints in a practice that continues to challenge and expand how we understand history and power. His work is fearless, rigorous, and deeply human. We’re honored to recognize him with this year’s Ree Kaneko Award.”
The 2025 Ree Kaneko Award recipient was selected from a pool of nominated Bemis alumni by a distinguished panel: Allison Glenn, Curator of the 2026 Toronto Biennial of Art, and Artistic Director-at-Large of The Shepherd; Marshall Price, Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J.Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Arden Sherman, Glenn W. & Cornelia T. Bailey, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Norton Museum of Art, and Rachel Adams, Chief Curator + Director of Programs, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha.
Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as “inevitabilities.” By excavating the language and aesthetics of social, historical, and cultural conventions, he brings them out of the world of the implicit. Once given gravity, weight, and shape it becomes possible to reveal their incongruities and their illusory nature. This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance.
His works have premiered nationally and internationally at the Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, Sharjah Biennial 15, the 14th Dak’Art Biennale, and Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Olujimi has been awarded grants, fellowships and residencies from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Mellon Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art in America, Vogue and CNN. Olujimi’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums and public collections, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Gregory R. Miller & co. has recently published a hardcover monograph on Olujimi’s work entitled North Star, and his upcoming permanent commission will be unveiled at JFK International Airport in 2026.
