The Museum Folkwang in Essen has announced that Munich-based curator, critic, and art historian Okwui Enwezor, currently the artistic director of the Haus der Kunst, has been awarded the 2017 International Folkwang Prize. The $26,600 award recognizes individuals and institutions that have made a special contribution to contemporary art. The official award ceremony will take place on October 9.

During the award announcement, Ulrich Blank, Museum Folkwang’s chair, said Enwezor is being honored for raising “a global awareness of art beyond the Euro-American canon.” He added, “This makes him one of the world’s most influential disseminators of contemporary art in the last decades. And in this way he is wholly in keeping with the spirit of [Folkwang founder] Karl Ernst Osthaus.”

Enwezor has been the head of the Haus der Kunst since 2011. Previously, he served as artistic director of the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale in 2015 and Documenta 11 in 2002. Prior winners of the award, which was established in 2010, include Neil MacGregor, then-director of the British Museum; art collector and business magnate Reinhold Würth; and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.