The Addison is excited to announce that photographer Tommy Kha has been selected as the recipient of the Addison Artist Council’s 2025 Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. Prize. Through this initiative, the Addison will organize Kha’s first solo exhibition (to open in September 2025), with an accompanying publication, an artist’s residency, and an acquisition of Kha’s work for the museum’s permanent collection.
About the artist
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Kha lives and works between Brooklyn, New York, and Memphis. With a humorous and poignant touch, Kha examines how we construct belonging and otherness through photography, inventing new models for self-portraiture with a critical eye toward the medium’s long history of absences and erasure. Growing up as a queer Chinese-Vietnamese American in Memphis, Kha was made to feel othered; as an adult the artist claims a place for himself within both the American South and the tradition of photography. Critical of the ways in which photography has been used to construct and perpetuate narratives that exclude or misrepresent, Kha has found a model of picture-making through which he maintains agency as a subject while simultaneously questioning the construction of the “self.” In his ongoing project I’m Only Here to Leave (2015–present), the artist creates cardboard cut-outs and prosthetic masks of his own face and photographs them, complicating and fracturing his representation.
About the Addison Artist Council
The Addison Artist Council awards the Hayes Prize every other year. The artist selection process includes nominations from the AAC Steering Committee, which consists of Phillips Academy alumni who are arts professionals and/or supporters of contemporary art, and the Addison’s curatorial department. AAC members then vote on the work to acquire. In 2023, painter Reggie Burrows Hodges was the inaugural recipient of the Hayes Prize.
