About the Prize
The New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize recognises outstanding Fine Art graduates nominated by tutors from UK BA and MA programmes.
Founded in 2023, the Prize highlights exceptional emerging artists at a critical transition point - offering visibility, early professional opportunity, and a connection to wider curatorial and collector networks.
Nominations are made directly by Fine Art tutors across the UK, ensuring that selection is grounded in artistic merit, integrity, and the context of academic and creative development.
​
The Prize offers something culturally remarkable - a distilled overview of the work emerging from across Fine Art programmes in the UK.
It’s a rare insight - not just into remarkable individual emerging artists, but into the collective shape of early-stage contemporary practice across the UK. A chance to see themes, material choices, approaches, the artistic atmosphere of a particular year, like a live cultural document, seen through the eyes of tutors who have been close to the making.
Past judges have included Professor Anita Taylor, Serenella Ciclitira, Peter Hargreaves, Jim Rajan, and Sarah Ryan. In 2025, Mary-Alice Stack, Chief Executive of Creative United, joins the panel.
The Prize champions emerging talent, offering a bridge between education and long-term practice.​
​
See the Prize in Pictures
Recognition, Rewritten​
The only national award shaped by direct tutor nominations - offering a rare, insider view of what’s emerging in UK contemporary art right now.
​
The New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize brings together standout 2025 Fine Art graduates from across the UK, each artist nominated directly by their tutor. For the first time, collectors and audiences can see - in one place, online - a distilled cross-section of the strongest emerging voices in contemporary art. From Dundee to Chelsea, Middlesbrough to Carmarthenshire, the next generation, can be seen together, for the first time, in one distilled space, offering a view of where contemporary practice is headed.
​
The UK’s creative education system is world-renowned, and a number of respected prizes offer collectors the chance to discover new talent. The New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize adds a different dimension: every Fine Art department across the UK is invited to nominate its standout graduates - making this the only award shaped through direct collaboration with tutors nationwide. This approach offers a rare snapshot of emerging practice across the country: a national pulse of fine art as it emerges.
​
For over 20 years, New Blood Art has identified and placed artists before the market caught on. The Prize extends this legacy - formalising a new collaboration with Fine Art programmes across the UK, and offering a national overview unavailable anywhere else.
​
This is the insider signal: every Fine Art tutor across the country identifying their strongest graduating artists. It’s expert judgement - gathered from the field - a rare chance to acquire work from the UK’s most exciting new artists, right at the start.
The 2025 New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize nominees are now live and available to explore and acquire online.​
​
Fieldnote:
Price, profile, and affiliation are the holy trinity of recognition in the art market. Affiliation creates context. It tells the market where to look. Affiliation is also how the art world protects itself. It’s a filter, credential, a gate. Which means a brilliant emerging artist without affiliation is often invisible - until someone creates a structure that sees differently.
The Prize isn’t just about tutor nominations. It’s about creating a new form of affiliation - one that doesn’t rely on market allegiance, but on artistic discernment. That’s what makes this prize radical.