As public arts funding shows no sign of increasing, it is fortunate that the number of prizes and awards for institutional acquisitions continues to proliferate during Frieze.
This year, the Contemporary Art Society celebrates its tenth anniversary of acquiring works for UK public institutions with the launch of the Dasha Shenkman Focus Fund for the purchase of a work by an emerging artist in the Focus section of Frieze, supported by philanthropist Dasha Shenkman. The inaugural winner of this £30,000 prize is Okiki Akinfe, for her powerful figurative painting Fame is a Gun along with a lightbox and a preparatory drawing, showing on the Ginny on Frederick stand. These will now enter the collection of Abbot Hall in Kendal.
In addition, the £100,000 CAS Collections Fund at Frieze has this year purchased three works: a textile piece by Claudia Alarcón and the Argentinian Silät collective (Proyectos Ultravioleta); Karimah Ashadu’s video work Machine Boys (Sadie Coles); and Gala Porras-Kim’s drawing of votive offerings at the Pitt Rivers Museum (Sprüth Magers). All are now destined for The Whitworth in Manchester. For all four of these artists this marks the first acquisition of their work for a UK museum.
Also zeroing in on the Fair’s Focus Section is the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award, which this year has been awarded to Ella Fleck, who is showing an installation using sculpture, sound and scent with Ehrlich Steinberg gallery, and who will now benefit from a solo show at Camden in 2027.
The Arts Council Collection Frieze Acquisitions Fund has expanded to £90,000 this year—more than double the figure when it was established in 2023—which has enabled it to buy a fresco piece by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings (Arcadia Missa); paintings by Oliver Osborne (Union Pacific) and Laurie Smith (Galeria Wschód); and a woven jacquard textile tapestry by Armando D. Cosmos (Phillida Reid).
The 2026 Tate Frieze Fund, which gives Tate curators early access to the fair to make purchases for the gallery collection, is supported by the patrons Alexander Lewis and Alexander V. Petalas along with a number of other private donors. All of these have declined to reveal the extent of their contribution, but they have made it possible for two works to be purchased for Tate’s collection this year. The first is Peace Unknown (2026), a multimedia work incorporating paint, glitter, glass beads, paper and ribbon by Michaela Yearwood-Dan from Hauser & Wirth, which takes its title from the Dolly Parton song Islands in the Stream. The second piece, from Alonso Garcés Galería, is Barge (1992), a papier-mâché by the Colombian artist Luis Fernando Zapata, made two years before he died from an Aids-related illness.
