2024 Arizona Artist Awards Exhibition Opening
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
5 pm // Artist Reception, Great Hall South
6:30 pm // Artist Talk with 2024 Scult Family Artist Award recipient Safwat Saleem
Whiteman Hall
TICKETS: Free for Members and the general public
Join us in celebrating the exhibition openings for the 2024 Scult Family Artist Award and the 2024 Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Awards recipients with a reception in Great Hall that includes a cash bar. Following the reception, enjoy an artist talk with the 2024 Scult Award awardee, Safwat Saleem, as he discusses his work and process.
The 2024 Arizona Artist Awards recipients are:
Safwat Saleem, Scult Family Artist Award
Elizabeth Z. Pineda, Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Award
Omar Soto, Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artist Award
About the Artists:
Safwat Saleem is a multidisciplinary artist working to give visibility to immigrant narratives, with a focus on cultural loss resulting from assimilation. Safwat’s body of work weaves together themes of preservation, desire to belong, resistance and joy as an immigrant father raising multiracial children in the American Southwest. Safwat’s practice ranges from graphic design, illustration and writing to film and sound. Humor is a critical element of his work, and he uses satire as a tool to challenge perceptions. His work aims to bring to the foreground points of view that have been obscured historically by hegemonic power.
Originally from Mexico City, Elizabeth Z. Pineda is a photographic emerging artist. Her work explores complicated issues regarding immigration, identity, displacement, and migrant deaths that occur in the Arizona desert. Pineda speaks visually of community, touching on language barriers, culture, and society. Her practice is rooted in handmaking as an expression of her deep ties to the subject matter using historic and untraditional photographic, printmaking, papermaking, and book art processes.
Omar Soto is a DACAmented Phoenix-based photographer who creates surreal imagery that explores queer joy and escapism to navigate the marginalization they endure while living at the intersection of race, gender, and social class. Born in Tijuana in 1996, Soto migrated to the United States in 2000. With a passion for the arts, they studied at South Mountain High School under the institution’s magnet photography program, learning fundamental photography skills while enriching their artistic practice.
The Arizona Artist Awards are made possible by the Scult Family Artist Award; Sally and Richard Lehmann; and the Cohn Fund for Arts and Culture, a founding gift of the Phoenix Art Museum Education and Engagement Excellence Fund.