The 2023 MacArthur Fellows were announced and the list of 20 includes four contemporary artists. The MacArthur Fellowship, given annually by by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to individuals working in any field who have shown ‘extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction’, comes with an $800,000, no-strings-attached award and is colloquially known as the ‘genius grant’.
Winners this year include Nashville-based artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons whose work is currently on view at the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; composer and artist Raven Chacon, whose music embraces visual art and performance in a redefinition of landscape and humans’ relationship to the land (he has also won the Pulitzer Prize for music, the first Native American laureate of that prize, which he received last year); Carolyn Lazard, based in Philadelphia and working in installation, sculpture, drawing and other media in a practice that explores accessibility and crip time; and Dyani White Hawk, whose works explore how Indigenous aesthetics have influenced modern art history. Both White Hawk and Chacon are currently showing at the exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 on view at the Hessel Museum of Art in Bard College through 26 November 2023.
Other fellows to win this year include poet Ada Limón, scholar and writer Imani Perry and cultural preservationist Patrick Makuakāne. Visual artists who won the award in the past include Mark Bradford, Nicole Eisenman, Trevor Paglen and Julie Mehretu.
