“Gray repurposes found objects to investigate power structures and social hierarchies with such rigor and imagination. I’m keen to follow Gray’s work and excited to be supporting his rich trajectory on the occasion of this Award.” – Juror Dr. Ashley James, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Guggenheim.

André Leon Gray is a multi-disciplinary self-trained artist born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina where he currently lives and works. He is interested in power structures, social hierarchies, and the synthesis of history and culture, past and present through an art practice that utilizes assemblage, collage, installation, painting, drawing, and video to code multiple layers of pictorial meaning and material relationships. Gray’s work is in the permanent collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Gregg Museum of Art & Design, NC State University, Raleigh, NC.

Gray is a multi-disciplinary self-trained artist seeking to engage his audience in a dialogue that explores connections between identity, culture, and history while investigating power structures and social hierarchies. Primarily, his work applies symbols, text, and found objects to fuse the past and present into thought-provoking social commentaries, while questioning the duality of remembering and forgetting with a visual language that examines the surrounding structures of our lives.