Okiki Akinfe has won the first Dasha Shenkman Focus Fund, a £30,000 emerging artist prize awarded at Frieze London. The prize was created by the Contemporary Art Society to mark ten years of buying works for UK public institutions, with backing from philanthropist Dasha Shenkman, and supports purchases of emerging artists showing in the fair's Focus section.

Akinfe won for a figurative painting titled Fame is a Gun, together with a lightbox and a preparatory drawing, shown on the Ginny on Frederick stand. The works will enter the collection of Abbot Hall in Kendal — the first UK museum acquisition for the artist.

The £100,000 Contemporary Art Society Collections Fund also made its Frieze purchases, all destined for The Whitworth in Manchester: a textile piece by Claudia Alarcón and the Argentinian Silät collective through Proyectos Ultravioleta; Karimah Ashadu's video work Machine Boys via Sadie Coles; and Gala Porras-Kim's drawing of votive offerings at the Pitt Rivers Museum through Sprüth Magers. For Akinfe and the other three artists, these mark first acquisitions by a UK museum.

The announcements capped a crowded prize round at the fair. Ella Fleck received the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Award for her installation with Ehrlich Steinberg and will get a solo show at Camden Art Centre in 2027, while the Arts Council Collection's acquisitions fund — expanded to £90,000 this year — bought works by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Oliver Osborne, Laurie Smith and Armando D. Cosmos. The Tate Frieze Fund added Michaela Yearwood-Dan's Peace Unknown from Hauser & Wirth and Luis Fernando Zapata's 1992 papier-mâché Barge from Alonso Garcés Galería.