Will Kasso Condry Receives 12th Annual Herb Lockwood Prize

The day that Will Kasso Condry learned he won the 2025 Herb Lockwood Prize in the Arts started out like any other for the Afrofuturist painter, graffiti scholar and educator. He and his wife and business partner, Jennifer Herrera Condry, were at Manchester Elementary/Middle School, hard at work on a large-scale mural. It was the latest of the more than 40 community arts projects they have led around Vermont.

He set down his paintbrush to take a call. It was prize director Todd R. Lockwood calling to inform the Brandon artist that he’d won the honor — and the $10,000 cash prize that comes with it. Kasso Condry, 47, was shocked.

Part of the Lockwood Prize’s unique prestige is that its nominees are not notified that they are being considered until they have won. And differing from the Vermont Prize for visual work that Kasso Condry earned in 2022, artistic excellence is only part of the criteria. Winners must also have gone to great lengths to uplift and engage others in their art, a mark Kasso Condry has hit throughout his career.

While studying fine art and illustration at the College of New Jersey, Kasso Condry developed an interest in graffiti and large murals. With bright color and expansive size, he channels Afrofuturism to explore Black identity through portrayals of hope and positivity. He founded SAGE Coalition, a nonprofit arts collective that created outdoor murals on abandoned buildings in New Jersey.

Since moving to Vermont in 2016, he has been an artist-in-residence and instructor at the University of Vermont and Middlebury College. At the latter, he taught classes and painted the interior of the Anderson Freeman Resource Center alongside a student mentee. That’s also where he met Herrera Condry, the center’s assistant director at the time.

The pair married and founded Juniper Creative Arts in 2020, spearheading collaborative public arts initiatives inspired by hip-hop culture and the mystical, natural world. The mural at Manchester Elementary, completed earlier this month, is their most recent project with local youths.

Kasso Condry creates “unique artwork for which the whole community shares authorship — and pride,” Vermont writer Stephen P. Kiernan said at the award ceremony on Saturday at the BCA Center in Burlington, where Kasso Condry accepted the prize. “The design and content are dependably brilliant and original, in part because they contain the vulnerability that comes from valuing the contribution of every participant.”

The artist told Seven Days that this achievement is meaningful to him because while he works constantly to bring out others’ passions, he often forgets his own role.

“You always put yourself on the back end, because you’re representing so many different voices and different ways of being,” Kasso Condry said.
He added that he has not decided what he’ll do with the prize money but anticipates investing some of it back into his practice.

Lockwood founded the Herb Lockwood Prize in 2014 to honor his late brother Herb, an influential figure in the Burlington arts scene in the 1980s. Lockwood said Kasso Condry has been on the nominating group’s radar for several years and that he first noticed the artist’s work driving by Kasso Condry’s mural at Champlain Elementary School in Burlington. The two met as panelists at a Burlington History & Culture Center event last December, and a conversation they had about city graffiti left a lasting impression on Lockwood.

“[Kasso Condry] was just sending out a really great message to both the greater community and to the community of color,” Lockwood said. It was a message “to look ahead [and] imagine a view of Black America that had never been thought of before.”