The Rehumanism Prize · What is Rehumanism
Rehumanism is a simple idea: art made with real skill and a clear purpose, that gives us back our story. A painting or a sculpture can help a person feel more connected, more understood and less alone. We started this prize to find the artists doing that now, and to reward them.
In plain words
Most of us can name a work of art that stopped us, because it showed something we knew and had never seen said: a goodbye, a homecoming, a long marriage, a crowd of friends on a summer afternoon. It gave us back a piece of our own story. Rehumanism is the name we give to art made on purpose to do that.
It asks two things of a work. First, real skill, because feeling without craft does not last. Second, a gift to the viewer:
Where we fit
There are excellent prizes for representational art, and we hope you keep entering them. They reward skill across many subjects, and they have helped a whole generation of realist painters find an audience. The Rehumanism Prize adds one question: after craft, what does the work do for the person standing in front of it? The same painting can do well in both, and work shown or entered elsewhere is welcome.
What we look for
Compositions and subjects that move people. Beautifully painted fruit is welcome in the Open category, and so is a quiet landscape, if it carries feeling. In the flagship category we look hardest for three things.
A parent, a loss, a neighborhood, a kind of work, a moment most people live through and few paint.
Gesture, gaze, light, distance and the moment chosen. The arrangement should do the work before a viewer reads a word.
Comforted, moved, more patient, more grateful, less alone. That is the test, after craft.
Who has done it
Each of these painters took the life around them and made people feel it. In the twentieth century, Käthe Kollwitz, Norman Rockwell, Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth did it too. They are a bridge to today, not a model to copy: we are not asking for new versions of these pictures, but for the moments of our own time that matter in the same way.
Of our time
We love the old masters, and what they teach is to paint your own world. Millet painted the farm workers of his own day. Caillebotte painted the new Paris the year it went up. Sargent painted the war he saw.
A rehumanist painter today does the same with now: the phone glowing at 2 a.m., the grandparent on a video call, the commute, the night shift, the kitchen table after an argument. Classical skill, contemporary life, and a viewer today who recognizes themselves.
What's unique about our timesPainters have kept doing this since 1945, and many are doing it today. A few examples of the spirit we hope to see.
The works shown here are examples chosen for commentary and education. We haven't sought permission for every image; in our judgment this is editorial fair use. If you have any concern about an image, please write to us and we'll gladly address it.
The Rehumanism Prize · Year one
Enter up to three works you already have. Free to enter.
