Artists to Watch Right Now: Seen Mentor Prize Edition
After more than 150 applications, Jodi Hays, Serutrepa and Sandra Buschow are our Seen Mentor Prize winners this year! These artists stood out not simply because of the quality of the work, but because of the clarity of their thinking, their commitment to their practices, and the sense that this is an important moment in their careers.
If you’re interested in emerging artists, keep an eye on these three! And if you’re interested in seeing more works from each artist, let us know. Huge thanks to Christian Levett and FAMM for their support of this year’s Seen Mentor Prize.
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-Carrie
Jodi Hays
Jodi constructs quilt-like collages from reclaimed materials, foregrounding their histories and formal attributes. She transforms materials like cardboard and fabrics through dyeing, pressing, and cutting before reassembling and affixing the parts together. The practice is a unifying of unlike parts, accessing conversations on the expanded field of painting, feminism, and found materials.
Her primary collage materials are emptied and flattened boxes from her neighborhood that she submerges in water, dye, dry, and press or iron. This process makes visible the patterns inherent in the structure of a cardboard box. The resulting papers that are left from the transformed cardboard have thin stripes of color. The labor of deconstructing and breaking down mountains of boxes, sinking them into a dye bath, and pulling them out to dry in her yard echoes work that her mothers, great aunts, grandmothers did – persistent and often underestimated domestic labor.
Serutrepa
Serutrepa is not interested in the heroic, the monumental, or the obviously beautiful. They are interested in the moment when ordinary light falls on an ordinary space and briefly, without warning, makes the invisible visible — makes the accumulated weight of human presence and human absence suddenly, undeniably legible.
The spaces they photograph are not special. They are the spaces that constitute the texture of American life — the warehouses and workshops, the barbershops and back alleys, the restaurants and retail interiors, the abandoned structures where nature and commerce are still mid-negotiation about who owns what and for how long. They are drawn to them because they carry history in their surfaces the way skin carries history in its lines.
Sandra Buschow
Sandra Buschow is a Berlin-based visual artist and photographer. Her practice moves between self-portraiture and abstraction, using colour as a primary language: warm, saturated tones that carry affect and resistance rather than decoration. Light is not a technique but a form of touch. She makes work that is felt, not just seen.
Her current series, Häutungen / Shedding (2024 to 2026), begins in deeply personal experience and opens outward. The work addresses the female body, change, dignity, and survival, not through documentation of damage, but through tenderness as a radical act. Intimacy carries weight. The body is present but not performed. What emerges is a space of healing rather than exposure, of self-possession rather than spectacle. Shedding is currently showing in a two-month exhibition at Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, and will be presented at Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles in July 2026.