Garrett Bradley, Gala Porras-Kim, and other closely watched artists are among the 22 winners of this year’s MacArthur “genius” grants. Each fellowship comes with an $800,000 stipend meted out over five years, making these awards the biggest ones of their kind in the US.
Alongside Bradley and Porras-Kim, artists Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Jeremy Frey were also recognized. Photographers Matt Black and Tonika Lewis Johnson both won grants as well, as did the archaeologist Kristina Douglass, whose research centers around biodiversity in southwest Madagascar.
Bradley has shown her work in both art galleries and movie theaters, and remains best known for her Oscar-nominated documentary Time (2020), which charted one woman’s quest to free her husband from prison. That film, like much of Bradley’s work, centered forms of Black resistance. She previously told ARTnews that her work asks the questions: “What happens when you systematically separate Black and brown families for hundreds of years in our country? What are the effects of those things?”
Porras-Kim’s work reflects on the notion of art institutions more broadly, asking what information is conveyed—and concealed—when an object enters museum walls. Through installations, drawings, and pieces in less classifiable mediums, she imagines new possibilities for the institutionally held objects that she researches in depth.
Nguyen’s films, installations, and sculptures meditate on trauma and colonization in locales such as Western Australia, Senegal, and his native Vietnam, but he often approaches war’s effects in ways that exceed the historical record. The characters in his films often commune with deities and supernatural forces, and are largely searching for fresh ways of understanding their world, in some cases through art. In an interview with Art in America, he described an interest with “the intangible narrative and the very tangible object.”
Frey is a seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker whose work has been shown widely in museums, most notably in the form of a mid-career survey that’s currently on view at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. Using materials such as spruce root and sweetgrass, he weaves baskets via techniques derived from the Wabanaki tradition, keeping alive forms of Indigenous knowledge that risk being lost to time.
Black, a member of the Magnum photography collective, has reflected on inequality across the US. Johnson’s photography often focuses on the Black communities of Chicago’s South Side; she was formerly the artist as instigator of the National Public Housing Museum in that city.
The MacArthur “genius” grants do not only go to artists: the novelist Tommy Orange, the cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce, and the astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry were also among the awardees this year. But the grants are well-known in the art world, where winners typically rise even further in stature after being named fellows.
Recent artist winners of the grants include Ralph Lemon, the subject of a retrospective at MoMA PS1 last year, and Dyani White Hawk, whose Walker Art Center survey will open this month. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carolyn Lazard, Tony Cokes, Wendy Red Star, and Jeffrey Gibson have also won the awards in the past decade.
