Jeffrey Meris is honored with the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts for his work engaging materiality, installation, and performance. His art explores the power of ecology and embodiment to liberate and heal from individual and historical trauma. 

Meris is a Haitian-Bahamian artist who works across sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing. Much of his inspiration comes from the built and natural environments—and seeing where and how those two worlds collide. He often explores the relationship between material items and larger cultural and social phenomena.

“I develop long relationships with objects and shift the inherent power that they carry,” Meris says of his work. “I create scaffolding and architecture that reorients our relationship with quotidian objects shifting the ways in which we experience them. Each piece begins with a sketch, a drawing, or a maquette. During this phase, he’s not worried about meaning, but rather learning how the objects speak to him. If it feels provocative or compelling, he’ll build it bigger.

Born in Haiti and raised in the Bahamas, Meris says his migration journey helped him understand the larger global context in which his art is situated, and allowed him to see beyond the regional Caribbean dialogue. It sparked the idea of collective freedom and healing—two things embodied in Meris’s work. 

While his art spans mediums, his practice often explores the themes of queerness, economics, and Blackness, while linking the struggles, ambitions, and liberation of global people of the African Diaspora. “My practice centers an emancipation that is both personal and collective. I want to be freed from anti-Blackness no less than I wish to wake up unburdened by HIV.”

For instance, in a 2018 piece titled Sugar, Daddy, Meris uses his body as a canvas to investigate his relationship with Coca-Cola, his mother, and his queerness. He pours condensed Coca-Cola on himself, symbolizing the sticky and messy relationship his mother has with his queerness. Growing up, the soda was the number-one seller from the mom-and-pop store that his mother ran illegally from their porch. The product meant survival for their family. Ultimately, the piece “plays with ideas of fetish, luring the viewer into an economy sugarcoated in decay.”

Awards & Accomplishments

Group Exhibition, François Ghebaly Gallery (2025)
Keynote Presenter, Art Students League of New York (2024)
Group Exhibition, Prospect 6 (2024)
Group Exhibition, Water Street Projects (2024)
Pollock Krasner Grant (2023)
Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant (2023)
Artist in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem (2022-23)
8th House Artist in Residence (2022)
Arison Artadia Awardee (2022)
Sharpe-Walentas Studio Artist in Residence (2021)
Socrates Sculpture Park Van Lier Fellow (2021)
Artist in Residence, Triangle Arts (2021)
Connecticut Arts Fellowship (2021)
Queer Art Mentorship Fellow (2020)
Daniel Arsham & Samuel Ross Artist Grant (2020)
Foundation for Contemporary Art Covid Grant (2020)
Temple University 30 under 30 (2020)
NXTHVN Studio Fellow, New Haven (2020)
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019)
Charitable Arts Foundation Grant (2019)
Columbia University D.R.A. Shops Fellow (2018)
Central Bank of the Bahamas Art Scholarship (2018)
In-Flux Artist Residency, Jamestown, Ghana (2018)
Pilot Resident, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (2018)
Harry C. Moore Art Scholar, Lyford Cay Foundation (2017-18)
Halle 14 Artist in Residence, Leipzig, Germany (2017)
Guttenberg Space and Time Artist in Residence (2016)
J. Arthur Khuen-Kryk Award (2015)
Sculpture Project Award (2015)
Charitable Arts Foundation Grant (2014)
Central Bank of the Bahamas Art Competition Winner (2013)
Lyford Cay Foundation Harry C. Moore Art Scholar (2012-13)
Popopstudios Junior Residency Prize (2010)