Mobile Arts Council Names Winners of 2026 Annual Members’ Show

The Mobile Arts Council has announced the winning artists of its 2026 Annual Members’ Show, capping a juried exhibition that has showcased original work from more than 80 local artists in the heart of downtown Mobile. The awards were presented during LoDa ArtWalk on Friday, Aug. 14, at the Mobile Arts Council Gallery, located at 6 So. Joachim Street, Room 1927. The exhibit opened July 9 and remains on display through Aug. 27, giving the council’s membership a dedicated space to share their work with the public.

The timing of the awards presentation was deliberate. LoDa ArtWalk, the monthly evening celebration that fills the Lower Dauphin entertainment district with gallery-goers, musicians and foot traffic, draws one of the largest recurring arts audiences in the region, and staging the ceremony in the middle of it put the winning works in front of the biggest crowd the show will see during its run. Visitors flowing between venues along Dauphin Street passed through the gallery, where the full exhibition — not just the winning pieces — remained on the walls.

This year’s show was juried by Kayla Dean, administrative specialist, and Lindsey Lawrence, community outreach manager, both of the Eastern Shore Art Center, who reviewed the submitted pieces ahead of the awards presentation. Bringing in jurors from across the bay is a longstanding practice for the council, which has sought outside eyes to evaluate member work. The Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope is one of the region’s most established visual arts institutions, and its staff see a wide cross-section of Gulf Coast art through their own exhibition calendar.

Juried shows of this kind ask jurors to make hard calls among works in wildly different media. A members’ exhibition like this one typically hangs paintings beside photographs, sculpture beside quilts, and — for the first time this year — poetry beside visual art, all evaluated for craft, originality and impact. The jurors’ selections, announced at the ArtWalk ceremony, represent their judgment of the strongest work in a field of more than 80 contributing artists.

This year’s award winners

Topping the list of honors was Best in Show, awarded to Elsa Payton for her piece The Keeper. Frank Vogtner took second place for I Am a Puzzle, II, and Daniel Smith placed third for Call Someone Who Cares. The top three awards anchor the exhibition’s competitive structure, and each carries the visibility that comes with a wall label and a place in the evening’s announcements before a full gallery.

Two Honorable Mention awards were also presented. Nancy Goodman was recognized for Children’s Corner, a quilted work featuring bold primary and secondary colors, while Wayne McNeil earned an Honorable Mention for his poem Short Parade — believed to be the first written work ever recognized in the history of the Members’ Show.

McNeil’s honor quietly made history. The Members’ Show has been a fixture of the council’s calendar for decades, and its awards have always gone to visual media. Extending recognition to the written word marks an expansion of what the exhibition considers art, and it signals to members who work in literary forms that the show’s doors are wider than they were a year ago.

Goodman’s quilt, meanwhile, represented a craft tradition with deep roots in Alabama. The state’s quilting heritage runs through the famed community quilters of Gee’s Bend and generations of family workshops across south Alabama, and the bold primary and secondary color scheme of Children’s Corner placed the work squarely in a lineage of Alabama quilts that treat geometry and color with painterly ambition.

The Dempsey & Litchfield Award

Among the evening’s most notable honors was the Dempsey & Litchfield Award, presented annually to the artist whose work best represents Mobile. This year’s recipient, Gwenn Ainsworth, was recognized for her photograph Last Harbor, featuring the historic SS United States.

The award is made possible through the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Arts and Baldwin County supporter Brenda Litchfield. The NEA’s backing places the local show in the company of arts programs across the country that draw on federal cultural funding, while Litchfield’s support continues a pattern of private patronage that has sustained Mobile’s visual arts institutions through decades of changing economics.

The subject of the winning photograph carries its own resonance for a port city. The SS United States, the mid-century ocean liner that still holds the transatlantic speed record for a passenger ship, spent her career as a symbol of American engineering, and her long afterlife — docked, sold, and debated over by preservationists and developers — has made her a magnet for photographers and maritime enthusiasts. A Mobile audience, steeped in shipbuilding and port culture, needs no introduction to what a great vessel means, and Ainsworth’s Last Harbor earned the Dempsey & Litchfield judges’ verdict as the work that best represents the city this year.

Members of the Mobile Arts Council also cast votes throughout the show’s run for the Members’ Choice Award, which this year went to Patrick Hurley for Revolve: Rise and Fall. The members’ ballot is the one honor in the exhibition decided by the artists themselves rather than by outside jurors, and it tends to reward work that has caught the attention of everyone who comes through the gallery over the show’s six-week run.

“The Annual Members’ Show is a celebration of the remarkable creativity and range of work that exists within our community,” said Angela Montgomery, Mobile Arts Council executive director. “We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts and Brenda Litchfield for their generous support, which not only makes this exhibition possible but also allows us to honor the dedication, talent, and artistic excellence of our members.”

Montgomery’s words describe the show’s dual role. It is a competition, with jurors and prizes and a Best in Show, but it is also a membership event — the one exhibition each year built entirely from the work of the council’s own artists, whatever their stage of career or choice of medium.

A gallery in the middle of everything

The Mobile Arts Council Gallery occupies space at 6 So. Joachim Street, Room 1927, steps off Dauphin Street in the district where the city’s nightlife, restaurants and galleries concentrate. The location matters to the council’s mission: a gallery on the ArtWalk route draws an audience that a standalone building elsewhere in the city would struggle to find, and foot traffic during a monthly ArtWalk regularly introduces first-time visitors to the organization and its member artists.

Final days to visit: with the show set to close Aug. 27, residents have a limited window left to see the full collection, including this year’s award-winning pieces, in person. The Mobile Arts Council Gallery is open Tuesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is always free and everyone is welcome.

Free admission is a deliberate choice for the council, which treats the gallery as a public resource rather than a commercial venue. Visitors can see the exhibition in a single lunch-hour visit on a weekday or a Saturday morning stop, and the informal setting means no appointment, no ticket and no purchase expectation — just the work on the walls and the story it tells about the region’s creative community.

Seventy years of supporting Mobile’s artists

The Members’ Show is one of several ways the Mobile Arts Council supports the region’s creative community throughout the year, giving local artists — both emerging and established — a platform to display their work in a professional gallery setting in the heart of downtown Mobile.

The council, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 1955, works to enrich quality of life in the Mobile area by increasing accessibility to the arts and promoting a vibrant cultural community through programs focused on community, education and membership. An organization that has now operated across seven decades has outlasted generations of gallery ventures, cultural fashions and economic cycles, and its longevity has made it one of the anchor institutions of the city’s arts infrastructure.

Its programs reach beyond the gallery walls. The council’s education work connects teaching artists with schools and community groups, its grantmaking and partnerships channel resources to small arts organizations that lack their own development staff, and its membership programs give working artists the practical supports — exhibition opportunities, professional networking, and a public identity — that are difficult for individual artists to build alone.

The Members’ Show sits at the center of that mission each summer. For an emerging painter, inclusion in a juried exhibition beside established names is a first line on an artist’s record. For a longtime member, the show is an annual reckoning of where the region’s collective work stands. And for the council itself, the exhibition is the most visible demonstration each year of what the membership actually makes — paintings, photographs, quilts, sculpture and, now, poetry.

The 2026 edition’s mix of media, culminating in the first award ever given to a written work, suggests the definition of a members’ exhibition in Mobile is still expanding. An organization founded in 1955, when the city’s cultural institutions looked very different, is now honoring a poem in the same ceremony as a Best in Show photograph of a vanished ocean liner — a range that would have been hard to predict when the first members gathered seventy years ago.

The Mobile Arts Council extends its congratulations to all of this year’s award recipients and its appreciation to every artist who helped make the 2026 Annual Members’ Show a success. Every submitted piece, selected or not, hung in a professional gallery for seven weeks, was seen by hundreds of ArtWalk visitors and gallery-goers, and contributed to the exhibition that jurors praised for its creativity and range.

For more information about the council and its upcoming exhibitions, follow @mobileartscouncil on social media. The organization announces exhibition calls, ArtWalk dates and program news through its online channels, and artists interested in membership can find details there as well. For now, the 2026 Members’ Show remains on the walls through Aug. 27 — the last chance to see this year’s award winners, and the first hint of what next summer’s show might bring.