Four Artists Awarded 2024 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant

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Four artists will receive the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, an annual award by MacArthur Foundation presented to individuals in any discipline who have shown ‘exceptional creativity’ and future promise.

Conceptual artist Tony Cokes, Jamaican-born painter and installation artist Ebony G. Patterson, and Apsáalooke multimedia artist Wendy Red Star are among the 22 recipients of the U.S. $800,000 prize this year, as well as performance artist and actor Justin Vivian Bond.

‘The 2024 MacArthur Fellows pursue rigorous inquiry with aspiration and purpose,’ said Director of MacArthur Fellows, Marlies Carruth. ‘They expose biases built into emerging technologies and social systems and fill critical gaps in the knowledge of cycles that sustain life on Earth.’

Distributed over five years, the award is considered the largest no-strings-attached grant in the United States, presented to U.S. residents as an investment in talent based on peer recommendation and their track records.

Writers, performers, and visual artists account for over half of 2024 fellows, including fiction writer Ling Ma, dancer and choreographer Shamel Pitts, and poet Jericho Brown.

Awardees are already highly accomplished, selected via anonymous nominations solicited by the foundation and reviewed by a confidential committee, who present their recommendations to the board.

Red Star, for instance, held her first career survey at Newark Museum in New Jersey in 2019, followed by an exhibition at MASS MoCA in 2020. Cokes has taught art since 1996, currently at Brown in Providence.

According to the foundation’s database, visual artists account for less than ten percent of the 1,153 grants received since 1981. The selection includes 31 artists working in ‘2-D’ and 47 artists in ‘3-D’, with overlaps.

Last year’s grantees included artists María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, Carolyn Lazard, and Dyani White Hawk.

Past fellows include painter Nicole Eisenman (2015), sculptor Daniel Lind-Ramos (2021), and installation artist Jeffrey Gibson (2019) who went on to represent the United States at the current Venice Biennale. —[O]

Main image: Ebony G. Patterson. Courtesy John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.