Artist Felipe Baeza, a 2009 graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art, has been awarded a 2025 Vilcek Foundation Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts. The prizes, given annually since 2006, seek to raise awareness of the importance of immigrant contributions in the United States and to foster appreciation for the arts and sciences more broadly.

“Baeza receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts for his studio practice and poetic style that engages multiple mediums and traditions to explore spirituality, otherness, and regeneration,” states the award citation. “Born in Mexico and based in the United States, Baeza’s work is informed by his experiences as an adolescent, navigating the structures and institutions that often marginalize those they purport to protect.”

Baeza, who also holds an M.F.A. from Yale, is one of three artists recognized with this year’s Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts. The recipients each receive a $50,000 cash award.

“The United States was founded with a vision of being a beacon for intrepid individuals to live and work free from tyranny,” says Vilcek Foundation President Rick Kinsel. “Immigration has been vital to the United States’ industrial and technological development over the past 250 years, and immigrant professionals have made profound contributions to scientific research, medicine, arts, and culture. With these prizes we honor outstanding immigrant professionals, and intellectual leaders whose work champions diversity in the United States.”

Baeza’s artistic practice fuses collage, painting, printmaking, and other techniques to create multilayered, textural works that explore notions of the body and migration. “The work sits in an unfixed space,” Baeza says. “I hope it manages to stay that way—avoiding rigid and linear categories through new forms while embracing unknowability as a non-horizon.”

In 2023, his Public Art Fund exhibition, Unruly Forms, was featured on bus shelters in the United States and Mexico. Baeza returned to his alma mater on September 27, 2023, for a conversation about the exhibition as part of the Public Art Fund Talks at The Cooper Union series. Last year, the John F. Kennedy International Airport announced that Baeza’s work would be showcased as part of a public art installation commissioned for the new Terminal 6, scheduled to open in 2026.

The Vilcek Foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. The foundation's mission of raising awareness of immigrant contributions to the United States was inspired by the couple’s respective careers in biomedical science and art history. Since 2000, the foundation has awarded over $15 million in prizes and grants.