Who Won United States Artists Fellowships in 2023?

After the MacArthur 'genius' grants, the unrestricted US $50,000 Fellowships are among the most generous awards for American artists.

United States Artists Fellowships were awarded today to 45 artists and cultural practitioners across the United States and its territories.

Five visual artists received fellowships: Thaddeus Mosley, whose abstract wood carvings showed at the Baltimore Museum of Art last year; Klamath Tribes artist Natalie Ball; 2023 Art Mundes Prize nominee Carolina Caycedo; Guadalupe Maravilla, who has tackled the trauma of cancer patients and undocumented migrants in his art; and Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim, who incorporates American Sign Language, sound, and music notation in her practice.

Kim's solo show at the Vienna Secession next month, Cues on Point, will feature a new video work about her national anthem performance at the 2020 Super Bowl.

'Receiving the USA Fellowship enables me to worry less about the everyday expenses—especially childcare—while freeing up the invaluable resource of time, providing me with more headspace and energy for my artistic practice and other things I've been hoping to make time for,' Kim said.

Natalie Ball said the Fellowship 'means that I am able to take time away from physically working in the studio to continue to invest my energy into my communities, ancestral territory, tribal government, and mamahood—which in turn informs and strengthens my studio practice.'

Ball is currently creating sculptures she calls Power Objects to complicate limited and inconsistent narratives about Native Americans.

Since 2006 Chicago-based arts organisation United States Artists Fellowships programme has awarded over $38 million to nearly 800 artists.

The Fellowships are given across 10 categories: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theatre & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. The full list of 2023 Fellows is on the organisation's website.

United States Artists President and CEO Judilee Reed commended the multivalent practices of this year's cohort, who work across artistic disciplines and fields such as healthcare, public policy, and legal aid.

'Their impact thus reaches far beyond the arts,' she said, 'providing an example of how artists can help us imagine more equitable and sustainable systems of support.'

'Three years into the pandemic, many artists are making work that expands our understanding of how to cope, how to grieve, and how to heal,' Reed added.

Visual artists who have previously received USA Fellowships include Theaster Gates, Catherine Opie, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker. —[O]