Four artists win $800,000 MacArthur fellowships
Four artists have been given MacArthur “genius” fellowships, a group of awards that each come with $800,000 to be issued out over the course of five years.
The MacArthur fellowships are among the biggest awards in the US, with a large cash prize matched by no other institution.
The four winners include alumni of last year’s Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial, alongside a winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a New York survey subject that will travel the nation next year.
One of the winners, Carolyn Lazard, makes films and sculptures which tackle accessibility and different forms of labour. Speaking to ARTnews earlier this year, Lazard explained: “I find myself interested in the labour that facilitates our staying alive and that labour is care and care work.”
The other winners include María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, and Dyani White Hawk. Compos-Pons’ art often incorporates themes relating to her Afro-Cuban heritage and the Lucumí religion, while White Hawk is known for paintings that draw on the presentation of Western abstract painting and Native American craft.
Chacon, a composer and Diné-American artist, became the first Native American ever to win the Pulitzer Prize last year for ‘Music’.
Art has been used to expose archaic value systems and inherent white normativity in history for decades. More recently, AI in various art forms has been utilised to draw patterns with racial biases and issues with perpetuating unchallenged data sets.
Among the MacArthur winners, White Hawk asserts that the originators of abstraction were not the white men often credited with inventing the tradition in history books. Compos-Pons has also addressed subjects including the history of the sugar trade and its ties to slavery.
Chacon’s work is currently being presented in Indian Theater, a show dealing with the notion of performance as it manifests in work by Native American and First Nations artists.
