The 22 recipients of the 2024 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, revealed by the MacArthur Foundation on Tuesday (1 October), include several visual artists: the Rhode Island-based media artist Tony Cokes; the multimedia and installation artist Ebony G. Patterson, who splits her time between Chicago and Kingston, Jamaica; and the Portland, Oregon-based Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star. Justin Vivian Bond, an influential performance artist whose practice incorporates video, painting, installation and more, is also among this year’s winners of the so-called MacArthur “genius grants”, each of which comes with an unrestricted $800,000 cash prize.
As is the case every year, the cohort of MacArthur Fellowship recipients for 2024 covers a large range of disciplines, from artists to poets, historians, choreographers, evolutionary biologists, an oceanographer, an astronomer and more. This year’s fellows also include the Seminole/Muscogee writer and film-maker Sterlin Harjo, whose films include the artist documentary Love and Fury (2020) and who co-created the series Reservation Dogs (2021-23).
“The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose,” Marlies A. Carruth, the director of the MacArthur Fellows programme, said in a statement. “They expose biases built into emerging technologies and social systems and fill critical gaps in the knowledge of cycles that sustain life on Earth. Their work highlights our shared humanity, centring the agency of disabled people, the humour and histories of Indigenous communities, the emotional lives of adolescents and perspectives of rural Americans.”
Red Star, who recently had her first solo exhibition in London at Gathering gallery, is known for works mixing photography, installation and archival research. She often foregrounds US colonial history and the government’s interactions with Indigenous people, while at times incorporating her own family’s history.
Patterson’s work spans elaborate wall-based assemblages using collaged paper, glitter, gouache painting and more, as well as large installations with sculptural elements that often reflect on violence against people of colour both in her native Jamaica and in the US. This year, Patterson is co-curating the sixth edition of the Prospect New Orleans triennial (with Miranda Lash), opening on 2 November.
Cokes is best known for multimedia installations that typically include videos with snippets of text presented on monochromatic backgrounds, accompanied by dissonant soundtracks. His style of textual sampling—with phrases and passages quoted from sources including critical theory, journalism, social media and pop music—seeks to highlight the systems of power that are implicitly articulated (and reinforced) by even the most seemingly apolitical statements.
Last year’s MacArthur Fellows included the visual artists María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, Carolyn Lazard and Dyani White Hawk. Past artist fellows have included Mark Bradford, Jordan Casteel, Paul Chan, Nicole Eisenman, Jeffrey Gibson, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall, Shahzia Sikander, Julie Mehretu and Kara Walker, among others.
