MacArthur Foundation Names 2023 ‘Genius Grant’ Awardees
Four artists were among this year's winners, each of whom will receive U.S. $800,000 'to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations'.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Courtesy John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The MacArthur Foundation has included four artists among its 2023 fellows. They are: María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, Carolyn Lazard, and Dyani White Hawk.
Campos-Pons (pictured top) left the Cuban town of La Vega to attend art school dressed in clothes her mother made from a mattress cover. She vowed not to return until she had 'a lot of good news to share', she told NPR.
'Now I am going back to La Vega — as a MacArthur Genius,' she said.
Campos-Pons favours Polaroid photography in a practice that takes inspiration from her heritage—Nigerian slaves brought to Cuba to work on the sugar plantation where she grew up.
She is now the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her artworks are displayed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art and shown with Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Florida.
Redhook-based sound artist Raven Chacon incorporates objects such as foghorns, rifles, coins, and whistles in his compositions. His work has been presented at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Pennsylvania artist Carolyn Lazard, who showed in Cecilia Alemani's international exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale, is especially concerned with the mechanisms of care. Lazard has incorporated medication, wheel-chair ramps, and captions for a dance in her works.
Minnesota-based artist Dyani White Hawk draws on her Sičáŋǧu Lakota and European ancestry in a practice that includes paintings, textiles, feathers, and buckskin tassels. At the Whitney Biennale in 2022 she created a flat work that resembled a painting but was in fact composed of thousands of beads.
'The 2023 MacArthur Fellows are applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities,' said Marlies Carruth, Director MacArthur Fellows.
'They forge stunning forms of artistic expression from ancestral and regional traditions, heighten our attention to the natural world, improve how we process massive flows of information for the common good, and deepen understanding of systems shaping our environment,' she said. —[O]
