Michael Rakowitz, a Chicago-based artist dedicated to resurrecting the past and drawing attention to the neglected, has been awarded the 2020 Nasher Prize, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas announced on Wednesday. As a part of the award, which honors a living artist for their contributions to sculpture, he will receive $100,000.

“There’s a part of me that is simultaneously grateful and really happy about it, but then there’s another part of me that hopes that, one way or another, I can earn this someday,” Mr. Rakowitz said in an interview. The beginning of his career in the late-1990s, he added, “doesn’t feel like long ago at all.”

Jeremy Strick, the director of the Nasher Sculpture Center, said in a statement that Mr. Rakowitz ’s work “wrestles in unique and revelatory ways with many of the complex questions of history, heritage and identity that are so much at the forefront of contemporary culture and politics.” By rigorously exploring the history of materials and objects, he added, Mr. Rakowitz “weaves dense webs of meaning in distinct bodies of work rich with insight and surprise.”

For an artist whose projects, including the “paraSITE” series and the ongoing “The invisible enemy should not exist,” often go on f or decades, the recognition and financial support that comes with the prize is particularly important. “An award like this allows me to continue to make these works,” Mr. Rakowitz said. “It allows me to go on.”